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IS THERE A BALM IN GILEAD? Editor’s note: In the June 2006 issue of Brotherhood Beacon, Megan Donahue asks where all the Christian novelists are, and Brenda Zook reviews Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a novel which wowed the critics and won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, quite a coup for a book with explicitly Christian themes. We invite you to join the online discussion. An exciting bonus: Marilynne Robinson has agreed to participate! By Brenda Zook 
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a not a swift-moving stream of words rushing through a sunny meadow, nor is it a cascading waterfall splashing refreshment on unsuspecting hikers. But for those who are patient and ready to venture off the beaten path of Christian fiction, the quieter waters of Gilead offer pools of reflective thought for the journey. The waters of Gilead are deep; the reader will want to linger along the bank with time to ponder and reread. John Ames is a minister in the little town of Gilead, Iowa and, at the age of seventy-six, he has decided to write a memoir of sorts for his seven-year-old son to read when he becomes an adult. There are so many things he wants to tell the boy, or that he wants him to know someday, when he is a man. Ames includes stories of a family line that marches back to Kansas Free-Soiler battles and forward to a future he can’t quite see. He fears that future will be filled with hardship for the boy and his mother, since he had so little time to prepare for it. Rev. Ames tells many tales, but he is not first and foremost a storyteller, for he frequently rambles and his accounts are often interrupted by apparently randomly selected descriptions of daily occurrences and his reflections on those events: You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. . . . I’ve always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.
As the pages slip away, the tapestry reveals its patterns. Fathers and sons: a prodigal son received by a waiting father, a wandering father sought by an angry son, a disappointed father criticizing his son’s preaching, an old man delighting over a young son, a wayward son devoted to his born-out-of-wedlock son — misunderstandings and sacred bonds. Fathers and sons are everywhere in Gilead: Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says. I can’t claim to understand that saying, as many times as I’ve heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a deeply mysterious fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
John Ames might have thought he didn’t have the words to tell his love, but how it shines through the entries in his memoirs: “It’s your existence I love you for mainly.” Oh, that every child of a minister father in Conservative Conference could read or hear, could feel the reality of that blessing from a father!
Loyalty and love. These sturdy cords seem to hold the tapestry together. Such love John Ames has for this small boy who arrived late in his life after marriage to a much younger woman! 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. John Ames might have thought he didn’t have the words to tell his love, but how it shines through the entries in his memoirs: “It’s your existence I love you for mainly.” Oh, that every child of a minister father in Conservative Conference could read or hear, could feel the reality of that blessing from a father! The ministry. John Ames’ comments on ministry and all things theological add color and depth to the waters of Gilead. As a pastor’s wife, I found some of his anecdotes to be humorously familiar, such as the call from an elderly widow who had just recently left the farm and moved to a cottage: You can never know what troubles or fears such people have, and I went. It turned out that the problem was her kitchen sink . . . hot water came from the cold faucet and cold water from the hot faucet. I suggested she might just decide to take C for hot and H for cold, but she said she liked things to work the way they were supposed to. So I went home and got my screwdriver and came back and switched the handles. She said she guessed that would do until she could get a real plumber. Oh, the clerical life! His museful remarks and observations only add to the winsomeness of this thoughtful man. He takes life seriously (“There’s a lot under the surface of life . . . a lot of malice and dread and guilt and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it either”), but himself not too seriously. He has boxes in the attic containing, by his own estimation, 2,250 sermons written out word for word, about 30 pages per sermon, and he’s trying to decide what to do with them: It might be best to burn them, but that would upset your mother, who thinks a great deal more of them than I do — for their sheer mass, I suppose, since she hasn’t read them. It’s humiliating to have written as much as Augustine, and then have to find a way to dispose of it. I found myself wondering what it would be like to meet John Ames. I liked how his mind worked; I admired his honest confessions and his vulnerability. Sometimes I felt slightly annoyed to realize he was a fictional character. But his words were true and thoughtful and I found much to ponder when I learned to read the book at the pace it required. To be honest, I didn’t really like this book at first. I thought it was slooooow. There was so little action. Where was the dialogue? (I think there were two sets of quotations marks in the first twenty pages.) What was going to happen? My mind kept trying to race ahead, but this book was not moving at that speed. About halfway through the book I stopped checking to see what page I was on, and when the evening came during which I would read those last few pages I had the sudden thought that I might burst into tears. (Someone in our house said, “Mom, it’s a book!” And a fiction book at that!) But I wasn’t quite ready to say good bye, so the next night I started again at the beginning. I was ready for another quiet walk on a dusty path listening to the wit and wisdom of John Ames. I was going back to Gilead. Brenda Zook longs to make a difference in the world from her own Gilead on Hickory Lane near Belleville, Pennsylvania. She is delighted to be a part of the congregation at Locust Grove where her husband Max is pastor. Together they are committed to parenting the boys God sends them, currently two biological teen sons, an adopted four-year-old, and a young adult foster son. She also likes helping to raise assorted other living things, including sheep, chickens, fruit and nut trees, perennials and herbs. Life is never dull.  Gilead Photo by David Herwaldt |
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Hilarious moments of cat baptisms are juxtaposed with theological musings. He offers wisdom and observations of the natural world, (“I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing& ”), as well as introspections about himself and his failures and joys. Thoughts and themes wind over and under and back around, creating a fabric of emotions and pictures that draw the reader back time and again. John Ames (or is it Marilynne Robinson?) is a weaver, inserting a relational thread here, adding a swath of shy humor there, slipping in the darker lines of loss and grief without any seeming pattern or plan. He is weaving for his son the tapestry of a life, his own life, imperfect, yet well lived.