Gilead

“There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.”

To John, the act of conferring baptism is a great privilege. Baptism enables him to sense the divine spark within the mortal being.

“I do try to write the way I think.” 

Describing his style of writing to his son, John explains that he doesn’t write the way the talks or the way he writes for the pulpit. Instead, his style is nonlinear, episodic, and associative, like thought.

“Mary Magdalene probably made an occasional casserole, whatever the ancient equivalent may have been. A mess of pottage, I suppose.”

Comparing his wife to Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’s most loyal followers and possibly a repentant sinner, John touches on Lila’s mysteriously sorrowful past and gently makes fun of her unprepared but unflinching willingness to take on the duties of a preacher’s wife.

“In a spirit of Christian forgiveness very becoming to men of the cloth, and to father and son, they had buried their differences. It must be said, however, that they buried them not very deeply, and perhaps more as one would bank a fire than smother it.” 

John points out that his father and grandfather adopt the appearance of forgiveness rather than truly forgiving each other. The fire of their differences and disappointments in each other flares forth and ultimately drives them apart, each unforgiven.

“There’s a shimmer in a child’s hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny, soft beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes. They’re in the petals of flowers, and they’re on a child’s skin.” 

Looking at his beloved son, John appreciates the miraculous beauty of the physical world which reflects the radiance within each person.

“I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens it eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.” 

John delights in the beauty and joys of this world. He constantly stops to marvel and consider the everyday miracles of life: a simple line of oak trees, birds on a power line, the full moon outside his window, the happiness of his son playing in the sprinkler.

“I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that.” 

John often considers the nature of heaven. He has faith that it will be marvelous but hopes it will still resemble this world, which he loves so much. Life is even more precious because it is fleeting.

“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.” 

Memory is changeable; time and experience all color the power and significance of John’s memories. Memories of the day he first sees Lila and of the time he helps his father with the burned down church become more meaningful over time than in the moment they happened.

“Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.” 

John and Boughton feel an obligation to the infants they baptize because they sense the incarnation of the Lord within them. The same goes for each individual person: every soul is separate, yet each is sacred.

“I’ve often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.” 

As much as John loves observing the vicissitudes of natural light, he has many beautiful and bittersweet memories about long nights spent alone, reading, walking, and praying. He loves all aspects of life.

“Sometimes when I came home from school my mother would meet me at the back porch and whisper, ‘The Lord is in the parlor.’'

John’s mother was respectful to John’s grandfather but often found him difficult to deal with. Her comment here drolly refers to the grandfather in the midst of one of his visions, having a one-sided conversation with the Lord. John remembers that his mother always loved making him laugh.

“Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliation of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.” 

Time passes, and material treasures decay. This pains John because he, too, is passing from the physical world. He wishes to share as much as he can of himself and his few treasured possessions with his son and future generations, though they may not value these things the same way John does.

“I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.” 

John has endured many sorrows: the loss of his first wife and his baby daughter; decades of loneliness; estrangement from his father; drought, war, and financial depression. Yet he recognizes how defining and formative his pain has been, how deeply ingrained his sorrows are in his life. John loves his life, woes and all, and wants to remember his humanity in whatever existence comes next.

“Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life’s problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You’d have thought I’d died. We saved it for lunch.”

John wryly describes his congregation’s response to his health scare, but the extravagant amounts of food—with one dish even potentially crossing over to a differing branch of Christianity—reveal how truly beloved John is.

“If you can’t change, there don’t seem much purpose in it.”

In one of the rare times Lila speaks, she asks about salvation and its relationship to predestination. Boughton and John can’t give her or Jack a definitive answer, but Lila tells Jack that everything can change, suggesting that she herself has changed and that Jack can find grace.

“I wish I could give you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am.” 

John fears losing himself and the things he loves, including his memories. By writing to his son, John is in fact giving him the images in his mind.

“Well, but I shaved carefully and put on a white shirt and buffed my shoes a little and so on. I think such preparations can be the difference between an elderly gentleman and a codger.”

John shows a little of his self-deprecating humor and his pride as he cleans up to meet and talk with Jack. He hopes this will give him a little psychological boost—which he loses by falling asleep in the pew as he waits.

“When I was small I thought the Lord was someone who lived in the attic and paid for the groceries.” 

Jack describes his youthful—and only—religious conviction. Despite Boughton’s faith and vocation as a minster, Jack grew up without belief or faith. He doesn’t understand why and asks John if he can find grace.

“That eye of his always seemed to me to be full of expectation and disappointment, both at once.” 

The grandfather’s remaining eye embodies his life: wild, drastic, and full of thwarted hopes.

“I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.” 

John feels that Jack unfairly tries to put him in a defensive position in their talks about religion. John tells his son it is fine to use your mind and question but to be aware that God is outside any possible human conceptualization and cannot be pinned down with proofs.

“They loved each other’s company when they weren’t at each other’s throats, which meant when they were silent, as they were that day.”

When John’s father and grandfather speak, they argue because their differences in religious interpretation are so great. They communicate best by not communicating.

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.” 

John believes that no one can ever know another person completely; we can find resemblances and similarities and customs, but everyone is separate and unknowable, except to the spirit within each person.

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” 

John thinks Boughton would see their shared blessing of Jack as a reason for living, but John knows that life itself is a gift for everyone, that everyone lives and interprets differently, and that no single interpretation is greater or lesser than any other.