Gilead (2005 Pulitzer Prize)

by Marilynne Robinson

  "Oh yes, but that was many years ago, when I was a boy. And it was only a small fire. There was very little damage." "So they're all gone now."

  "Yes, they are. It's a pity. We have several new Lithuanian families. Of course they're Lutheran."

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  He laughed. He said, "It is a pity that they're gone." And he seemed to ponder it for a while.

  Then he said, "You admire Karl Barth." And I believe it

  was here he began to speak out of that anger of his, that sly, weary anger I have never been able to deal with. He was always smart as the devil, and serious as the devil, too. I should

  have known he'd have read Karl Barth.

  I said, "Yes, I do admire him. Very much."

  "But he seems to have very little respect for American religion. Don't you agree? He is quite candid about it."

  "He has been very critical of European religion also," I

  said, which is true. And yet even at the time I recognized that my reply was somewhat evasive. So did young Boughton, as I could tell by his expression, which was not exactly a smile. He said, "He takes it seriously, though. He thinks it's worth quarreling with."

  "Granted." That is certainly true, too.

  Then he asked, "Do you ever wonder why American Christianity always seems to wait for the real thinking to be done elsewhere?"

  "Not really," I said, which surprised me, since I have wondered about that very thing any number of times.

  Now, at that point I did feel that Jack Boughton was, so to

  speak, winning the conversation, and furthermore, that he was no happier about it than I was, maybe even a little disgusted. Certainly I found myself in a false position yet again. I felt like pleading old age. But I was sitting there in my church, with the sweet and irrefragable daylight pouring in through the windows. And I felt, as I have often felt, that my failing the truth could have no bearing at all on the Truth itself, which could never conceivably be in any sense dependent on me or on anyone. And my heart rose up within me—that's exactly what it felt like—-and I said, "I have heard any number of fine ser172

  mons in my life, and I have known any number of deep souls. I am well aware that people find fault, but it seems to me to be presumptuous to judge the authenticity of anyone's religion, except one's own. And that is also presumptuous."

  And I said, "When this old sanctuary is full of silence and

  prayer, every book Karl Barth ever will write would not be a feather in the scales against it from the point of view of profundity, and I would not believe in Barth's own authenticity if

  I did not also believe he would know and recognize the truth of that, and honor it, too."

  I was tired and I was feeling more beleaguered than a man my age should feel, and that is the only way I can explain the tears. I was almost as surprised as young Boughton.

  He said, "I can't tell you how sorry I am," and he said it convincingly.

  There I was, wiping tears off my face with my sleeve, just the way you do it. It was embarrassing, believe me. He said something that sounded like "Forgive me," and he went away. Now what? My present thought is that I will write him a letter. I have no idea what it will say.

  There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs, and I want you to know that. Because that is the truth, even if no one remembers it. To look at the place, it's just a cluster of

  houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water

  tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station, which is pretty well gone to weeds now. But what must Galilee have looked like? You can't tell so much from the appearance of a place.

  Those saints got old and the times changed and they just 173

  seemed like eccentrics and nuisances, and no one wanted to listen to their fearsome old sermons or hear their wild old stories.

  I say it to my shame—it got so I didn't really like to be with

  my grandfather, and that's the truth. It wasn't just the shabbiness, and it wasn't just that whenever some useful object

  turned up missing, the owner happened by our house to mention the fact. That eye of his always seemed to me to be full of expectation and disappointment, both at once, and I began to dread the moments when it would fall on me. The old men called people who failed to embrace the great cause "doughfaces." There is a lot of contempt in that phrase. They were

  harsh in their judgments. With reason, I believe.

  I particularly remember one time when my grandfather

  was asked to say a few words at the Fourth of July celebration. I remember because it caused us all anxiety in anticipation, and then embarrassment enough to justify some part of our worrying. The idea was that since he was a sort of founder of the place in a general sense and a veteran, it would be a fitting thing to have him speak. The mayor at that time had lived in

  Gilead only about twenty years, and he was Swedish and a Lutheran, so he may not have heard the stories about the old times. And my grandfather rarely stole except from his family. The exceptions were pretty well limited to our own congregation and, very rarely, the most openhanded Presbyterians and Methodists, all of whom were good about keeping the matter quiet out of respect for his age and for the purity of his intent. My mother said you could tell where a Congregationalist lived by the padlock on the shed door, and there was an element of truth in that. In any case, the mayor most likely had no notion of the degree of the old man's eccentricity when he sent the invitation.

