Big Enough for God: The Fiction of Sara Maitland

SARAH MAITLANDarah Maitland is hard to label. Her fresh, intelligent views enliven two works of theology as well as a number of essays and reviews on literature and religion in both English and American magazines. Yet she is, above all, an extraordinarily gifted writer of fiction: a first-rate novelist, an accomplished teller of traditional tales with a feminist twist, a brilliant and inventive stylist of short stories. Since 1979, when her novel Daughter of Jerusalem won the Somerset Maugham best first novel award, Maitland has demonstrated her ability to write about the lives of contemporary women in highly inventive ways ranging from the realistic to the mythical and often combining both styles in three more novels and a continuous outpouring of short stories. Like the acrobat heroines in her short story "A Fall from Grace," she is a high-wire performer, kept aloft by the convincing voices of her varied narrators.

What makes Maitland's fiction unique among mainstream writers, however, is the vision that animates it and gives her the creative freedom to take risks in its composition. This vision is deeply rooted in three religious conversions she underwent in her early twenties. After leaving the Scottish Presbyterian church of her childhood as a teenager during the sixties when her closest, brightest friends were committed leftists, she was free from formal religious commitment, but she continued to love the Bible and to retain good memories of her Christian community. The antireligious stance she developed while attending boarding school, which she severely disliked, was partly tactical. "In retrospect, it was a brilliant strategy of protest," she said. "I always walked a thin line; I wanted to be a rebel but I wanted to go to Oxford, too. I declared myself an existentialist and they couldn't throw me out because I took a stand on conscience, not politics." ¹

Maitland did go to Oxford, and there, her passion for social justice was kindled further by the intense discourse and revolutionary hopes that students and teachers shared in the politically inflammatory atmosphere of the early seventies. Maitland's interest in social justice was also transformed by feminism, which, she said, brought her life a surprising sense of possibility. Along the trajectory of her religious conversions, feminism made her think again about God and envision him in quite different terms than the patriarchal God so many other feminists were rejecting: "Made brave by hope and anger, I was tough enough for the enormous God whom I met." ²

She encountered that enormous God in postgraduate studies in science and religion with Rowan Williams, now Archbishop of Canterbury. Readers of A Big-Enough God: A Feminist's Search for a Joyful Theology are familiar with the results. In that work of "amateur theology" (a phrase she uses without apology, knowing the freedom of expression it gives her), she explains how modern scientific theories about the universe—such as chaos theory, Cantor's proof that infinity comes in different sizes, and the uncertainty principle—have stretched her sense of God:

We have gained a universe so extraordinary that it should stun us into awe, and a God so magnificently clever and creative that we can have confidence in such a creator's ability to sort out tiny little problems like the resurrection of the body without too much trouble. (62)

She realized that this maker of the universe is powerful beyond our wildest imagination but also generous beyond measure, as the Hebrew Scriptures suggest. For her, it became necessary to use different, and even incompatible, discourses in order to reveal the true mystery of such a creator who, in the "scandal of particularity" that is the incarnation, seems to invite all of us to pitch in and help with what is clearly an ongoing creation.

Maitland became an Anglican and then, in 1993, a Roman...