Gilead

by

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead: Pages 140-149 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
John has had a more leisurely morning today, and in the course of reshelving his books, it occurred to him to wonder what he’d say to himself if he came to himself for counsel. He decides to put his conundrum down in a Question and Answer format, calling himself “Moriturus.” He asks “Moriturus” what he fears most, and he replies that he fears leaving his wife and child “in the sway of a man of extremely questionable character.”
John has spent years counseling people, so imagining a counseling session with himself seems a reasonable way of helping him work through his own problems. This also gives a glimpse into John’s approach as a minister, which involves getting to the heart of people’s fears rather than giving heavy-handed advice. “Moriturus” means a person who’s about to die, and it appears that John’s biggest fear is Jack Boughton’s future influence on his family.
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Continuing to question himself, John asks himself what makes him believe that Jack will have a damaging influence upon his family. This strikes him as a good question—after all, Jack has come to the house a handful of times and to the church only once. The truth is that when John looked down and saw Jack sitting with his family, covetousness rose up within him—the way he once felt “when the beauty of other lives was a misery and an offense to me.” He’s glad he thought this through.
John recognizes that there isn’t really a rational basis for his fear. That is, Jack hasn’t even been around John’s family that much, and John’s fear seems to be based on his own insecurities more than anything else. When he saw Jack with his family during church, it brought up memories of his old envy of big, happy families. While there’s no reason to believe that Jack would marry Lila after John dies, it’s a lurking fear nonetheless.
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The truth is that John doesn’t want to be old—“the tremulous coot you barely remember.” He wishes his son could have seen him when he was trim and fit, even into his sixties. He reminds himself that Jesus wept in the face of His impending death, and the Bible’s promise that “we shall all be changed […] in the twinkling of an eye.” He’s saying all this because he’s aware that he’s failing, “as though I’m some straggler” that people keep leaving behind. This morning, when his son came up to show him a picture, he was finishing a magazine article and didn’t look up immediately. He was struck that his wife said to his son, “He doesn’t hear you”—not “he didn’t hear you.”
By all appearances, John isn’t afraid to die, but he does hate being old. He regrets that his son will never know him as he used to be—the version of himself John seems to regard as his truest self. He tries to reassure himself with the Bible’s promises regarding death, such as the transformed, resurrected bodies mentioned in 1 Corinthians. He does this because he can’t deny that he’s slipping ever closer to death, the rest of the world moving on without him. Even Lila seems to believe that John isn’t fully present with the family anymore. John isn’t a fully reliable narrator in this regard, so it’s hard to know if Lila is right, but John acknowledges that there’s at least a little truth to it.
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The article was in a 1948 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal; Boughton had marked an article to show John a long time ago. The article is called “God and the American People,” and it claims that 95 percent of Americans say they believe in God. But the writer thinks all those churchgoers are “the scribes and the Pharisees.” The writer clearly thinks of himself as a prophet, but to John’s mind, the scornful tone marks him as a “scribe” himself.
“The scribes and the Pharisees” refers to the religious authorities who criticized and eventually condemned Jesus to death in the Gospels. So, when the magazine writer calls religious Americans “scribes and Pharisees,” it’s a scathing remark—he thinks they’re all hypocrites. However, John thinks the writer’s self-righteous denunciation of others reflects badly on himself, too.
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“Believe in God” is an odd phrase, and it makes John think of Feuerbach, who doesn’t imagine any existence beyond this one. John observes that humans’ notion of reality is very limited. He tried giving a sermon on this last year, and he was very pleased with it, but people seemed puzzled, and he realized that he lives in his thoughts too much. It occurs to him that nowadays people might chalk up his abstract preoccupations not to eccentricity but to senility, “by far the worst form of forgiveness.” In any case, in his waning years, he has felt it important to tell people that many of the attacks on religion that have been so popular in recent centuries are actually meaningless. He wants his son to understand this, too.
