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Reflection for June 26, 2005

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Revelation

It's 1953. A 73 year old minister named John Ames is addressing a memoir to his 7 year old son. He recalls incidents in his own grandfather and father's lives, both of whom were also ministers back in the 19th century. The grandfather was a rabid abolitionist who moved to Kansas to support old John Brown as a righteous avenger of slavery. John's father, having seen the outcome of the Civil War in terms of the widows, orphans and mutilated veterans who began to fill the pews of the grandfather's church, grew up and preached as a pacifist. Beyond such memories John Ames also records domestic strife reflective of the theological controversies that plague humanity - as when John's older brother Edward returns as an atheist from his education in Germany. Asked to offer grace before dinner, Edward says, "I am afraid I could not do that in good conscience, sir." To which the father replies, "You know the customs of your family . . . show some respect for them." Edward replies, "When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things." Ames recalls how his father left the table, his mother wept and Edward passed John the potatoes.

But it's not only a world of conflict that John Ames would bequeath to his son. There are other memories that reveal the beauty of this universe in the simplest ways, as when his father and he walked all the way to Kansas from Gilead, Iowa to find the grandfather's grave all grown over with weeds and how they tidied up all the graves in the abandoned plot, scattering cornflower, sunflower and sweet pea seeds - and how John's father asked his grandfather's pardon, lingering over the grave until the full moon came up over the prairie's eastern horizon just as the sun was setting in the west. And John's father said, "I would never have thought this place could be so beautiful. I'm glad to know that." Or there was that day when during his sermon the young woman whom he would marry in old age walked in, possessed of "a seriousness almost like anger" as if to say, "I come here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness - so now say something with a little meaning in it." And suddenly "his sermon felt like ashes on his tongue".

And there were moments when the simple element of water seemed mystical as when one day: "There was a young couple . . . half a block in front of him and the sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain . . . And out of sheer exuberance the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch and a shower of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them - and they laughed, . . . the girl sweeping water off her hair and dress as if she were a little bit disgusted but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something out of a myth." And he comments, "I don't know why I thought of that . . . except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing and only secondarily for growing vegetables and doing the wash."

And then there are places where John Ames shares his impression of the very 7 year old son to whom his memoir is addressed, remarking: "I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, . . . you have been God's grace to me, . . . more than a miracle . . . If only I had the words to tell you. You're a nice looking boy, well scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined." What's going on in this bestseller entitled Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, as well as in all great literature and the Bible itself? Revelation is taking place, like what happens in a theatre when the curtain is drawn and you see the world with the eyes of a poet - a world of often mindless strife but one also permeated with an indestructible moral and natural beauty that reveals our lives and universe to be meaningful after all.

-- Geoff Wood