Gilead Reveals A Gilded World

My mother handed me a little book called Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, when I was in the height of my theological exuberance. Young men tend to make up in zealous certainty what they lack in wisdom and maturity, and I was typical. She saw what I couldn’t, that there was something in the book my soul lacked. It sat unthumbed on my shelf for many months until I had my first real encounter with weakness and the limits of my natural abilities in the form of a personal, spiritual, and professional crisis in my mid-twenties. Laid low and humbled, something drew me to open Gilead for the first time. By then, however, cancer had claimed my mom’s life, and we never got the chance to talk about it. Which is a real shame because reading it refreshed my soul and brought a measure of healing, though I couldn’t have expressed why or how. All I knew was that my mom had been right about Gilead and about me.

Re-reading it again now, these fifteen years later, the power of the novel has not diminished. But I feel I am beginning to be able to describe the something, the je ne sais quoi, that has made it so beloved by so many. For those unfamiliar with it (repent!), the book takes the shape of a lengthy letter that an elderly pastor, John Ames, writes to his young son. Having lived as a widower for decades after the loss of his first wife and child, he found himself marrying again and having a child in his old age. Ames’s health is weak and failing, and he knows he will not live to teach his son what he wants to teach him, so he writes a long, meandering, beautiful letter.

There are many reasons to love the book. Among clergy it is beloved for its portrayal of faithful, small-town pastoral ministry, with its joys and sorrows, seen and unseen. Among those with an ear for literature, it is loved for its stunning prose. As Lewis wrote: “Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.” Robinson is rightly recognized as a master of modern prose.

But these elements alone cannot explain the book’s power. What stood out to me this time through was the recurring theme of wonder at the created world, a wonder that arises from encountering something divine in human faces, trees, water—all of creation. Gilead opens our eyes to see the sacred beauty all around us, invites us to move through the world as participants in something divine. And because of this quality, it becomes a vehicle for escaping the illusions of modernity—illusions which afflict even those of us with thoroughly supernaturalist beliefs. Our belief that God is everywhere present and fills all things does not mean we experience the world this way. No. Rather, like sponges we have imbibed the disenchanted just-stuff way of seeing and experiencing life from the surrounding culture. These are habits of mind and heart we must unlearn, and I have found that Gilead is a great help in this good work.

Also, we Protestants are not generally known for our aesthetics. This is, if we are honest, a weak spot for us. Gilead then is an instructive anomaly, a powerful exception to the rule. It’s probably no accident that the theological vision of John Ames, the protagonist, is a sacramental one. In its most basic sense sacramentalism is the idea that the physical can be a means of grace, a vehicle for the spiritual. But there is also a sense in which anyone, whether they hold to sacramentalism or not, can recover a sense of the sacred in everyday life. The feast of seeing the beauty of the world around us is open to any and all, whether high church or low church. Let us take a sampling here of how Gilead helps us do this.

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light.

Here is our theme and thesis—that the stuff of ordinary creation can shine and shimmer with a supernatural radiance. This is also a key aspect of Christ’s transfiguration—the human face of Jesus made to shine like the sun. Indeed, that is what Robinson, via Ames, goes on to say: “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?”

And this seeing—really perceiving—is at the heart of what Robinson wants us to learn to do. She repeatedly has the elderly Ames writing about being astonished at the most ordinary things:

People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That’s clearer to me every day. Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes—old hands, old eyes, old mind—a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable.

There is something Chestertonian about this emphasis on learning to see as children see, reviving the childlike faculty for wonder that tends to diminish over time. This diminishment of wonder due to familiarity is a failure, if not a sin, and must be resisted. We must make use of what helps we can to recover our capacity for wonder, amazement, and their close cousin, worship. In a similar passage, Ames describes how on one of his nighttime walks he came upon a line of oaks in the wind:

As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial — if you remember them — and I thought of another morning fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, it is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees still can astonish me.

In Gilead one finds a natural world that is, in the words of George Manley Hopkins’s sublime poem, “charged with the grandeur of God.” But there is something which surpasses nature in its capacity to elicit wonder: the human person. In the following passage, Ames tries to describe the way he encounters the presence of those who come to speak to him:

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.

