Gilead: Pages 173-179 Summary & Analysis

Gilead doesn’t look like much, but John wants his son to know that heroes and saints have lived here. Over time, those saints came to seem like mere eccentrics. John even felt this way about his grandfather, dreading his disappointment. The older generation judged people with great harshness for failing to embrace the “great cause,” and John believes they were justified.

John remembers a certain Fourth of July when his grandfather was asked to speak. (The mayor who invited him doesn’t seem to have known just how eccentric the old man was.) John has a copy of the sermon his grandfather preached that day, and he copies it out here for his son. His grandfather wrote that the Lord came to him when he was a young man and spoke to him. He told him to free the captives. He categorizes this as a vision. Such things aren’t common anymore. In his day, General Grant called Iowa “the shining star of radicalism.” But now, only dust and ashes remain in Gilead. Most people weren’t listening very carefully, but those who did mostly just laughed at the strangeness of the speech. His grandfather knew it hadn’t done much good.

John thinks about that a lot. It seems to him that the same words that radicalize one generation often alienate the next. So while it might seem that he would feel obligated to rescue Jack from his skepticism, he feels the conversation is pretty futile. In any case, he has always declined to get involved in conversations with skeptics, because he doesn’t believe that one can speak truthfully of God from a defensive posture. It just reinforces people’s skepticism.

When John was young and Edward was studying in Germany, his father watched him like a hawk and lectured him about the faintest whiff of heterodoxy in John’s thinking. It caused tension in their relationship, but John knew that his father was really trying to find a way through to Edward.

John actually thinks that attempts to defend faith can backfire, “because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.” And it’s possible to assert something’s existence (like “Being”) without understanding what it means. And God is yet further beyond that, as the “Author of Existence.” Human understanding is too poor to grasp how a being could exist before existence. These ideas force us to speak of things of which we have no experience, like “building a ladder to the moon.” So, John advises his son not to look for proofs of God. They’ll never be enough, and over time, they can be very unsettling.