Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

Gilead is a diary/letter ostensibly from elderly,dying minister, John Ames to his seven year old son. Ames intends that the boy will read it as an adult, long after he's gone. This is the central fiction/hope underlying Ames' writing. As such, it lends it an aura of honesty that is not always or entirely deserved.

Ames' intentions in writing it shift throughout the course of the book. In the beginning, his primary goal is to give the boy his history, or, as Ames terms it,"his begats." Yet, even here early on, Ames' own interests and obsessions dominate the focus of his writing.

In writing of his and the boy's history, Ames devotes a great deal of attention to his sons grandfather, John Ames. The senior John Ames is a prophetic abolitionist, who helps to found Gilead as a respite and sanctuary to those aiding John Brown in Kansas. Grandfather Ames is a stern, uncompromising man who is willing to resort to violence in pursuit of a cause he deems righteous. He is certain of God's will, having a rather personal relationship to Him.

His grandfather's shadow looms large over Ames' history because he looms large over Ames. Comparing his own beliefs and courage, Ames sees himself as vitiated version of his grandfather, an untested and lukewarm man.

His insecurities thus awakened, his history becomes an apologia for his quiet life spent ministering the Christian gospel in Gilead, a dying, small town in Iowa. Speaking of Gilead, Ames' brother warns him as a teen,"you might as well know what your sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater...leaving here is like waking from a trance"(26).

Ames is a Christian philosopher and the book is full of his meditations on grace, forgiveness and providence. While the philosophy can get heavy going, Ames' thoughtful and eloquent prose is seductive. The book is full of provocative thoughts and meditations eloquently stated; Gilead is replete with quote-worthy aphorisms. However, there is a certain patness to his thinking. The reader quickly joins Ames' in his worries that his convictions have never been refined or challenged by a true test.

Still, it is hard not to like Ames, to be charmed by him. He is capable of expressing an infectious, childlike wonder. He gushes with love for the world. By his lights, the world is blessed by, infused with, God; anyone who pays it sufficient attention is bound to share the blessing and achieve a communion with the divine.

Ames' wonder, hope and faith appear remarkable given the tragedy that has marked his life. As a young man, Ames loses his wife as she attempts to give birth to a daughter who dies shortly after. Scarred by the loss, Ames spends a great part of his adult life alone. He fills his his solitary days and nights with prayer, mediation and study. He grows old ministering a withering flock that he loves in a distant fashion.

According to his retrospective self-fashioning, Ames maintains "that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing"(55). His darkness is broken when a young woman, Lila, shows up at his church seeking religion. Despite the age gap, despite his efforts to resist his attraction toward her as unworthy, Lila becomes his wife and the mother of his son. Ames comes to see their coming together as an instance of grace, God's blessing him with love and knowledge of Himself. Ames recounts, "I learned a great deal from the experience....it enlarged my understanding of hope, just to know that such a transformation can occur. And it has greatly sweetened my imagination of death"(203).

Yet, this experience ends up comprising a rather small part of his memoir. Furthermore, given their central place in his story, Ames' beloved son and wife are rather vaguely defined characters, especially when compared to the sketches he offers of himself, his grandfather, his best friend Boughton, and his nemesis, Jack Boughton.

Finally, Ames' writing is ultimately high-jacked when his nemesis Jack Boughton returns to Gilead unexpectedly. Though unsure as to what brings black sheep Jack home, Ames views him as a threat. However warranted, Ames' distrust of Jack offends his own conception of himself as a Christian. Moreover, he's silently aware that there is an obsessive quality to it. With Jack's return, Ames' writing becomes a record of Jack's past and present doings in Gilead, an opportunity for Ames to reflect on their longstanding and tortured relationship. Ames ends up confessing,"I have mainly been worrying to myself, when my intention from the beginning was to speak to you"(202).

Estranged from his family for the past twenty years, Jack, as he's called, returns to Gilead to see his ailing and doting father. Jack has a troubled past and has deeply wounded everyone close to him. However, when he returns, everyone sense a change and is eager to forgive and embrace him, with the exception of Ames who seems to bear some particular grudge against him. Out of Christian pride, Ames is eager to hide his antipathy and distrust, although it is clear to those around him. Similarly, Ames holds back from writing to his son about Jack's misdeed and why he distrust him but ultimately does. He holds out for a while: it is only on page 155 that Ames finally "bear[s] witness against him"(155).