John muses on the nature of belief in God—a topic that’s hard to put into words, since God is beyond human understanding. His experience preaching on the subject suggests that John’s theological musings are often too abstract for his congregants. It’s embarrassing to think that people might cut him a break not because of his scholarly bent (as in his younger days), but because of his age. But he sincerely thinks that faddish criticisms of religion often proceed on an intellectually faulty basis.
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This afternoon John and his son walk to Boughton’s to return the magazine. Every once in a while, his son runs off to chase drifting milkweed seeds, but he always comes back to take John’s hand again. John knows it’s hard to be patient with his shuffling gait. He drinks lemonade with Boughton on the porch. As soon as John brings up the magazine article, Boughton starts laughing—he knew it would exasperate John. They figure that lots of people in both their congregations must have read it, because it appeared in the same issue as a recipe for a horrible gelatin salad that has haunted both of their lives in recent years.
John’s walk with his son is touching, as the boy tries to balance his desire to run and play with his desire to be close to his dad. John’s discussion with Boughton shows how well they know each other’s minds, and it’s also funny—congregations often bombard their ministers with food, but it’s unusual to hear the ministers complain about it openly.
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John says there are two “insidious notions” about Christianity in the modern world. The first is the view of Feuerbach and Freud, that religion and religious experience are basically illusions. The second is that religion is real, but that the individual’s belief that they participate in it is an illusion. John points out that people are always vulnerable to this second accusation, because no one’s understanding meets the highest standards of faith. But if religion’s failures mean that there’s no truth to religion (a view that the Bible itself rejects), then people cannot believe in the dignity of their own or their neighbors’ inevitably flawed expressions of belief. It seems to John that this article is written in exactly that self-righteous spirit that the writer criticizes.
Speaking to his son, John explains what he sees as the pitfalls of modern atheism. Basically, his point is that people either discount religion altogether or attack religious people as inauthentic. It’s true that nobody can perfectly live up to their faith, John says, but this modern objection isn’t a new observation (it’s everywhere in the Bible, after all). And what’s more, religious people’s failures are not sufficient grounds for claiming that there’s no truth to religion whatsoever.
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John points out an especially “fraudulent” point in the article, which claims that the majority of respondents expressed confident views about heaven, even though the Bible doesn’t say much about it that’s clear. John argues that just because a subject is ambiguous doesn’t mean that someone can’t or shouldn’t form ideas about it; indeed, it may not be possible to avoid doing so. He’d love to talk to the 29 percent of people who claim they have no ideas about heaven to see how they manage it. Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day—he just multiplies the world’s glories by two (and would multiply them more if he had the energy).
John continues critiquing the article with Boughton. The magazine writer seems to scoff at people’s certainty about heaven, but John contends that it's difficult to avoid forming views about this subject, even if those views are just conjectures. He implies that it’s only human to wonder and form ideas about big, ultimate things like life and death and what comes after death. Indeed, like Boughton, many people probably imagine heaven more as they draw closer to death.
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Jack comes outside to sit with his father and John. He mentions a point in the article that Americans’ treatment of Black citizens seems to indicate “a lack of religious seriousness.” Boughton says it is easy to judge. This is the first John has seen of Jack since he came to church, and he feels a little embarrassed. He realizes he mainly came to visit Boughton to see if he and Glory were mad at him, if he’d driven off Jack by bringing up “the old catastrophe” in church. But he hesitates to bring up the issue because he doesn’t want to stir up needless offense. Thankfully, everyone seems to be in fine spirits.
John was having a good time discussing the article with Boughton, but Jack becomes an unwelcome interruption. Jack wants to discuss a specific matter of injustice, but Boughton brushes it off rather easily. And John is distracted by the fear that his sermon about neglectful fathers alienated Jack, though it’s still not clear why this would be the case.
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John’s wife comes up to Boughton’s to tell them supper is ready. John coaxes her to stay for a moment, which she is always reluctant to do, and she says little. He loves the way she talks, though he knows she is self-conscious about it—like the “prodigal” way she says “It don’t matter” when she forgives someone.
John uses “prodigal” to mean something like “generous”—when his wife expresses forgiveness, you can tell she means it with all her heart. From her style of speaking, it’s also hinted that Lila comes from a lower social class than John does.
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