Returning to Gilead
Of the hundreds of books I’ve read, nothing I’ve read feels as close to my family life as Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Reading it reminds me of my grandmother, my Mamaw, and how at my last family reunion, the last one before Mamaw died of a failed heart, we gathered around her to share. My mom and each of her siblings that were present took a turn in the hot seat, updating their mom about their lives and the lives of their children. Of my three brothers, only my youngest brother and myself were there. After the sharing time, he, my wife, and I talked about all that wasn’t said and all that everyone hid: the loss, the heartbreak, and the brokenness. Like revealed in the pages of Gilead, families are not strangers to complicated griefs, to deep wounds, and tarnished memories. We, the siblings and the grandkids, all knew about what was unspoken, but we couldn’t bear to burden Mamaw with our hurts, or let her down by our family being imperfect.
In Gilead, John Ames is a pastor, just like his father and his father’s father. His best friend Boughton is dying. So is John, but not quite so quickly. His heart is failing. Glory Boughton, old Boughton’s youngest daughter, is caring for her father, having fled home from a divorce and lost job, which everyone knows about but no one talks about. Glory doesn’t even think about it herself. Before John Ames goes, he wants to leave letters for his seven year old son. These letters together form the novel. John’s letters begin by telling his young son critical moments from his own childhood. He writes about the time that he and his father struggled through Kansas to find the grave of John’s grandfather, a abolitionist firebrand who rode with John Brown. At the gravesite, the full moon rose just as the red sun set and between the two orbs the prairie blazed with glory and wonder. Later, when the old Black church was burned down, John and his father worked to salvage what they could from the gray ashes, and John’s father gave him a sooty biscuit which he received as communion, full of the mystery of incarnate God. Before long, the letters are derailed by the return of Jack Boughton, the prodigal son, to his fathers house.
The first time I read Gilead, I only saw John Ames as a pastor. He reminded me of my Papaw, Mamaw’s venerated husband, who died when I was eight. He was a carpenter between pastoring and the varnishes he used to finish furniture might have been the source of his leukemia. In my memories and in the collective family memory alike Papaw is powerful, vigorous, and deeply good. He was alive to the beauty of God’s creation and always willing to be a part of God made flesh, loving his people and serving them in any way and at any time they may need him. From this lens, I read the conflict of Gilead as the faith of Jack Boughton, Glory’s brother and Boughton’s son, who could never manage to believe in God. When he returns to town, John has a chance to save him and show him the mystery of faith. As it often does, this reading says more about me and the context in which I read the novel than it really says about Gilead. That aspect of the book exists, but I have to leap over most of the text to reach that reading. I saw in Gilead a piece of my own family at a certain time. Returning to Gilead, I realized how much I’d missed.
The second time I read Gilead I was also reading Home, Robinson’s companion novel told from Glory’s perspective. I didn’t read to see John, but to see Jack and Glory from his angle. My life was different from that first time I’d the novel. I wanted to know what happened with Jack and Glory because of my new family context. I wanted to know what John thought of Jack, Glory, and Teddy, the brother that had always looked out for Jack. The letters of John Ames were another window into a good yet quietly and deeply broken family.
Even now, I’m like the Boughtons and like John Ames. I’m like my family when we gathered around Mamaw. I only allude to the cracks in the family. Those stories aren’t all mine to tell. I don’t have the audacity to claim them for myself, and I don’t think I’d be right to do so. I don’t need to confess via this blog, only disclose. The internet is not my God. To you my heart and mind is not open; from you some secrets will be hidden.
But other stories are mine.
About two months ago, my wife and I lost our first pregnancy. There was a genetic fluke, and the child we’d hoped for and cherished for a month would never and could never grow into a baby. Eventually, the rapidly dividing, formless cells would threaten my wife’s life, so we had to surgically remove them. We’d been trying to conceive for almost a year when we found out we were pregnant. The loss of the pregnancy meant that not only was our hope for a child gone, but all of the good things we’d hoped for were replaced with horrible parodies. Instead of an ultrasound hearing a heartbeat, we heard unbearable silence. Instead of telling our friends and family we were having a baby, we had to tell them we’d lost one. The trip to the hospital was for surgery, not labor. The blood brought no new life, only loss.
I read Gilead from the third time in the weeks that followed. It took my wife weeks to physically recover from the ordeal, and emotionally recovery isn’t the right concept. In the aftermath, Gilead felt very different. I noticed how much John spoke about his first wife and daughter. He lost both of them in childbirth. I saw how insecure John was about his second, younger wife, Lila, worried she’d get together with Jack as soon as he died, and distorting both Lila and Jack in his fear. This, I realized, was why John could never forgive Jack. True, Jack was an atheist, but John easily reconciled with his older brother. The real reason was that in college Jack got a young women pregnant, and they had a daughter. Jack abandoned both child and mother, leaving his daughter to die of a random infection. Jack had everything that John had longed for, lost, and longed for again, and Jack threw it away like it was worthless. I used to see only John Ames the pastor, but after trying to have a child and losing the pregnancy, I saw him as more of a person. John is a good man, but he struggles in his sanctification. He sees beauty and grace and embers glowing in the Breath of God we others see only ashes, yet he struggles with jealousy, bitterness, and forgiveness.
“Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?” Gilead asks this along with Saint Peter. I ask, too. I ask this question more often than I can say. Gilead has a specificity to my life which draws me to it, but it also has the depth to transcend the narrowness of the past and present perceptions. Gilead helps me focus on myself, my family, my choices and mistakes, graces and triumphs when it’s easier to turn away. It holds up a reflection, as long as I have courage to look myself in the eyes. Like John, I hope I’m sanctifying. My mom told me loss makes us wiser. I hope she’s right. It makes me feel older if nothing else. Some thing’s are easier to forgive now than they were when I was younger and read Gilead for the first time. Others are harder to forgive. As long as we have family, we’ll need grace. As long as there is life, we’ll need grace. With life comes loss, and that needs grace, too, a bottomless grace, the grace of God. And Gilead is full of beauty and grace, so I’ll keep coming back to it as long as I live.
