“There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for every age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.”
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel (p. 276)
In Gilead, the main character, the Reverend John Ames—pastor’s son and grandson of a fiery abolitionist preacher—sees in this prophecy of Zechariah a hope. The kind his beloved small town of Gilead was meant to provide. A hope that a harmless life could be lived in a place unbothered. The book emphasizes that this simple life can be one of unexpected glories experienced in time—but often recognized only retrospectively.
This beauty is the atmosphere of the novel and is orchestrated across the characters—all who struggle, some who surrender to their struggles, but each one senses that any given moment in their life could become the one sufficient for their existence. As Robinson reveals near the end of the novel:
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead(p. 280)
I have recommended this series (Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack) to people for many years and have read each of the books multiple times. I return to these books because they keep ending in the recognition Ames describes, that we are not enough for the world and it is not enough for us, and that grace shows up in the places between.
Gilead did win the Pulitzer Prize and a few other of her books have been nominated for the National Book Award, but I do not think Marilynne Robinson is writing about the same things that the current typical winners of literary awards do. This is why I recommend her novels, because few other living writers can capture such acts of beauty in ways that are personally and positively impactful for more than an afternoon.
John Ames
Reverend Ames is a Congregationalist pastor in Gilead, Iowa. He is honorable and serious and has experienced great grief and lived much of his subsequent life as a bachelor pastor. The novel Gilead is a love letter meant to describe his now-old and dying self to a very young son, the product of a miraculous and wholly unexpected marriage. In doing this, Ames wanders from theological topics to themes of daily life. He tells his son in the letter that “If you’re a grown man when you read this—it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then—I’ll have been gone a long time. I’ll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I’ll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things.” (p. 4)
As a small-town pastor and the son and grandson of pastors, Reverend Ames is quite conversant with the existence of mature faith, but also innocent faith. He notes that “When the Lord says you must ‘become as one of these little ones,’ I take Him to mean you must be stripped of all the accretions of smugness and pretense and triviality.” (pp. 34-35) By this point in his mid-70s, he seems to have become extremely self-aware of smugness, pretense, and triviality, and he calls himself out about these things frequently. How has he found this possible? It seems that Ames has developed a very acute sense and respect for wonder and a regard for a true meaning that he seeks by faith but knows by instinct exists on this plane:
I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead(pp. 64-65)
Passages Worth Keeping
One of the things I do in the editing of my own novels (Desdichado Books) is to make a dedicated “thoughtful quote” pass. This helps solidify good thoughts and put them in accessible language. I can only imagine that Marilynne Robinson does the same thing, because I find so many. Here are a few, grouped under my own categorization, intended for the edification and enjoyment of whoever is reading this:
Pride
The Reverend has learned much of pride from chastising his own tendency to see life as an extension of his own self and to lean on the human formulae about life that he has learned.
- Speaking of Ludwig Feuerbach’s notions of God’s being merely a projection of human longing: “It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.” (p. 27)
- About a sanctimonious writer: “But our religion doesn’t meet the writer’s standards, not at all. To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does. How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do.” (p. 162)
Connectedness
The picture of Gilead, Iowa, is one of connectedness and what happens when connection is broken—and whether it can be repaired.
- I personally resonate with this one. Does that make me an old man? “To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.” (p. 56)
- Describing a small-town pastor walking the town and praying for his flock: “I’d try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren’t mine were Boughton’s. And I’d pray for them. And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.” (p. 81)
Grace Working in Time
Reverend Ames realizes that in his long years of preaching, his areas of growth haven’t been in sermon writing or study of the scriptures. Rather, he has grown in understanding of waiting on God to see grace unfold in time.
- On Vision: “Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth.” (pp. 103-104)
- On nursing resentments: “I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preposterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.” (p. 134)
Love
Reverend Ames’ counsel about his wife, Lila, is the book’s whole argument in miniature.
- About his wife – to his son: “In the particular instance of your mother, I know that if you are attentive to her in this way, you will find a very great loveliness in her. When you love someone to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself.” (p. 159)
- About his faltering godson, Jack: “Nevertheless, there is a very real sense in which people are fairly and appropriately associated with their histories, for human purposes. To say a thief is a brother man and beloved of God is true. To say therefore a thief is not a thief is an error.” (p. 177)
The Blessing at the Bus Stop
I have many more quotes to share, but I choose to stop at this last one, because the relationship between Reverend Ames and his godson John Ames “Jack” Boughton, son of his closest friend, is what inspires the greatest amount of thought and concern. In Gilead we are introduced to Jack in his middle age as he returns to Gilead for unspecified reasons. He is a sad but beloved character, who struggles with communication and anger and boredom and generally overthinking things. This makes him a major nuisance at a minimum, but in a way, the reader develops a great empathy in this man whose flaws have ensured that nothing ever worked out for him—regardless of how committed he was. We all know people like this, I think. Jack and Reverend Ames have to work through lots of history and multiple fears to reach a place that is symbolic of forgiveness and acceptance and hopefully divine mercy.
After giving Jack a blessing at the bus stop on his retreat from Gilead and his own father’s impending death and eventual funeral, Reverend Ames observes this beautiful thought. “Well, anyway, I told him it was an honor to bless him. And that was also absolutely true. In fact I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment.” (p. 276)
In this moment Reverend Ames recognizes that this act of grace—performed at the bus stop in a place where the harmless life could still be lived in peace—was the fulfillment of his ministry.
Do we all have moments of clarity like this when we realize this one thing we just did despite ourselves could possibly have realized all our purpose and promise? The Reverend Ames would say it happens when we do the hard work—in love—and succeed at seeing someone as God sees them.
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