I’ve been meaning to tell you what I thought of Gilead all week, and am finally in a space to do so.

                                                                                                                

I really loved it.  Especially the first half.  I loved the honesty of the narrator, and the humility.  The way he told you what his weaknesses are, and the things that fill him up.  The way, like any of us, he couldn’t tame his jealousies or resentments like he wanted—or his tongue, even when he knew the ones he burned with it did not deserve the burning.  The book is a rambling letter he writes at the end of his life to his young son.

                                                                                                                

I also love the ways he deals with religion.  The narrator is a minister, and comes from a line of ministers, but even in all of that history, all of the holy wars within his family and between denominations and even races that he talks about, his take on his vocation is fresh, is earnest.  It makes it sound like an honor to be in his position.  He’s one of those people who’s read all sorts of things, all sorts of angles on God and faith, theism, atheism, and holds it all loosely together somehow.  He’s read enough for his convictions to be gentle, lived enough for his faith to be strong.  I’m not religious, but I could totally appreciate his views.  I was endeared to them.

                                                                                                                

One passage I particularly liked was this one.  He’s just written how he and a childhood friend baptized a litter of kittens.

I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand.  Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing.  It stays in the mind.  For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them.  It still seems to me to be a real question.  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.  I don’t wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out.  Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing.  You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position.  It’s a thing people expect of you.  I don’t know why there is so little about this aspect of the calling in the literature. (23)

A little later he’s still reflecting on blessing, and writes this beautiful scene:

That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church.  There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me.  The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet.  On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t.  It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth.  I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.  I wish I had paid more attention to it.  My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really.  This is an interesting planet.  It deserves all the attention you can give it. (28-29)

Amen, dear sir.

                                                                                                                

A book I well recommend.

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