  My grandfather had a gleam in his eye from the moment

  he read that letter. My parents were trying to make the best of 174

  it all. My mother searched the house for his army uniform, but of course nothing was left of it but the hat, which had survived,

  I suppose, because it was fairly useless. "The gristle, the

  hooves, and the snout," my mother would say, that being what remained of anything that in any wise came into his hands.

  My mother found the cap in a closet and did what she could to shape it up a little. But the old man said, "I'm preaching," and put it back in the closet again. I have the sermon, the ipsissima verba, because it was among the things my father buried and unburied that day in the garden. It is very brief, so I'll copy it here as he wrote it. My father encouraged him to write it out,

  I remember, probably to discourage rambling, and most likely

  in the hope that he or my mother might get a look at it and discuss it a little with my grandfather if need be. But he kept it very close, dropping his drafts into the kitchen stove and keeping the text on his unapproachable Nazirite person.

  Here is what he wrote and what he said: Children

  When I was a young man the Lord came to me and

  put His hand just here on my right shoulder. I can feel it still. And He spoke to me, very clearly. The words went right through me. He said, Free the captive. Preach good news to the poor. Proclaim liberty throughout the land. That is all Scripture, of course, and the words were already very familiar to me at the time. But it is clear enough why He would feel they needed special emphasis. No one lives by them, unless the Lord takes him in hand. Certainly I did not, until the day He stood beside me and spoke those words to me.

  I would call that experience a vision. We had visions in those days, a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams. And 175

  now all those young men are old men, if they're alive at all, and their visions are no more than dreams, and the old days are forgotten. We fly forgotten as a dream, as it says in the old hymn, and our dreams are forgotten long before we are.

  The President, General Grant, once called Iowa the shining star of radicalism. But what is left here in Iowa? What is left here in Gilead? Dust. Dust and ashes. Scripture says the people perish, and they certainly do. It is remarkable. For all this His anger is not turned away,

 
; but His Hand is stretched out still. The Lord bless you and keep you, etc.

  Only a few people seemed to have been paying attention. Those who did came very near taking offense at the notion

  that they were perishing even though the terrible drought had begun to set in that would bankrupt and scatter so many families, even whole towns. There was a little laughter of the kind

  you hear when the outlandishness of a thing is being generally agreed on. But that was the worst of it. My grandfather stood there on the stage in his buzzard-black preacher's clothes, eyeing the crowd with the dispassionate intensity of death itself,

  with the banners flying around him. Then the band struck up, and my father went to him and put his hand on his left shoulder, and brought him down to us. My mother said, "Thank

  you, Reverend," and my grandfather shook his head and said, "I doubt it did much good."

  I have thought about that very often—how the times change,

  and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next. You might think I am under some sort of obli

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  gation to try to "save" young Boughton, that by inquiring into these things he is putting me under that obligation. Well, I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it. It is even destructive. Young people from my own flock have come home with a copy of La Nausee or L'Immoraliste, flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief, when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible. And they are attracted to it by the very books that tell them what a misery it is. And they want me to defend religion, and they want

  me to give them "proofs." I just won't do it. It only confirms them in their skepticism. Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

  From the time my father began receiving those long letters from Germany, he began watching me more, or otherwise, than he ever had before. For the first time in my life we were not quite at ease with each other, my father and I. I had to be careful what I said to him, because he would note any possible tinge of heterodoxy and lecture me solemnly on the nature of the error my thinking might have brought me to. Even days later he would come to me with new refutations of. things I had not said. No doubt he was speaking to Edward; certainly

  he was speaking to me as, so it must have seemed, the next Edward. Then, too, he was clearly rehearsing for his own sake the

  defenses he could make of his beliefs. They had never till that moment struck me as vulnerable, nor him, I suspect.

