I hereby declare Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead mandatory reading for all pomocons or those who are considering converting (although Robinson herself does not appear at this time to have faced the inconvenient fact that she is one of us). This book is first of all the fictional Reverend John Ames’ singularly beautiful celebration of the holiness of ordinary life. The respectable Iowa minister sees the incarnation of eternity, its penetration into time, its distillation and crystallization in the most delicate details of each particular existence, with truly unforgettable clarity and inexhaustible gratitude.
Somehow this love of the world is not undermined but intensified by faith in a God who (as a good Calvinist holds) radically transcends the world. This intensification is presented with mysterious and unforgettable power in an early scene in which young Ames and his father pray at the grave of his grandfather. The boy opens his eyes to behold an exquisite play of light between setting sun and rising moon, “palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them,” each shimmering disc resting just on the horizon, their communion defining a west-east axis. To interrupt a prayer for this vision would not be an interruption. In a supremely lovely gesture, the boy gets his praying father’s attention by kissing his hand. As the flow of time was suspended while the luminous orbs “seemed to float on the horizon,” the three generations appear in a sacred light neither quite solar nor lunar, just grave, father, and son – an infinitely particular past, present, and future – positioned precisely at the heart of Being. “And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t give much thought to the nature of the horizon.” (14-15)
The political themes of Gilead may not at first appear essential. But on reflection it seems to me that this exquisite novel raises deep political-theological questions. Calvin’s anti-dualistic legacy taught generations to savor the holiness of the ordinary. But once this sensibility was severed from the transformative social and therefore political vision that linked the Puritans to the abolitionists, or once this vision was usurped by a frankly secular progressivism, then there was no one left bravely to take political, philosophical, or theological responsibility for a world or for a regime in which the ordinary could come to light as extraordinary.
Whether the transcendence of the ordinary can be sustained without the help of brave people in a brave country in sustaining a cosmos where the noonday sun defines a vertical dimension of high and low is the question Robinson has raised for me. We still have not given enough “thought to the nature of the horizon.”
This much to prepare for upcoming remarks on (or questions concerning) Robinson’s latest, Home .
