Gilead: Pages 200-209 Summary & Analysis

John lies awake all night, except for the time he spends writing all this out. He’s touched by his wife’s kind words about him. He’s also struck by Jack’s tone of amazement when he learned that John hadn’t yet warned Lila about him. He wonders how much of Jack’s apparent misery comes from the fact that he’s here in Gilead, and whether Jack feels shame. He wishes he could soothe any guilt and regret Jack is feeling. Then John could see what he’s dealing with. But he apologizes—that’s not a “theologically [acceptable] notion.”

John also admits that he heard the edge disappear from Jack’s voice while he spoke with Lila. The two sounded like friends.

After prayer and sleep, John thinks he’s starting to see where the grace is in all of this. He regrets that he’s never been to St. Louis.

After looking through the letter, John realizes he’s mostly been worrying to himself, while his intention had been to address his son. He fears that when his son reads this, he will just see an old man’s struggle. But he thinks he’s finding his way out of it. He remembers the kindness in his wife’s voice while she held his hand last night. She sounded as if she thought she’d never lose the settled life she enjoys with him, even though she knows she will. It gives him peace to know that her years of longing and wandering have been answered for her.

Once John dreamed that he and Boughton were looking for something in the shallows of the river, when suddenly his grandfather appeared and threw a hatful of water over them; they stood there “shining like the apostles.” John thinks most of life’s transformations are just this sudden and unexpected. It makes him think of meeting Lila on that rainy Pentecost. He’s never told his son how their marriage came about. It sounds strange, but the event “sweetened [his] imagination of death.”

After Lila visited his church for the first time, he spent the next week hoping she’d come back; he’d neglected to ask her name. He felt like a fool for wanting to see her and hear her voice again. He remarks that if his grandfather did “throw his mantle” over John, the holiness of his life gave the same holiness to John’s, which he has tried not to sully. He had always tried to match his life to his preaching. Yet all of a sudden, he found himself distracted by the memory of a young woman’s face.

If John had been younger, he might have been wiser. But now he understands more about passion. He no longer sees earthly love as separate from the kind of passion that moved saints and martyrs. Even in his misery, those days made him grateful to his core for the existence of love.

John and Louisa were expected to marry from their childhood. He’d never experienced this constant preoccupation with a stranger before. It was the first time he felt at risk of damaging his character and reputation. In that way, it was a kind of foretaste of death. And it got worse: as Lila continued attending church, John found himself writing his sermons in the hope of pleasing her. He felt ridiculous even as he prayed about it—and yet God answered his prayers beyond his wildest hopes.

One awful Sunday, Lila didn’t appear in church. John spent the next week feeling foolish and resigned. But she was back the following week, and John tried not to let his joy show. (He’d also gotten a haircut and a new shirt and experimented with hair tonic.) Finally, after the service, he shook hands with her and said they’d missed her last week. She blushed with surprise and looked away.

The following week John invited Lila to an evening Bible study. To his delight, she showed up on the church steps that night and asked to speak with him. She informed him, “an unworthy old swain with perfume in his hair,” that she wanted to be baptized—no one had made sure she was baptized as a child, and she’d been feeling the lack. He promised that she would be taken care of. When she admitted that she had no family at all, he felt sad for her, and wretchedly glad, too.

So, John taught Lila the basic doctrines of the Christian faith and soon baptized her. He felt thankful that he hadn’t yet disgraced himself—he was 67, and yet he almost chased her down the street when he saw her coming out of the grocery store. He took care to treat her with the greatest respect. He even made sure that some of the church’s kindly older ladies sat through her baptismal instruction with her, though he regretted that this seemed to make her feel shy.

John remembers one evening of the baptismal class. The group was sitting there pondering a passage John had just read from Calvin’s Institutes, but he was really thinking about the loneliness stretching ahead of him. When he looked up, Lila smiled at him, touched his hand, and softly said, “You’ll be just fine.” He found it “unfathomable grace” to get to hear such a voice. Soon, Lila began to visit from time to time to tend his gardens. One day by the roses, he asked how he could repay her for it all. She replied, “You ought to marry me.” So he did.

Even now, John can’t believe that Lila’s feelings could have been as passionate as his own. He even hopes that someday, the words of the Song of Songs might startle her the way they startled him when he first fell in love with her. He wonders why he worries so much about Jack. After all, love is like grace: “the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.” Perhaps he will leave her to an even greater happiness; he even supposes he might be witnessing its beginnings in her. If that’s true, then it’s a kindness from God.