A novel of Christian experience: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

Back in March I explained how reading Justin Ariel Bailey’s Reimagining apologetics1 had sent me off on a reading spree. Bailey’s proposal was that reading a literary novel that came from inside Christian experience could be a form of apologetics that by-passed the intellect and reached readers’ aesthetic sense. As his examples, he took George MacDonald, a late 19th-century movelist (I wrote about Thomas Wingfold, curate here), and Marilynne Robinson’s prize-winning novel Gilead, published in 2004. Thomas Wingfold is about searching for and finding God. Gilead, on the other hand, is the thoughts of an old man who has long related to God. For Robinson religious experience is an intrinsic part of human existence that cannot be ignored. Through John Ames she expresses the view that the religious experience of a group of worshippers exceeds the religious reflections of our best theologians:

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.

Gilead is in the form of a memoir written over an unspecified number of weeks by John Ames, pastor of a small church in a small town in southern Iowa. Ames is in his seventies, has a bad heart and doesn’t expect to live much longer. His second wife is a generation younger than him and they have a young son to whom Ames’ memoir is directed in the hope that the little boy will read it when he is an adult. He tells his young son, “It is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer.”

The memoir ranges over various topics, in no apparent order, as they come to Ames’ mind. He talks about his family as he sees them from his study window, reminisces about his life, reflects on what he has learned through the years. There is an order of sorts, however. Early on there is the story of how Ames’ father had taken him on foot to Kansas in search of Ames’ grandfather’s grave. Ames’ father and grandfather had been pastors of the church before him. In the course of their wandering, the young Ames learns a good deal from his father about how strange his grandfather was, and how he would raid his family’s possessions to give to the needy. The strangeness culminated in his vanishing to Kansas. Ames himself had inherited the church when his brother had invited his parents to spend some time with him in Florida, a trip from which they only briefly returned. Ames had trained for the ministry, but the reader is left with the unstated impression that Ames has simply accepted his situation rather than having any specific call to it.

The cast of Ames’ memoir is largely restricted to his father and grandfather, his wife and small son, his lifelong friend the Presbyterian pastor ‘Old’ Boughton, and Boughton’s son, ‘young Boughton’. Ames’ first wife had died giving birth to a daughter who did not survive either, and Ames had had many years of lonely singleness before his second wife came on the scene. The reader is perhaps drawn to infer that these are years in which he thought deeply about experience. Early in this period, Boughton had invited Ames to baptise his son. Immediately before the baptism, Boughton announces that his son is to be named John Ames Boughton. The implication is that he will, in some way, be the child that the widowed Ames had missed out on. Thinking back to the baptism at one point, Ames writes,

John Ames Boughton is my son. If there is any truth at all in anything I believe, that is true also. By “my son” I mean another self, a more cherished self. That language isn’t sufficient, but for the moment it is the best I can do.

Sadly, we learn bit by bit that young Boughton had had a child by the daughter of a very poor family and had left town under a cloud. Ames had felt an obligation towards that family, but his attentions and those of the Boughton family had not been well received, and the child died when she was three. In the latter part of the novel, young Boughton returns to the Boughton home.

A notable feature of Ames’ commentary on people he knows is the lack of acrimony or negativity. The one exception to this, late in the memoir, is Ames’ unease in relating to young Boughton, who gets on well with Ames’ wife and child. This affects young Boughton’s conversations with Ames. Young Boughton wants to talk about the fact that ever since childhood he has been unable to participate in his family’s faith, and Ames is unable to respond helpfully, something he afterwards regrets. Gradually we realise that Ames wonders if, after his impending death, young Boughton will marry his wife. But in a final meeting, young Boughton confesses that he is married to an African American girl and that they have a son. However, young Boughton has been unable to gain the acceptance of his wife’s family (her father is also a pastor) or to support his wife and son long term, who have returned to her family in Memphis, leaving young Boughton distraught. Finally, Ames accompanies young Boughton to the bus stop as he departs from the town, and they part amicably. Young Boughton is running away from a family gathering in which, tragically, he feels he has no place—and apparently still with no faith.

Robinson’s writing is simple but beautiful. Often there are slight hints of things that later turn out to be true (and some things, perhaps, that never quite emerge).

