Gilead (2005 Pulitzer Prize)

by Marilynne Robinson

  I mention this because it seemed so strange to me to be sitting there with the two of you and young Boughton, of all

  people. Because not so many years ago I was sitting at that table in the dark eating cold meat loaf from the pan it came in, listening to the radio, when old Boughton let himself in the door and sat down at the table and said, "Don't put the light on." So I turned the radio off and we sat there together and talked and prayed, about John Ames Boughton, for John Ames Boughton.

  But that story may be more than you need to know, more

  than I ought to tell you. If things have come right, what is the point? There's nothing very remarkable in the story, in fact it is very commonplace. Which is not an extenuation by any means. So often people tell me about some wickedness they've been up to, or they've suffered from, and I think, Oh, that again! I've heard of churches in the South that oblige people to make a 121

  public confession of their graver sins to the whole congregation. I think sometimes there might be an advantage in making people aware how worn and stale these old transgressions

  are. It might take some of the shine off them, for those who

  are tempted. But I have no evidence to suggest it has that effect. Of course there are special and extenuating circumstances. They were fairly special in young Boughton's case and

  by no means extenuating, if I am any judge. Which I am not, or ought not to be, according to Scripture.

  Transgression. That is legalism. There is never just one transgression. There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all. Avoid transgression. How's that for advice.

  I have to decide what to tell your mother. I know she is wondering. He's very nice to her, and to you. And to me. No "Papa"

  this evening, thank goodness. He's so respectful I feel like telling him I'm not the oldest man in the world yet. Well, I know I'm touchy about some things. I have to try to be fair with him.

  You look at him as if he were Charles Lindbergh. He keeps calling you little brother, and you love that.

  I hope there's some special providence in his turning up

  just when I have so many other things to deal with, because he

  is a considerable disruption when peace would have been especially appreciated.

  I'm not complaining. Or I ought not to be.

  I've been thinking about my funeral sermon, which I plan to write to save old Boughton the trouble. I can do a pretty good imitation of his style. He'll get a laugh out of that.

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  Young Boughton came by again this morning, with some apples and plums from their trees. He and Glory have things

  looking pretty nice over there. They've done a lot of work. I'm trying to be a little more cordial to him than I have

  been. He sort of steps back and smiles a little, and looks at me as though he's thinking, "Today we're cordial! What can account for that?" And he looks me right in the face, as though

  he wants me to know he knows it is a performance and he's amused by it. I suppose an attempt is a performance, in some

  sense. But what else can I do? Most people will go along with you in these situations, whatever their private thoughts might be. I hesitate to call it devilment, but it certainly does make me uncomfortable, and I'm fairly sure that is what he intends. And I believe he truly is amused as well. So I abandoned the attempt at cordiality for today and excused myself and went off

  to look after some things at the church.

  I spent several hours in meditation and prayer over John Ames Boughton, and also over John Ames, the father of his soul,

  as Boughton once called me, though I can't endorse the phrase, any soul's father being the Lord only. There's much for me to ponder in that fact. Better that I should offend or reject my own son—which God forbid—but you are the

  Lord's child also, as am I, as we all are. I must be gracious. My only role is to be gracious. Clearly I must somehow contrive

  to think graciously about him, also, since he makes such a point of seeing right through me. I believe I have made some progress on that front through prayer, though there is clearly much more progress to be made, much more praying to be done.

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  This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism,

  your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think,

  as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some

  small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are

  free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the

  same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.

  I am reminded of this precious instruction by my own

  great failure to live up to it recently. Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin's God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction. Well, we all bring such light to bear on these great matters as we can. I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe

  we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for

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  God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart. "He has a mind of his own," Boughton used to say when that son of his was up to something. And he meant it as praise, he really did. Now, Edward, for example, did have a mind of his own, a mind worthy of respect.

  I'm not sure that's true, either. Worthy of respect, of course. But the fact is that his mind came from one set of books

  as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But

  that can't be true. While I was at seminary I read every book

  he had ever mentioned and every book I thought he might have read, if I could put my hand on it and it wasn't in German. If I had the money, I ordered books through the mail

  that I thought he might be about to read. When I brought them home my father began to read them, too, which surprised me at the time. Who knows where any mind comes

  from. It's all mystery. Still, Boughton is right. Jack Boughton is a piece of work.