Jack's past misdeeds are numerous. His chief offense occurred in college when he fathered a child with a "very young girl" living on the wrong side of the tracks in Gilead. The event profoundly shames his father. Jack compounds the sin by refusing to acknowledge or care for the child. Despite the efforts of the other Boughtons to provide help, the baby girl is neglected by its teen mother and eventually dies as a result. Jack's behavior especially rankles Ames, still mourning and questioning the senseless death of his beloved child many years before.

Yet, even before this incident, Ames had a problem with Jack. Jack is not an easy child to like. As a youth, he engages in all sorts of malicious behavior, vandalism and theft for no apparent reason other than to irritate and shame those around him. Ames suspects Jack of deliberately testing his and others' capacity for Christian forgiveness and love. Ames is convinced that Jack is a shrewd psychologist. According to Ames, Jack has the ability to see through people, to locate and expose others' foibles and failings so as to explain away his own.

However, Ames' aversion to the boy in part originates in his own failings and weaknesses. Jack was christened John Ames Boughton, as a tribute and gift to Ames from his best-friend and fellow minister,Robert Boughton. However, Ames has never been able to accept this gift, instead seeing it as an affront, a suggestion that somehow the blessings of his life are lesser than those given Boughton. As Ames frames it, Jack was "the beloved child of my oldest and dearest friend, who gave him to me, so to speak, to compensate for my own childlessness"(155). Secretly, Ames has long resented Boughton and his large and prospering family. Ames is obviously bothered and affronted when he compares Boughton's with his own situation. Boughton's "gift" surprises and opens an old wound.

Prone to introspection and doubt, Ames fears that his long harbored dislike and suspicion of the boy is driven by his own failings. Worse, he worries that his petty aversion has played a role in Jack's failed life. Going all the way to the moment of his christening, Ames wonders if "the child felt how coldly I went about his christening, how far my thoughts were from blessing him"(188). Although quick to disavow this as magical thinking, he does confess "I have never been able to warm to him, never"(188). By Ames' convictions, this constitutes a sin, an abrogation of his Christian duty.

Ames is writing for the future. His account has a guarded quality to it. Yet, Ames' ego prevents him from realizing how in cowardly and indirect ways, his foibles and secrets come out. He may not be an entirely open book, but a good number of his pages are legible. As he rather humorously describes an earlier attempt at self-assessment, "I simply could not be honest with myself, and I couldn't deceive myself, either"(203).

Ames is well named: he is full of good thoughts and intentions. He aspires to live a good life. However, his notions of it have grown limited, possibly circumscribed to a smallness thanks to the reclusive and quiet life he's lived. He's grown a little too comfortable and self-involved after all these years in Gilead. This shows in his mention of his elderly parishioner Lacey Thrush, who "died promptly and decorously, out of consideration for me, I suspect, since she's been concerned about my health"(57). The dying Ames claims that in her passing Thrush gave him "a lot to live up to, so to speak. At any rate, she didn't keep me awake past my bedtime, and the peacefulness if her sleep contributed mightily to the peacefulness of mine. These old saints bless us every chance they get"(57).

For Ames, a life should be a blessing. Blessings connect us to and reveal the divine. Ames writes, "There is a reality in blessing...it doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that." To bless another is to become a vehicle of the divine. When done properly, Ames claims "the sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time"(23). To bless another is to raise them up by imparting to them a sense of their divinity. Perhaps jokingly, Ames even goes so far as to suggest he may have conferred such a benefit on a batch of kittens he blessed as a boy imitating his father who was a minister.

Ames is a tragic case. The bulk of his life has been holy. One gathers that he has truly blessed the folks around him. He has a saintly aspect. As he's leaving town, Jack himself, in partial reference to Ames and his father, remarks "You're all saints"(242). Yet, at some level, it is hard to say if Ames manages to overcome the last remnant of hatred in his heart: his hatred of Jack. Before Jack leaves, Ames blesses him. He tells him he's a good man. Yet, he only does so once he realizes that Jack is no longer a threat to him. He does so after it becomes apparent that doing so will incur no real cost or sacrifice.

One gathers that the time to bless and reach out to Jack was long ago and Ames squandered the opportunity. A sheep went missing and he left it at that. In a reverse of the bible parable, the shepherd Ames may have given his days wandering after and tending religiously to ninety-nine sheep. Out of selfish bitterness and envy, he neglected the one he needed to pay special attention to. He knows this and he can't make it right. A sad story.