In our time of digital dehumanization and isolation, we do well to ponder the mystery that is every person’s incandescent presence. Andrew Kern, the classical educator, has a lovely reflection on the idea that every thing God made has its own glory, and that we can learn to look for it and see it. This metaphor of a person’s presence, “like a flame on a wick,” is a beautiful way to describe the glory of the human person. After the sinful woman had washed the Lord’s feet, Jesus asked Simon the Pharisee, “Do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:44). More than physical sight is in view here, and the question is rightly turned back to us: do we see others as the image-bearing, embodied souls that they are?

One last excerpt. In what is one of my favorite passages, John Ames describes a simple moment he witnessed between a young couple—a moment I confess I have tried to recreate now and then, with mixed results:

That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing.

It would be a mistake to base one’s theological beliefs on the work of Marilynne Robinson. It would likewise be a mistake to treat creation as if it were divine in some kind of pantheistic sense, or as if it could replace the Word and ordinary means of grace. I hope it’s clear I’m not advocating for anything like that. Robinson’s views, from what I can gather, are a strange mix of liberal Protestantism, the works of John Calvin, Congregationalism, and who knows what else. Concerns and critiques are certainly warranted. But that need not waylay us here. My point is simply that Gilead is a great help to those of us who still tend to see the people and the natural world about us with modern, disenchanted eyes.

As I reflected on the book after this most recent re-reading, I was reminded of something that happened to me, a moment when I felt like the beauty of the natural world broke through a stubborn hardness of heart. That encounter stays with me as an unforgettable testament to the power of beauty to affect the soul. Here is what happened.

For the last five years, my family has been living in a farmhouse surrounded by flat fields in every direction, the horizon dotted with trees, houses, distant forests, and the Adirondack mountains. Living in the country has its drawbacks—such as being far from everything and having approximately seven million ladybugs crawl inside the house a couple times a year—but it has many benefits, such as an unobstructed view of the sky and its manifold wonders. With sightlines to the horizon in every direction, we bask in the sunrises and sunsets, the towering pillars of cloud, the rolling storms, the starry nights. You can live half a life under these miracles and never really see them.

Not too long after we moved here, I was working with my son on closing in the large back porch with screens to keep the birds out. He was about eleven at the time. In my better moments I will assure you that there is hardly anything better in this world than for a man to be building something with his son—there is something deeply good about it that resonates in the soul. But this was not to be one of my better moments.

Progress was slow—due to nothing more than the nature of the work and my general ineptitude. My temper was simmering, ready to boil over. I told my son to do something, but he did not understand precisely what I wanted, so he started doing something else. When I saw he had not done what I wanted, I lashed out and spoke very harshly to him. Crushed, he burst into tears and ran off into the house. Despite this, my heart was as hard as the framing hammer I clenched in my fist; my mind working to justify my outburst on the grounds of “It’s not hard to understand” and “the need for productivity.” Grumbling, I went to do myself the thing I had asked him to do.

In the midst of this, I stepped off the porch and glanced up at the sky. I immediately stopped and stood still. The sky was a roiling masterpiece, stacks of clouds piled up above me to impossible heights with the evening light shining on and through the openings like stained glass, castles and pillars of dark blue and grey; an architectural wonder of medieval proportions, and all of it moving swiftly to the east.

The beauty of it struck me down. I gaped open-mouthed at this wonder and felt it rebuking me to my face, like the sky was asking me, What right do you have to treat your son like that when the world is this beautiful? It was not exactly a rational argument. It took no time to process. It was the encounter with beauty itself that instantly revealed the comparative ugliness of my heart, that prompted me to drop the hammer and go inside to find my son and apologize to him for my beastly outburst.

It is not uncommon to hear someone say that beauty drew them to God or draws them closer to him. I can relate to that experience, but in this case, beauty didn’t woo me; it breached the door of my psyche with an explosive charge and dragged me outside into the sunlight of gospel sanity.

Reading Gilead is itself an experience of beauty. But it also helps us see, in Kern’s words, the glory of each thing: the sky and trees and rain and, most of all, the people around us. “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration,” wrote the good reverend Ames. “You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.”

That, I think, is what my mother knew I needed.