Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

  any rational person does, but there is a tendency, in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other

  more or less algebraically—this is true, but on the other hand, so is that, so I discover a kind of equivalency of considerations that is interesting in itself but resolves nothing. If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible. Not deciding is really one of the two choices that are available to

  me, so decision must be allowed its moment, too. That is, as behavior, not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not

  to act. If I were to put deciding not to act at one end of a continuum of possibility and deciding to act at the other end, the

  whole intervening space would be given over to not deciding,

  which would mean not acting. I believe this makes sense. My point in any case is that I must put special, corrective emphasis on the possibility of doing the thing I dread doing, which is telling your mother what I think I ought to tell her. Question: What is it you fear most, Moriturus?

  Answer: I, Moriturus, fear leaving my wife and child unknowingly in the sway of a man of extremely questionable

  character.

  Question: What makes you think his contact with them or his influence upon them will be considerable enough to be damaging to them?

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  Now, that really is an excellent question, and one I would not have thought to put to myself. The answer would be, he has come by the house a few times, he has come to church once. Not an impressive reply. The truth is, as I stood there in the pulpit, looking down on the three of you, you looked to me like a handsome young family, and my evil old heart rose within me, the old covetise I have mentioned elsewhere came over me, and I felt the way I used to feel when the beauty of other lives was a misery and an offense to me. And I felt as if I were looking back from the grave.

  Well, thank God I thought that through.

  And while I am being honest, I will add here that for perhaps two months I have felt a certain change in the way people

  act toward me, which could be a simple reflex of the way I act toward them. Maybe I don’t understand as much as I should. Maybe I don’t make as much sense as I should.

  The fact is, I don’t want to be old. And I certainly don’t want to

  be dead. I don’t want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember. I bitterly wish you could know me as a young man,

  and not really so young, either, necessarily. I was trim and fit into my sixties. That was one way I took after my grandfather and my father. I was never rangy like them, but I was very strong, very sound. Even now, if I could trust my heart, there’s a lot I could do.

  I don’t have to fault myself for feeling this way. The Lord

  wept in the Garden on the night He was betrayed, as I have

  said to people in my situation many times. So it isn’t just some unredeemed paganism in me that I dread what I should welcome, though clearly my sorrow is alloyed with discreditable

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  emotions, emotions of other kinds. Of course, of course. “Who will free me from the body of this death?” Well, I know the answer to that one. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” I imagine

  a kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going up for a line drive when you’re so young that your body almost doesn’t know about effort. Paul couldn’t have meant something entirely different from that. So there’s that to look forward to.

  I say this because I really feel as though I’m failing, and not primarily in the medical sense. And I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me. I had a dream like that last night.

  I was Boughton in the dream, for all purposes. Poor old Boughton.

  This morning you came to me with a picture you had made

  that you wanted me to admire. I was just at the end of a magazine article, just finishing the last paragraph, so I didn’t look

  up right away. Your mother said, in the kindest, saddest voice, “He doesn’t hear you.” Not “He didn’t” but “He doesn’t.”

  That article was very interesting. It was in Ladies’Home Journal,

  an old issue Glory found in her father’s study and brought

  over for me to look at. There was a note on it. Show Ames. But it ended up at the bottom of a stack of things, I guess, because it’s from 1948. The article is called “God and the American People,” and it says 95 percent of us say we believe in God. But our religion doesn’t meet the writer’s standards, not at all. To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does. How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself

  to be? The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do.

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  The oddness of the phrase “believe in God” brings to my

  mind that first chapter of Feuerbach, which is really about the awkwardness of language, not about religion at all. Feuerbach doesn’t imagine the possibility of an existence beyond this one, by which I mean a reality embracing this one but exceeding it, the way, for example, this world embraces and exceeds Soapy’s understanding of it. Soapy might be a victim of ideological conflict right along with the rest of us, if things get out of hand. She would no doubt make some feline appraisal of the situation, which would have nothing to do with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Manhattan Project. The inadequacy

  of her concepts would have nothing to do with the reality of the situation.

