The balm in Gilead

I’ll stop in from the break to post this one thing, which I have just realized I should have posted on Christmas Eve. A few days before Christmas I finished Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, and found it the most incandescent book, to steal a word from the last page.

One of the things that is extraordinary about the book is what Marilynne Robinson actually gets away with. If ever a work of fiction titled towards ‘preaching’ this one does, but it does so with such immense gentleness and grace that the whole world of literature responds (it won a Pulitzer). There is a sympathy that stirs in this book which is enticingly beautiful. And the last dozen or so pages are amongst the most exquisite dozen or so pages I have read. I read them again and again, as the tears streamed off my face. Here is a portion (which I don’t think gives away any of the story, if you want to read it yourself):

‘How could he possibly leave now!’ she says. That’s a fair question, I suppose, but I think I know the answer to it. The house will fill up with those estimable people and their husbands and wives and their pretty children. How could he [the wayward son] be there in the midst of it all with that sad and splendid treasure in his heart? ...

I can tell you this, that if I’d married some rosy dame and she had given me ten children and they had each given me ten grandchildren, I’d leave them all, on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face, your mother’s face. And if I never found you, my comfort would be in that hope, my lonely and singular hope, which could not exist in the whole of Creation except in my heart and in the heart of the Lord. That is just a way of saying I could never thank God sufficiently for the splendor He has hidden from the world – your mother excepted, of course – and revealed to me in your sweetly ordinary face. Those kind Boughton brothers and sisters would be ashamed of the wealth of their lives beside the seeming poverty of Jack’s life, and he would utterly and bitterly prefer what he had lost to everything they had. That is not a tolerable state of mind to be in, as I am well aware.

And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant. That is a thing I would love to see.

As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father’s house – even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence? ...

... Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.