Gilead

Since I finally got around to returning it to the public library today, I thought I'd post about Gilead, a novel I "read" earlier this summer and enjoyed immensely--possibly more than anything else I've encountered in some time. (I am using quotation marks around "read" because, in fact, I listened to the book on CD, a habit I picked up about eight months ago to get me through several long and solitary car trips.)

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, is a beautiful book, told from the perspective of Reverend John Ames, who is writing a long letter to his young son. Ames, who became a father very late in life, has learned his heart will soon fail him, and so feels compelled to leave whatever advice and guidance he can for his son. Sounds corny, but it really isn't. It is a book about vocation, religion, life, family--all the important things. It's a book about a man of simple means with a relatively simple life looking back over it and realizing the beauty in it. Of course, I am simplifying it a bit, but I did find myself quite moved by it again and again.

I've copied down some of my favorite passages into my journal and I'll share some of them here, without any specific commentary. I'll let them speak for themselves.*

“I’m thinking about the word ‘just.’ I almost wish that I could have written ‘The sun just shone and the tree just glistened and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed.’ When it’s used that way, it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness. At any rate, something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree, so it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified in that word, ‘just,’ that proper language won’t acknowledge.”

“Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I am about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. The twinkling of an eye—that is the most wonderful expression. I’ve thought from time to time it was the best thing in life—that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them or the humor of it. The light of the eyes rejoices the heart. That’s a fact.”

“…There is nothing more astonishing than a human face…it has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.”

“When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with any one at all, it is as if a question is being put to you, so you must think, ‘What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?’…If you think, as it were, ‘This is an emissary sent from the Lord and some benefit is intended for me, first of all, the occasion is to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do, in some small way, participate in the grace that saved me’…you are free to act by your own lights. You are freed, at the same time, from the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit and his, but that is the perfection of the disguise—his own ignorance of it.”

“[John] Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me because it makes us artists of our own behavior and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic, rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it?...I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggests how God might enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child, even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.”

“Grace has a grand laughter in it.”

“Love is holy because it is like grace; the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”

“There is no justice in love—no proportion in it, and there need not be because in any specific instance, it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal, so how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?”

[Okay--I guess I lied about not commenting. These last quotations are even cooler because Ames wants us to see these observations about love in a good way--as a positive thing. I just love that idea.]

Robinson is probably best-known for Housekeeping, a novel I read several years ago but don't remember all the well. After reading Gilead, I might want to give Housekeeping another read-through.

*I should also note that my quotations might not match the published text exactly. I was copying them down based on the CDs, so I am sure there are differences in punctuation, etc.