Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

In Gilead, Iowa, in the 1950s, an old pastor’s heart is beginning to fail. His first wife died years earlier in childbirth, and he was resolved to live the rest of his life as a bachelor, but he met and married a much younger woman, and they have a son. The book is written by the pastor, John Ames, to his son, who is about seven years old.

I decided in the first few pages that I wasn’t going to bother marking many passages in this book – there were just too many to mark. It really is beautifully written and full of wisdom. Here are the things I did mark:

“I told you you might have a very different life from mine… and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a life.” (3) This is good for me to remember as I watch my kids doing perfectly fine things that happen to be different from what I would do.

“A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.” (7) It is a painful thing to be misunderstood, especially by those you love, and we should try to understand each other. But loyalty and love will have to prevail in a family.

People who feel regret toward you may think you are angry with them, even if you are “quietly going about a life of your own choosing.” (7) This is a poetic way of avoiding a cliche (“minding your own business”). Is anyone’s life really of his own choosing?

When writing, “you feel like you’re with someone.” (19)

Writing about a book that was meaningful to him: “There are some notes of mine in the margins of the book which I hope you may find useful.” (27) I can relate to this. How rarely my children even pick up one of my books, let alone read one. Will they ever read any of these notes I’m writing? I’m mostly writing them for myself, but I love to think my kids will want to know what I thought about all these books I keep reading. If you’re reading this now, and you’re one of my kids, then hello! I love you.

I wish you could have known my grandfather. I heard a man say once it seemed the one eye he had was somehow ten times an eye. Normally speaking, it seems to me, a gaze, even a stare, is diffused a little when there are two eyes involved. He could make me feel as though he had poked me with a stick, just by looking at me. Not that he meant any harm to speak of. He was just afire with old certainties, and he couldn't bear all the patience that was required of him by the peace and by the aging of his body and by the forgetfulness that had settled over everything. He thought we should all be living at a dead run. I don't say he was wrong. That would be like contradicting John the Baptist. (31-2)

But I believe we knew also that his eccentricities were thwarted passion, that he was full of anger, at us not least, and that the tremors of his old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief. (34)

I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. (39)

The problem of pain:

The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask me how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn't allow something. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing. It was just like a biblical plague, just exactly. I thought of Sennacherib. (41-2)

He sees the Spanish Flu as a punishment for sin (war), and that the punishment is even for Christians. This is wrong. A Christian’s suffering cannot be viewed as punishment for sin if Christ took all our punishment when He died on the cross. Also, he says in the quote above that the flu may have spared many – not from suffering, as is supposed, but from the act of killing. Is he a pacifist? Keep reading, and it seems he views war as murder.

My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn't actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew, except for certain of his friends. All of them could sit on their heels into their old age, and they'd do it by preference, as if they had a grudge against furniture. They had no flesh on them at all. They were like the Hebrew prophets in some unwilling retirement, or like the primitive church still waiting to judge the angels. (50)

(The Hebrew Prophets in Retirement – band name!)

The narrator is writing words he expects his son to read long after the narrator has died. “When you read this, I am imperishable.” (53)

How do you tell a scribe/pharisee from a prophet? “The prophets love the people they chastise.” (142)

*** “I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst.” (154) This is very wise!

“Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.” (166) I could do well to remember this. We’re always saying kids should enjoy their childhood, or childhood is wasted on the young, but I had not considered that you might go through these same thoughts again in old age, about the time I’m living right now.

“My failing the truth could have no bearing at all on the Truth itself.” (172)

Gilead, like Galilee, didn’t look like much, but it had its own heroes, saints, etc., even if they are forgotten by most:

There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs, and I want you to know that. Because that is the truth, even if no one remembers it. To look at the place, it's just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station, which is pretty well gone to weeds now. But what must Galilee have looked like? You can't tell so much from the appearance of a place. (173)

Manuscriping a sermon “to discourage rambling.” Love the description of the grandfather here. He was writing a sermon to deliver at a Fourth of July celebration, and his son (the narrator’s father) was nervous about what he might say:

I have the sermon, the ipsissima verba ["the very words"], because it was among the things my father buried and unburied that day in the garden. It is very brief, so I'll copy it here as he wrote it. My father encouraged him to write it out, I remember, probably to discourage rambling, and most likely in the hope that he or my mother might get a look at it and discuss it a little with my grandfather if need be. But he kept it very close, dropping his drafts into the kitchen stove and keeping the text on his unapproachable Nazirite person. (175)

Forgiving harm done to someone else can be harder than forgiving harm done to yourself:

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me. (190)

When Ames is sitting silently with Jack near the end of the book, two people who have never been able to connect: “There in the dark and the quiet, I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being.” (197) This is how I sometimes feel about people when they are not around. I can love their very existence, but if they walk in and start talking to me, interrupting my thoughts about how much I love them, it annoys me.

Ames blames radio preachers for “sowing confusion” about theology. (208)

Old Boughton, in his 80s, and the only words he’d spoken one day were, “Jesus never had to be old!” (236)