  That’s a drastic way of putting it, and not a very precise

  one. I don’t wish to suggest a reality that is simply an enlarged or extrapolated version of this reality. If you think how a thing we call a stone differs from a thing we call a dream—the degrees of unlikeness within the reality we know are very extreme,

  and what I wish to suggest is a much more absolute

  unlikeness, with which we exist, though our human circumstance creates in us a radically limited and peculiar notion of

  what existence is. I gave a sermon on this once, the text being “Your thoughts are not our thoughts.” That was a good deal longer than two months ago. I believe it was last year. I thought at the time it might have puzzled a few people, but I was pleased with it. I even wished Edward could have heard it. I felt I’d clarified some things. I remember one lady did ask me, as she was going out the door, “Who is Feuerbach?” And that made me aware of that tendency of mine to live too much in my own thoughts. Your mother wanted to name the cat Feuerbach, but you insisted on Soapy.

  It could be true that my interest in abstractions, which

  would have been forgiven first on grounds of youth and then on grounds of eccentricity, is now being forgiven on grounds of 143

  senility, which would mean people have stopped trying to see the sense in the things I say the way they once did. That would be by far the worst form of forgiveness. I used to have one of

  those books with humorous little sermon anecdotes in it somewhere. It was a gift, I remember, no name on it. How many

  years ago did I get that? I’ve probably been boring a lot of people for a long time. Strange to find comfort in the idea. 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. If I were to go through my old sermons, I might find some

  in which I deal with this subject. Since I am presumably somewhere near the end of my time and my strength, that might be

 
; the best way to make the case for you. I should have thought of this long ago.

  This afternoon we walked over to Boughton’s to return his magazine. You held my hand a fair part of the way. There

  were milkweed seeds drifting around which you had to try to catch, but you’d come back and take my hand again. It’s a hard thing to be patient with me, the way I creep along these days, but I’m trying not to get my heart in a state. There have been

  so many fine days this summer that I’ve begun to hear talk of

  a drought. Dust and grasshoppers are fine in their way, too, within limits. Whatever is coming, I’d be sorry to miss it. Boughton was on his porch, “listening to the breeze,” he

  said. “Feeling the breeze.” Glory brought out some lemonade for us and sat down with us, and we talked a little bit about tele144

  vision. Your mother has been looking at it, too. I don’t enjoy it myself. It’s not the last impression I want to have of this world. It turns out that when Glory found that article and asked

  her father if he still wanted me to see it, he asked her to read it over to him, and then he laughed and said, “Oh yes, yes, Reverend Ames will want to have a look at that.” He knows what

  will exasperate me, and he was laughing in anticipation as soon as I mentioned it.

  We agreed it must have been fairly widely read in both our congregations, because on one page there’s a recipe for that molded salad of orange gelatin with stuffed green olives and shredded cabbage and anchovies that has dogged my ministerial life these last years, and which appears at his house whenever he so much as catches cold. There should be a law to

  prevent recipes for molded salad from appearing within twenty pages of any article having to do with religion. I ended up bringing the magazine back home because I thought I might want to use it in a sermon.

  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 elo145

  quent 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.

  Here is a sentence Boughton and I got a laugh out of: “One

  might ask how many Christians can define Christianity.” In twenty-five volumes or less, I said.

  Boughton said, “Fewer,” and winked at Glory, and she said, “Ever the stickler,” which is true.

  (Of course I was simply using contemporary idiom, and he was aware of that. He just doesn’t approve of it. I don’t use it often. But I think it’s perfectly fine for making a little joke now and then.)

  Here is a paragraph we lingered over: “There is indeed a

  note of sinful pride in the confidence with which the majority

  of people expressed their ideas about heaven. For although the Bible has much to say about final judgment, it offers no definitive picture of life after death. Yet fewer than one third of the American people—29 percent—admit they have no ideas on what is one of the most ambiguous subjects in Biblical revelation.” Now, that is a kind of interpretation I would call fraudulent.

  To say a subject is ambiguous is not to say one cannot 146

  form ideas on it, or shouldn’t, nor is it to say even that it is possible to avoid forming ideas on it. Any concept that exists in

  the mind at all exists in some form, among some set of associations. I’d like to talk to that 29 percent who have no ideas, to

  see how they do it. I bet they just didn’t like the question. Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day.

  He said, “Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I’d multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes.” So he’s just sitting there multiplying the feel of the wind by two, multiplying the smell of the grass by two. “I remember when we put that old wagon on the courthouse roof,” he said. “Seems to me the stars were brighter in those days. Twice as bright.”