  Then, when he began reading those books I brought home,

  it was almost as if he wanted to be persuaded by them, and as

  if any criticism I made of them was nothing more than recalcitrance. He used phrases like "forward-looking." You'd have

  thought a bad argument could be put beyond question by its supposed novelty, for heaven's sake. And a lot of the newness of this new thinking was as old as Lucretius, which he knew as 177

  well as I did. In that letter he sent me which I burned he spoke

  of "the courage required to embrace the truth." I never forgot those words because of the way they irritated me. He just assumed that his side of the question was "the truth" and only

  cowardice could be preventing me from admitting as much. All that time, though, I think he was just finding his way to Edward, and I can't really blame him for it. He did try to take me along with him.

  In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle

  it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding "existence," which merely restates the fact that they have a

  place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would

  have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to have any meaning, however.

  I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert

  the existence of something;—Being—having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogetherif God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean

  to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. That is

  clearly a source of confusion. Another term would be needed to describe a state or quality of which we can have no experi178

  ence whatever, to which existence as we know it can bear only

  the slightest likeness or affinity. So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It

  seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.

  So my advice is this—don't look for proofs. Don't bother

  with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they're always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them. That is very unsettling over the long term. "Let your works so shine before men," etc. It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

  No sleep this night. My heart is greatly disquieted. It is a strange thing to feel illness and grief in the same organ. There is no telling one from the other. My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. That old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it from myself—that same good weight worries me these days.

  But the fact is, I have never found another way to be as

  honest with myself as I can be by consulting with these miseries of mine, these accusers and rebukers, God bless them all.

  So long as they do not kill me outright. I do hope to die with a quiet heart. I know that may not be realistic.

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  Well, I close my eyes and I see Jack Boughton, and it seems

  to me that more than he has matured or aged he has wearied. And I think, Why must I always defend myself against this sad old youth? What is the harm I fear from him?

  Well, that really is not a purely rhetorical question. This morning your mother gave me a note from him. It said, "I am very sorry that I offended you yesterday. I will not trouble you again." He writes a good hand. In any case, I felt from her manner that your mother knew what lay behind the note. It

  was just a folded slip of paper, but she would never have read it if he had not shown it to her. Perhaps he told her what it said. Or simply that it was an apology. I heard them talking on the

  porch before she brought it in to me. She looked sorry and concernedfor me, for him perhaps, or for both of us. They do

  talk, I know that. Not much and not often. But I sense a kind of understanding between them.

  "Understanding" might be the wrong word, since I have never spoken to her about him, and it is precisely the fact of

  her knowing so little about him that worries me. Or "understanding" might be exactly the right word, no matter what she

  knows or does not know. I can't decide which thought worries me more. Maybe neither one could worry me more.

  I sent him a note. It s
aid I was the one who should apologize, that my health has not been perfect lately, and so on, that

  I hoped we might have a chance to speak again soon. And your mother carried the note back to him.

  I was thinking about the time when he was just ten or twelve and he filled my mailbox with wood shavings and set them on fire. He rigged up a sort of fuse of twine dipped in paraffin. At that time the mailbox was on a post by the gate. It

  was that loaf-shaped kind people use in the country. I was 180

  walking home from a meeting at the church in the dark of

  a winter evening. I heard a poof and looked up, and just then flames came pouring out of the mouth of that box. It gave me quite a turn. But I didn't doubt for a minute whose prank

  it was.

  That boy was always alone, always grinning, always intent on some piece of devilment. He wasn't more than ten when he took off in a Model T he saw idling in the street downtown.

  Cars were still pretty rare around here in those days, so his interest was understandable. He drove it straight west for a number

  of miles, until it ran out of gas, and then he just walked

  home. A couple of young fellows with a team of horses happened upon the car and towed it off to Wilkinsburg and traded

  it for a hunting rifle. I think half the people in the county owned the thing for a day or so over the couple of months it stayed missing. Then a good-sized family who had traded a heifer for it came sailing into Gilead to enjoy the Fourth of

  July and got themselves arrested. The authorities traced it

  back through any number of swaps and IOUs and poker

  games, but never found the original thief. As it turned out, there were so many people involved in minor criminality having to do with buying that car and selling it that the resources

  of the law were in no way sufficient, so the whole thing was forgotten officially and remembered for a long time afterward because it made such a good story. People clearly knew the car was stolen, but they couldn't resist owning it for a little while, even though they didn't have the nerve to keep it—which kept the price very reasonable and the temptation that much greater.