Read Ye Now!

Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Picador, 2006
ISBN 0-312-42440-x
Amazon Link

This is a wonderful book. Rush out and get your hands on a copy as soon as possible. You are welcome to borrow my copy, but I’ve already promised it to Jeanne, so you may have to get in line.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead is well-deserving of its acclaim. It is the story of Congregationalist minister John Ames, who has been diagnosed with a terminal condition and is spending his last days writing letters to his young son.

Before I read Gilead, I read a review that described the book as a depiction of Ames’ lifelong struggle with faith and doubt. I wondered how respectfully a book characterized that way might deal with the matter of a Christian minister’s doubt. I found that I had misunderstood. The book is not at all about Ames’ doubt. He remains devout throughout his life and ministry. The struggle with doubt has to do with his deep, abiding and very spiritual reflections on how to minister to those who approach his faith through doubt. It is also about the larger-scale doubt that creeps into the society surrounding Ames through the latter part of the nineteenth century and the earlier half of the twentieth century.

And it is about his opportunity, at the end of his life, to learn new lessons in the kind of faith, forgiveness, and love he has preached for decades when his namesake and the “prodigal son” of his dearest friend comes home again.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I will say no more than read it, read it, read it. Gilead is profound and thought-provoking through a kind of steady, gentle lyricism that matches the character of Ames himself.

Some experts:

Well, I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the
conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it. It
is even destructive. Young people from my own flock have come home with a
copy of La Nausee or L’Immoraliste, flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief,
when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible. And
they are attracted to it by the very books that tell them what misery it
is. And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them
“proofs.” I just won’t do it. It only confirms them in their
skepticism. Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of
defense. (177)

…..

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number
of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is
beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not
satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances
among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to
the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same
notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to
coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
(197)

…..

There were two further points I felt I should have made in our earlier
conversations, one of them being that doctrine is not belief, it is only one way
of talking about belief, and the other being that the Greek word sozo, which is
usually translated “saved,” can also mean healed, restored, that sort of
thing. So the conventional translation narrows the meaning of the word in
a way that can create false expectations. I thought he should be aware
that grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of
ways. (239)