Gilead

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, narrated by a fictional small-town Iowa minister in his twilight, addressing his young son (or rather, addressing the future adult son who will survive him), has been on my must-read list for too long. Now I've finished it, and can report that it lives up to the praise heaped on it (and its author) by Barack Obama and many others. Some of my highlights, conveniently gathered by Kindle:

…Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world. Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. 27

…the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. 29

…I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp. 45

… And there was baseball… 50

…I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches. 62

…I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth. 103

…you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. 108

…I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world! 131

…The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point. It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love. I’ll try to remember to use this. 135

…presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, 141.

—my note: That's the nub of my objection to most religiosity. If our enjoyment doesnt matter, except by divine grace, then we dont truly value OUR lives. But I do. It does.

…his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can’t be true… Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery. 142

…I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that. The Yankees are playing the Red Sox today. This is providential, since it should be a decent game and I don’t care at all who wins. So there should be no excess of emotion involved in my watching it. (We have television now, a gift from the congregation with the specific intent of letting me watch baseball, and I will. But it seems quite two-dimensional beside radio.) 143

There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt there are more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion. I think the second of these is the more insidious, because it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer. 165-6
…
…Grant me on earth what seems Thee best, Till death and Heav’n reveal the rest.—Isaac Watts And John Ames adds his amen. 190

—My note:
I find the notion that we're just not supposed to know or inquire into some things superstitious... and the notion that pushing inquiry in every direction is somehow impious or impudent or hubristic doubly so.

…Morris chair 270

…It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health. 272

…There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. 277

Also...

“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. 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, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”

“That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water...
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead