But that is the pulpit speaking.
GILEAD
Marilynne Robinson
Set in a small dusty town in Iowa in the year 1956, this elegiac, epistolary novel takes the form of a final letter Congregational minister John Ames writes to his young son. The novel finds Ames very near to dying but still with enough energy and stamina for promenades to the church where he preached and where his father preached as well as to the house of his childhood friend Reverend Robert Boughton.
What begins as a slow serenade on the Ames family history and the contentions and miracles that attend the relationships between fathers and sons, particular fathers and sons cut from similarly clerical cloth, soon develops into a more urgent rumination with the arrival of a man no one in either family has seen in 20 years and who has, in the past, been the cause of much turmoil intended and unintended.
The theology expounded upon here stomps into severe abstraction on occasion but never loses the lived-in reality of the narrator. So much of it, in the end, reflects an almost boundless love of the world and marvel at the wonders in it and the intersection between Creation and human experience, so that children running through sprinklers gathers about it a divine light, the hair on the heads of each of those boys haloed with insight into the transcendent and heavenly.
There are too many such episodes to count, each of them either nudging a chuckle out of my chest or bringing water to my eyes. The narrator, and by extension the author, is brilliant with ecclesiastical understanding, or, at least, it came across to me as brilliance the way someone is able to posit an answer to a question with which you've struggled for the better part of your adult life. Upon starting the book a few afternoons ago, I wrote the following comment in response to an earlier status update on Facebook:
"If ever there was a book I was meant to read, a book that spoke so directly to my worries and my concerns and cut straight through my doubts to assure me that others asked the questions I was asking, a book that offered answers simultaneously inconclusive but reassuring, if ever there was a book that captured me and, at the same time, put me so profoundly and so entirely at peace, it is this book."
Peace was the undercurrent throughout, and I believe a lot of it came from the narrator's denominal persuasion. Claiming Congregationalism as well, seeing this here was akin in some ways to having discovered, in high school, that Alexandre Dumas was brilliant. A hero who shares my outsides. A hero who shares my insides.
The Ames family history, a story told in a series of reverse-'begets' touches on the Civil War and the Abolitionist movement, and the present conflict brings many of those issues into stark relief in the context of the 1950s to surprising and heartbreaking effect, showing how, despite such advanced and internalized doctrinal insight and awareness and knowledge, we are no more immune to the prejudices that plagued us generations ago.
A lovely book. One that I feel has improved me.
Marilynne Robinson
Set in a small dusty town in Iowa in the year 1956, this elegiac, epistolary novel takes the form of a final letter Congregational minister John Ames writes to his young son. The novel finds Ames very near to dying but still with enough energy and stamina for promenades to the church where he preached and where his father preached as well as to the house of his childhood friend Reverend Robert Boughton.
What begins as a slow serenade on the Ames family history and the contentions and miracles that attend the relationships between fathers and sons, particular fathers and sons cut from similarly clerical cloth, soon develops into a more urgent rumination with the arrival of a man no one in either family has seen in 20 years and who has, in the past, been the cause of much turmoil intended and unintended.
The theology expounded upon here stomps into severe abstraction on occasion but never loses the lived-in reality of the narrator. So much of it, in the end, reflects an almost boundless love of the world and marvel at the wonders in it and the intersection between Creation and human experience, so that children running through sprinklers gathers about it a divine light, the hair on the heads of each of those boys haloed with insight into the transcendent and heavenly.
There are too many such episodes to count, each of them either nudging a chuckle out of my chest or bringing water to my eyes. The narrator, and by extension the author, is brilliant with ecclesiastical understanding, or, at least, it came across to me as brilliance the way someone is able to posit an answer to a question with which you've struggled for the better part of your adult life. Upon starting the book a few afternoons ago, I wrote the following comment in response to an earlier status update on Facebook:
"If ever there was a book I was meant to read, a book that spoke so directly to my worries and my concerns and cut straight through my doubts to assure me that others asked the questions I was asking, a book that offered answers simultaneously inconclusive but reassuring, if ever there was a book that captured me and, at the same time, put me so profoundly and so entirely at peace, it is this book."
Peace was the undercurrent throughout, and I believe a lot of it came from the narrator's denominal persuasion. Claiming Congregationalism as well, seeing this here was akin in some ways to having discovered, in high school, that Alexandre Dumas was brilliant. A hero who shares my outsides. A hero who shares my insides.
The Ames family history, a story told in a series of reverse-'begets' touches on the Civil War and the Abolitionist movement, and the present conflict brings many of those issues into stark relief in the context of the 1950s to surprising and heartbreaking effect, showing how, despite such advanced and internalized doctrinal insight and awareness and knowledge, we are no more immune to the prejudices that plagued us generations ago.
A lovely book. One that I feel has improved me.