  Much more prayer is called for, clearly, but first I will take a nap.

  My impulse is strong to warn you against. Jack Boughton. Your mother and you. You may know by now what a fallible man I am, and how little I can trust my feelings on this subject. And you know, from living out years I cannot foresee, whether you must forgive me for warning you, or forgive me for failing to warn you, or indeed if none of it turned out to matter at all. This is a grave question for me.

  That paragraph would itself amount to a warning. Perhaps I can say to your mother only that much. He is not a man of the highest character. Be wary of him.

  If he continues to come around, I believe I'll do that. 125

  I have not been writing to you for a day or two. I have passed some fairly difficult nights. Discomfort, a little trouble breathing. I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the
Lord. There is no earthly

  solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that. The Yankees are playing the Red Sox today. This is providential, since it should be a decent game and I don't care at all who wins. So there should be no excess of emotion involved in my watching it. (We have television now, a gift from the congregation with the specific intent of letting rne watch baseball, and I will. But it seems quite two-dimensional beside radio.)

  Your mother has sent you off to the neighbors, so you won't pester me, she says, but it makes me wonder about the impression I must be making on her this morning. The poor woman

  is very pale. She has not slept any better than I have. They put the television set in the parlor yesterday and spent the afternoon scrambling around on the roof rigging up an antenna.

  The young men are terribly interested in these things. It makes them happy to. do a kindness so perilous and exotic in nature. I remember, I remember.

  Your mother has brought down my writing materials and

  the books she found on my desk, and someone has brought in a TV tray for my pills and spectacles and water glass. In case this is as serious as everyone seems to think. I don't believe it myself, but maybe I'm wrong.

  I fell asleep in my chair and woke up feeling so much better. I missed eight and a half innings, and nothing happened in the 126

  bottom of the ninth (4 to 2, Yankees), but the reception was good and I look forward to watching the rest of the season, if God wills. Your mother was asleep, too, kneeling on the floor with her head against my knees. I had to sit very still for a long time, watching a movie about Englishmen in trench coats who were up to something morose involving Frenchmen and trains. I didn't really follow it. When she woke up, she was so glad to see me, as if I had been gone a long time. Then she went and fetched you and we ate our supper in the parlor—it turns out

  that whoever brought the trays brought one for each of us. Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life's problems with food items ofjust this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You'd have thought I'd died. We saved it for lunch.

  We had a fine time, we three, watching television. There

  were jugglers and monkeys and ventriloquists, and there was a lot of dancing around. You asked for bites off my plate so you could decide' which casserole and salad you wanted—you have the child's abhorrence of mingling foods on your plate. So I gave you a bite of one after another, (guessing) Mrs. Brown, Mrs. McNeill, Mrs. Pry, then Mrs. Dorris, Mrs. Turney, feeding you with my fork. You would say, "I still can't decide!" and we'd do it all again. That was your joke, eating it all up. It was a wonderful joke. I thought of the day I gave you communion.

  I wonder if you thought of it also.

  I went up to the church for a few hours this morning, and when I came home I found a great many of my books moved into the parlor, with my desk and chair, and the television set 127

  moved upstairs. This was your mother's idea, but I knew it was young Boughton who did the lifting and carrying for her, or helped her with it. I am not angry about this. At my time of life, I refuse to be angry. It was kindly meant. And it had to be done sooner or later. It's true that if I have to spend my twilight stranded with somebody or other, I'd prefer Karl Barth to

  Jack Benny. Still. I have my study. I don't feel I need to give it up yet. Jack Boughton in my study. He may have carried this very journal down the stairs. After some fairly anxious looking around, which involved two trips upstairs, I found it down here, in the bottom drawer of my desk, where I never put it. That seemed like a sort of taunt, as if he had made a point of hiding it from me. I know I am not being reasonable.

