For most of us educated Westerners the mystery of faith is the mystery of why anyone would believe at all. At its best, Christianity has rather become the religion of our grandparents or those oddly fanatical young people we may encounter on visiting a Christian Union. At its worst, it is a cruel mockery of all that it once stood for, a motivation for policies and persons that are anything but Christian. Christianity may be the belief that we put down on the census, but churchgoing and active faith are almost without exception relics of a bygone age. If we are still spiritual, our God may look a little like Jesus, but dressed up in our own hopes and ideals. It’s just the way things are.
For me unbelief is something I struggle with. And it’s not just because of Ivan Karamazov’s infamous claim that “if there is no good, then everything is permitted”. When I look at the magnificence of an oak or the radiance of a misty morning, or feel the weight of stars upon me late at night, I can’t help but feel that something is out there. Without God I cannot find any sense in the world, and whatever certain thinkers may say all I get out of that position is despair. Nietzsche et al. would say (probably correctly) that my belief is motivated by the most shameful of psychological urges – a need for comfort, for order, for plan.
Be that as it may, though I am not a churchgoer and am only really a Christian only by default, I feel the rudiments of a real Christian faith within me. And when I look at those who truly believe, whose faith animates them like a fire, underneath my scepticism is a kind of jealousy, a wish that I could believe too.
Gilead
I say all this because Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead is a novel about faith and the loftiest parts of belief – its virtues, hopes, and despairs. To read it is to be brought into a world where God is here, now. He is not visible, but simply present, lurking behind every page and every thought. The story takes the form of a diary of sorts, or a series of letters, written by the seventy-six-year-old pastor John Ames to his seven-year-old son. Ames knows that he does not have long to live, and he wants to leave a testament for the boy, so that through these pages the child may come to know the father he scarcely had. Gilead pulses with Ames’s faith and its greatest merit is the way it makes faith and its value comprehensible to a non-believer. It does not convert, but it shows the beauty of a believing world.
Moments
This beauty comes, first and foremost, as moments. Because Gilead is a diary, Ames’ entries range from paragraphs to several pages. He sits and watches his son, and part of the wonderful intimacy of Gilead is the way Ames constantly refers to “you” while he writes. You did this, or you did that. He describes his son and his wife playing with bubbles:
I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavours. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.
This is just a moment. But seen through the eyes of a dying man, and of a loving man, it takes on a radiance. Life is a collection of such moments, and in our attitude towards them we can transfigure them or turn them into dust.
Reading with Faith
I think one of the difficulties of Gilead is that reading it requires an act of faith in itself. If we go in with scepticism, with an unwillingness to engage with the book’s message, it can seem boring. One of the most common criticisms of Robinson’s work that I’ve read is precisely that – that it’s boring. I actually read Housekeeping, Robinson’s first novel, earlier this year. I didn’t get anything out of it, which is why I didn’t write about it here. But I read Gilead differently, over several weeks, and I let it wash over me like a blessing. If we go into a work like this with hostility, then we will only be disappointed. Take, for example, Ames’s comment – “how I have loved this life”. He often says similar things when finishing a note. It is repetitive, and in a way annoying. But it’s also what he feels.
Ames is a man who is blown over by the beauty of the world, and if anything we should be jealous of him for loving it as he does. In the same way, there is a lot in this novel about things that aren’t relevant at all to non-believers – matters like baptism, or blessings, or the Eucharist (the wafer and wine). These things have significance for him, and we must try to feel our way into his shoes to enjoy what he says about them. For in their mystery there lies so much about the redemption of his world.
Fathers, Grandfathers
A great part of Gilead is taken up by the theme of family and the passing of the generations. Ames’s father and grandfather were also priests, and his closest friend, Boughton, is another priest. Ames is haunted by the memory of his grandfather. That man had fought in the American Civil War (Gilead takes place in 1956) and lost an eye. When his shocked family sees his wound his response is simple: “I am confident that I will find great blessing in it”. He is a man who has visions of God and who finally disappears to become an itinerant preacher in Kansas. It is fair to say that Ames struggles with the differences in their faiths – his own faith is quieter, less mystical. He wonders whether that means it is a faith at all.
Ames also struggles with his own role as a father. His unexpected marriage and son so late in life mean that he won’t be able to be a father to his boy for very long. Much of Gilead also centres on Jack Boughton, the wayward son of Ames’ friend, who is named after Ames himself. Ames does not want to forgive the man for something he did when he was younger, though he knows Christ would have wanted him to, and this leads to another tension that is at the heart of the story.
Love
When I think about it, love is at the centre of Gilead. This is perhaps inevitable for a work that is so manifestly Christian. Love for moments, love from fathers to their children, and love of a romantic sort too:
Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, “Why’d you have to be so damn old?”
We are left with a feeling that love, like beauty, is something that can be found in every part of our lives if only we have the eyes to see it. More than once I closed the book, touched by something it had said.
Conclusion
Gilead does have its share of tensions, of intrigues. I had no idea how the novel would conclude and actually it ended up surprising me. But what I am left with is not a story so much as a vision of love and of peace. Here is a world where goodness and redemption are possible for everyone. It presents a version of Christianity at its best. And though not all of its readers will be Christians – or will want to be – there’s enough value and enough compatibility between Ames’s worldview and a good, happy, atheist-or-whatever life that it’s perfectly reasonable to call the novel an inspiration and a source of hope.
I can’t wait to read more Robinson in the future.