by Marilynne Robinson, 2004
Found this book in the Little Free Library on Locust Street. It is on several best books lists. It’s about a sweet, old pastor (77 years old) who is going to die soon, writing a very long letter to his 7 year-old son. He married (for the 2nd time) late in life; he fell in love with a young lady who happened into his church on Pentecost Sunday and who asked him to marry her after a few months. He married young the first time, but lost his first wife and child in child-birth, a loss that he lived with and hurt over for most of his life. They were Louisa and a baby girl, Angeline, which he was going to name Rebecca, but his best friend who baptized her as she died, did not know that.
The old pastor is named John Ames. He was born in 1880, and he is the son and grandson of preachers. He starts writing to his beloved son when he is 76 years old, so the time period is 1956. The setting is Gilead, Iowa, where he has lived since he was 3 years old, except for the time he was in college and seminary. His best friend is Boughton, with whom he grew up, and who lives down the street, and also happens to be a preacher. Boughton is failing and one of his daughter’s, Glory, and then his youngest son, Jack, come home to Gilead to help him out. Jack is young (40’s), handsome, and has a bad history, but he is beloved. This is the story within the story. At first, John Ames is a little wary and maybe jealous of young Jack. Jack is his name-sake – Boughton named him John Ames Boughton after him, his best friend in all the world, John Ames, as sort of a kindness since he lost his wife and child. Young Jack has been gone a long time, and Boughton is so happy he has returned home, although he knows there is something going on, and he’s sad that Jack won’t tell him.
When Jack was in high school, he got a very young, very poor girl pregnant and rather than marry her and take care of her and the baby, he abandoned her. Jack’s father, Boughton, and Jack’s mother and sisters would visit the baby once a week and, even though the poor family would never welcome them, they left gifts and money for the little girl. The little girl died when she was 3 years old because she stepped on a tin can and the infection killed her. John Ames has never really forgiven young Jack for being so mean and callous, abandoning this young girl and their child.
Young Jack wants badly to talk to John Ames and, finally, they do have a heart-to-heart talk. It turns out young Jack has fallen in love with a black woman and they have a child together. They were having difficulty living in the current times with laws against white and black marrying and general racial prejudice in St. Louis where they lived. This talk happens towards the end of the book. Before that, young Jack would come around and play catch with the little boy (John Ames’ son), sat at church with John Ames’ son and his wife, while John Ames is preaching; and visit in the evening, sitting on the porch with the family. In the end, after the heart-to-heart talk, John Ames forgives young Jack. Young Jack leaves town and, though it breaks Boughton’s heart, John Ames understands, his heart is at peace, he can pray easily again, and sleep well again. He can die.
There are lots of spiritual nuggets in this book. They are good and true and reflect God’s love and a life lived in faith. John Ames had much pain and suffering throughout much of his life but he kept on praying, kept on living in faith. In the end, the wife and child he had late in life filled his final years with love, beauty, fullness.
I’m not sure whether to keep this book or not. So, here are some of the rich passages:
Page 41 and 42, talking about the Spanish flu that ravaged the world at the same time WWI was starting. Many soldiers were lost. “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.”
Page 45: “A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought–the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord.”
Page 46: “There was a book many people read at that time, The Diary of a Country Priest. It was by a French writer, Bernanos…I remember reading that book all night by the radio till every station went off, and still reading when the daylight came.”
Page 52: “I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”
Page 57: “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. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
Page 66: “She was such a little bit of a thing. But while I was holding her, she opened her eyes. I know she didn’t really study my face. Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I’m glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. Boughton and I have talked about that, too. 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. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any. Boughton agrees.”
Page 71, he is telling about how when he couldn’t sleep in the days after losing his first wife and child and full of heartache, he would walk to the church in the middle of the night and as he passed each house, he would remember the people living inside of them, and he’d pray for each family. “And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. Then I’d go into the church and pray some more and wait for daylight. I’ve often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing he dawn come.
“Trees sound different at night, and they smell different, too.
“If you remember me at all, you may find me explained a little by what I am telling you. If you could see me not as a child but as a grown man, it is surely true that you would observe a certain crepuscular quality in me. As you read this, I hope you will understand that when I speak of the long night that preceded these days of my happiness, I do not remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort–grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace. Almost never.”
Page 104: “Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life…”
Page 112: “The people in Maine used to put those roosters on their steeples, he told me, to remind themselves of the betrayal of Peter, to help them repent.”
Page 118, he talks about starting the book, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, his young wife’s favorite book. So, I requested it from the library – they don’t have it so it’s coming via Prospector.
Page 118-119: “The story of Hagar and Ishmael came to mind while I was praying this morning, and I found a great assurance in it. The story says that it is not only the father of a child who cares for its life, who protects its mother, and it says that even if the mother can’t find a way to provide for it, or herself, provision will be made. At that level it is a story full of comfort. That is how life goes–we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s. I need to bear this in mind.”
Page 124: “This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone 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 confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But 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 to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of 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.”
Page 124-125: “I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggests how God might actually 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.”
Page 129: “My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child….”
“I noted that Abraham himself had been sent into the wilderness, told to leave his father’s house also, that this was the narrative of all generations, and that it is only by the grace of God that we are made instruments of His Providence and participants in a fatherhood that is always ultimately His.”
Page 139, talking about the 10 commandments: “There’s a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy-laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object.”
Page 144: “There have always been things I felt I must tell them, even if no one listened or understood. And one of them is that many of the attacks on belief that have had such prestige for the last century or two are in fact meaningless. I must tell you this, because everything else I have told you, and them, loses almost all its meaning and its right to attention if this is not established.”
Page 145-146: “There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt there are more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.) and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion. I think the second of these is the more insidious, because it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer.
“But people of any degree of religious sensitivity are always vulnerable to the accusation that their consciousness or their understanding does not attain to the highest standards of the faith, because that is always true of everyone. St. Paul is eloquent on this subject. But if the awkwardness and falseness and failure of religion are interpreted to mean there is no core of truth in it–and the witness of Scripture from end to end discourages this view–then people are disabled from trusting their thoughts, their expressions of belief, and their understanding, and even from believing in the essential dignity of their and their neighbors’ endlessly flawed experience of belief. It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he’s right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness.”
Page 150, young Jack Boughton is asking what he thinks of predestination: “I’ve seen grown men, God-fearing men, come to blows over that doctrine. The first thought that came to my mind was, Of course he would bring up predestination!
“So I said, “That’s a complicated issue.”
“Let me simplify it,” he said. “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievable consigned to perdition?”
“Well,” I said, “That may actually be the kind of simplification that raises more questions than it avoids.”
“He laughed. “People must ask you about this all the time,” he said.
“They do.”
“Then I suppose you must have some way of responding.”
“I tell them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the working of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”
Page 208: “If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.”
Page 246 and 247, last three paragraphs:
“To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place, is, as little regarded. I can’t help imagining that you will leave sooner or later, and it’s fine if you have done that, or you mean to do it. This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope. I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love–I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence.
“I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.
“I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.”