  I gave the sermon on Hagar and Ishmael today. I departed from my text a little more than I do ordinarily, which may not have been wise, since sleep was a struggle last night. Not that I couldn't sleep. I would have very much preferred to have been awake. I just lay there, helplessly subject to my anxieties. A good many of them I could have put out of my mind, if I'd

  had the use of my mind. But as it was, I had to endure a kind of dull paralysis. To struggle within paralysis is a strange

  thing—I doubt I stirred a limb, but when I woke up I was exhausted, weary at heart.

  Then young Boughton came to the service. That was nothing

  I would have expected. You saw him and waved and patted the pew next to you, and he came down the aisle and sat with you. Your mother looked at him to say good morning, and then she did not look at him again. Not once.

  I began my remarks by pointing out the similarity between the stories of Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the wilderness and Abraham going off with Isaac to sacrifice him, as he be128

  lieves. My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances

  sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the

  child. Abraham's extreme old age is an important element in both stories, not only because he can hardly hope for more children, not only because the children of old age are unspeakably precious, but also, I think, because any father, particularly

  an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so

  little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting

  God to honor the parents' love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.

  I noted that Abraham himself had been sent into the wilderness, told to leave his father's house also, that this was the narrative of all generations, and that it is only by the grace of God that we are made instruments of His providence and participants in a fatherhood that is always ultimately His.

  At this point I departed from my text to say that an old pastor's anxiety for his church is likewise a forgetfulness of the

  fact that Christ is Himself the pastor of His people and a faithful presence among them through all generations. I thought

  this was a good point, but it started some of the women crying, so I tried to change the subject. I put the question why the Lord would ask gentle Abraham to do two things that were so cruel on their face—sending a child and his mother into the wilderness, and taking a child to be bound on an altar as if for sacrifice. This came to my mind because I had often wondered about it. Then I had to attempt an answer.

  It had occurred to me that these were the only two instances in Scripture where a father is even apparently unkind

  to his child. The Lord can ask, "What man of you, if his son 129

  asked for bread, would give him a stone?" and it is a rhetorical question. Anyone knows from experience that among us there are a good many fathers who mistreat their children, or abandon them. And it was at that point I noticed young Boughton grinning at me. White as a sheet, and grinning. The text was one I would never have chosen if I'd thought he might be

  there, though if I'd kept to the sermon as I wrote it, everything would have been better.

  About the cruelty of those narratives I said that they rendered the fact that children are often victims of rejection or violence, and that in these cases, too, which the Bible does not otherwise countenance, the child is within the providential care of God. And this is no less true, I said, if the angel carries her home to her faithful and loving Father than if He opens the spring or stops the knife and lets the child live out her sum of earthly years.

  I don't know how sufficient that is to the question. It is such

  a difficult question that I hesitate to raise it at all. My only preparation for dealing with it has been the many times people have asked me to explain it to
them. Whatever they may have thought, I have not succeeded to my own satisfaction even once.

  I have always worried that when I say the insulted or the downtrodden are within the providence of God, it will be taken by some people to mean that it is not a grave thing, an evil thing, to insult or oppress. The whole teaching of the Bible is explicitly contrary to that idea. So I quoted the words of the Lord: "If anyone offend these little ones, it would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he were cast into the sea." That is strong language, but there it is. Young Boughton just sat there grinning. That's one thing that has always been strange about him. He treats words as if they were actions. He doesn't listen to the meaning of words, 130

  the way other people do. He just decides whether they are hostile,

  and how hostile they are. He decides whether they threaten him or injure him, and he reacts at that level. If he reads chastisement into anything you say, it's as if you had taken a shot at him. As if you had nicked his ear.

  Now, as I have said, I did not expect him to be at that service. Furthermore, there are plenty of people whose behavior toward their children falls far short of what it should be, so, even when I departed from my text, and even though I will

  concede that my extemporaneous remarks might have been influenced by his sitting there with that look on his face, right

  beside my wife and child, still it was considerable egotism on his part to take my words as directed at him only, as he clearly did.

  Your mother looked anxious. That might have been because

  I seemed to her to be talking about my own situation, and hers and yours, or it might have been because I did struggle a little to organize my thoughts, or it might have been because my emotions ran higher than they normally do. And if I looked at all the way I felt, even half as weary, there'd be grounds for concern in that, too.