  “And we were twice as clever.”

  “Oh, more than that,” he said. “Much more than that.”

  Jack came out and sat down with us. He asked if he could look at the article, and I gave it to him. He said, “I thought he made the point in here somewhere that Americans’ treatment of the Negro indicated a lack of religious seriousness.” Boughton said, “It is very easy to judge.”

  Jack smiled and handed the magazine back to me. “True,” he said.

  That was the first I’d seen of him since Sunday, since the service. He went out through the chancel and the side door, to avoid shaking hands with me, I believe. I’ve been feeling some discomfort on that account as well as others. I was even a little embarrassed to meet his eyes, to tell the truth. I believe returning the magazine was mainly a pretext for looking in on

  Boughton and Glory, to see if they were upset with me. I wasn’t done with that article. I meant all along to bring it back with me. I conceal my motives from myself pretty effectively sometimes. I had even imagined, lying awake Sunday night, 147

  that Jack might go away again because I had brought up the

  old catastrophe right there in church, or so he seemed to believe. I thought of apologizing, but that would only confirm in

  his mind that my meaning and my intention were what he took them to be, which I do not wholly believe, and which would deprive him of the possibility of making a less damaging interpretation of them. At any rate, it would raise the issue between us, perhaps unnecessarily. Finally, I was hesitant to go to the house at all, fearing that my mere presence might be an irritant or a provocation, as I feared my staying away might be

  also. Then Glory came by to say hello. She seemed in fine spirits. And I was mightily relieved. If there is one thing I don’t

  want to do in the time that remains to either one of us, it is offend Boughton. I fell to thinking what a pleasure it must be to

  him to have Jack there, and it occurred to me that it might be a remarkable generosity on Jack’s part to come home to the

  poor old man, and perhaps to Glory also, considering; her troubles. I was downright ashamed to remember how impatient I

  was for him to leave, thinking only of my own life, I admit. The thought had even occurred to me that he might be there

  to start moving his father out of the house, so to speak, since he and the other children will inherit it. The place really did need to be put right, and there was much more to do than Glory could have done alone. Sitting there on the porch with Jack, I was struck by how much he had aged. Of course he’s old enough to have aged, he’s in his forties somewhere. Angeline would be fifty-one, so he’s forty-three. There is gray in his hair, and he looks tired around the eyes. Well, he looked tense, as he always does, and he also l
ooked sad, it seemed to me.

  Your mother came up the road to tell us our supper was

  ready. It was a cold supper, she said, so there was no hurry. She agreed to sit with us for a few minutes. She always has to be coaxed to stay in company even a little while, and then it’s all I 148

  can do to get a word from her. I believe she worries about the way she talks. I love the way she talks, or the way she talked when I first knew her. “It don’t matter,” she would say, in that low, soft voice of hers. That was what she said when she meant

  she forgave someone, but it had a sound of deeper, sadder resignation, as if she were forgiving the whole of the created order,

  forgiving the Lord Himself. It grieves me that I may never hear just those words spoken by her again. I believe Boughton made her self-conscious with that little trick of his of correcting people. Not that he ever corrected her.

  “It don’t matter.” It was as if she were renouncing the world itselfjust in order to make nothing of some offense to

  her. Such a prodigal renunciation, that empty-handed prodigality I remember from the old days. I have nothing to give

  you, take and eat. Ashy biscuit, summer rain, her hair falling wet around her face. If I were to multiply the splendors of the world by two—the splendors as I feel them—I would arrive at an idea of heaven very unlike anything you see in the old paintings.

  So Jack Boughton is forty-three. I have no idea what sort of life he has had since he left here. There has never been any mention of marriage or children or of any particular kind of work. I always felt it was best not to inquire.

  I was sitting there listening to old Boughton ramble along (he uses the expression himself) about a trip he and his wife made once to Minneapolis, when Jack broke in and said to me, “So, Reverend, I would like to hear your views on the doctrine of predestination.”

  Now, that is probably my least favorite topic of conversation

  • in the entire world. I have spent a great part of my life hearing that doctrine talked up and down, and no one’s understanding 149

  ever advanced one .iota.,J’ye seen grown men, God-fearing men, come to blows over that doctrine. The first thought that