Gilead, part 3
Every fortnight Manders, Laura and I will be reviewing a section from Marilynne Robinson’s second and Pultizer Prize winning novel, Gilead, which you can buy here. Here is my first review and here is the second.
*****
This section of the novel tends to deal more with John Ames’ own father and grandfather as well as his namesake, the son of another minister, John Ames (Jack) Boughton. For the Christian there are some wonderful reminders in this section of the novel. Jack Boughton, the epitome of the unrepentant wayward son, is a sort of thorn in the flesh of our narrator; Ames passes on some valuable information to his son that has been passed down from his father and in turn, his grandfather:
‘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. [...] He [the emissary] would probably laugh at the thought that hte Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it’ (141).
[First I would think that 'participating in the grace that saved me' is a response to this grace that saved me, rather than an actual participation in salvific grace. If Robinson means the latter, than I'd take that up with her on theological grounds.] Robinson so clearly captures the instances of grace and our own fallen attempts at carrying it out that, often, we frankly, lean towards the ‘first impulse’ rather than ‘demonstrat[ing] [...] faithfulness’. Such small instances of grace — and indeed the failures of following in that grace — that John Ames is so ready to tell his son, illustrate the continuing sanctification of our narrator (if fictional sanctification is even able to be written about). For he doesn’t have it all figured out and his appeal to his reader (both fictional and actual) are these moments of realisation of his innate sinfulness — that he is entirely human; but one who, through grace alone, has the potential to transcend the petty insult.
John Ames returns to several images that stick with the reader — ones to note are the pulling down of the Baptist church struck by lightning (he recalls that he once though ‘the purpose of steeples was to attract lightning [...] to protect all the other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me’ [130]) and receiving an ash-covered piece of bread from his father, which the narrator compares to partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s table. Another image is the prevalence of light, which like the church, provides a unifying motif throughout the novel as it morphs and is re-expressed in new situations and with new language. Inbetween paragraphs analysing Jack Boughton is placed these two lovely paragraphs:
The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point.
It seems to me to be a metaphor of the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love. I’ll try to remember to use this. I believe I see a place for it in my thoughts on Hagar and Ishmael. Their time in the wilderness seems like a specific moment of divine Providence within the whole providential regime of Creation’ (136).
What I particularly like about this stream-of-consciousness (in the best sense) bit of reflection is first the detail of his observation and secondly the language with which it opens, ‘light within light’. Written by a woman steeped in Scripture and the Christian faith, the phrase immediately resonates with the language of the Nicene Creed when describing Jesus: ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God’. I also appreciate that this passage looks at one simple image — the light of the moon in the warm evening light — and extrapolates truths by extension about Jesus, about language, about life, about the narrator’s sermon on Hagar and Ishmael, and about the whole providence of God (which earlier he says he needs to remember that ‘Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s’ [135]). The moonlight becomes so much more than cliche, it becomes the metaphoric vehicle to enter in to thoughts about the very stuff of life that makes his own life worth living; the physical presence of the moon, becomes the vehicle whereby grace is experienced. This image, like the ash-covered biscuit Ames’ father gave him, like his father’s trek to find his own father’s grave, like his grandfather’s bloody shirts were to him, are tangible symbols of remembrance, of meaning, and ultimately of grace as each sought to be faithful to his calling as a minister, but most of all, to his calling to live out faithfully what it means to be human.