In the earlier part of Ames’ memoir there is little that is explicitly theological—or is it framed in such untheological language that I missed it? Ames’ comment cited above gives us a clue to Robinson’s strategy: “. . . language isn’t sufficient, but for the moment it is the best I can do.” Ames returns to this thought in his parting conversation with young Boughton:

There were two further points I felt I should have made in our earlier conversations, one of them being that doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief, and the other being that the Greek word sozo, which is usually translated “saved,” can also mean healed, restored, that sort of thing. So the conventional translation narrows the meaning of the word in a way that can create false expectations. I thought he should be aware that grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways.

At times Robinson has Ames express thoughts that could be put in the language of orthodox theology, but aren’t, as when he expresses a calvinist belief in divide providence:

And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer. I know this, I have seen the truth of it with my own eyes, though I have not myself always managed to live by it, the Good Lord knows. I truly doubt I would know how to live by it for even a day, or an hour. That is a remarkable thing to consider.

On another occasion he hopes that his son will share his Christian faith:

If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift. I am not speaking here of the ministry as such, as I have said

In this passage we also see Ames correcting his own theology, as he recognises that faith comes from God, not from one’s parent. Occasionally he theologises his own experience, but recognises that he has no obvious biblical basis for this thought:

Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform. Now, I may be wrong here. No such distinction occurs in Scripture. And repentance and reformation are matters of the soul which only the Lord can judge. But, in my experience, dishonor is recalcitrant.

More than one thing seems to be going on here. Ames’ theology is well integrated into his wandering thoughts. But at the same time Robinson apparently wants to say not only than everyday language has difficulty encompassing Christian belief but that this belief itself only ‘sees through a glass darkly’ (cf 1 Corinthians 13:12) and cannot encompass the reality to which it reaches out.

you can assert the existence of something—Being—having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether—if 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.

And again:

… I knew perfectly well …, as I had for years and years, that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him, which makes loyalty to Him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him.

Our inability to encompass divine reality also informs Ames’ view of Christian apologetics:

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.

For Ames faith is authenticated by experiencing it, but this experience is itself limited by our humanity:

it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer. But people of any degree of religious sensitivity are always vulnerable to the accusation that their consciousness or their understanding does not attain to the highest standards of the faith, because that is always true of everyone.

Reflecting on a conversation with Old Boughton, Ames’ language beautifully captures the difficulty of reaching even each other’s thought life:

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

However, I don’t want to imply that Ames’ theology is unorthodox or gnostic. It isn’t. At other times he expresses orthodox calvinist theology in quite orthodox language (cf Romans 3:24, Matthew 7:1):

Let me say first of all that the grace of God is sufficient to any transgression, and that to judge is wrong, the origin and essence of much error and cruelty.

Or:

And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

Reading through an old sermon of his own on forgiveness, Ames writes of the parable of the Prodigal Son as a description of divine grace (cf Matthew 6:12, Luke 15:3–21),

And it makes the point that, in Scripture, the one sufficient reason for the forgiveness of debt is simply the existence of debt. And it goes on to compare this to divine grace, and to the Prodigal Son and his restoration to his place in his father’s house, though he neither asks to be restored as son nor even repents of the grief he has caused his father.

And on what I take to be original sin:

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.

But even when their language is orthodox, Ames’ theologising thoughts are never a mere repetition of Scripture. They almost always have an evident relationship to living, and Ames does not shrink from the fact that his life includes personal failure:

And the fact is, it is seldom indeed that any wrong one suffers is not thoroughly foreshadowed by wrongs one has done. That said, it has never been clear to me how much this realization helps when it comes to the practical difficulty of controlling anger. Nor have I found any way to apply it to present circumstance, though I have not yet abandoned the effort.

Ames also has a remarkable facility for seeing the divine in various dimensions of human life. About love he writes:

I might seem to be comparing something great and holy with a minor and ordinary thing, that is, love of God with mortal love. But I just don’t see them as separate things at all. If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible pleasure we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love. I devoutly believe this to be true. I remember in those days loving God for the existence of love and being grateful to God for the existence of gratitude, right down in the depths of my misery.

On the final page of Gilead Ames talks about the environment in which he has spent his life:

l love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing.

The town that is his home reminds him of Christ, and from here his thought wanders to his impending death and to the ‘great incandescence’, a term we are left to contemplate and interpret for ourselves:

To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is, as little regarded. I can’t help imagining that you will leave sooner or later, and it’s fine if you have done that, or you mean to do it. This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope. I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love—I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence.

  1. Justin Ariel Bailey, Reimagining apologetics: The beauty of faith in a secular age. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020.
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