Gilead: Pages 39-43 Summary & Analysis

John has always been tall; it runs in his family. Because of this, people always assumed he was older than his age, and he became adept at pretending he understood more than he did. This became a useful skill throughout life. He’s telling his son this so that his son will know he isn’t a saint and that he’s gotten more respect than he deserves, even gained a reputation for wisdom because of his huge library of books—many of them unread. But for much of his life, he read out of loneliness, even finding human company in bad books.

Often when people saw light in John’s study late at night, it just meant that he’d fallen asleep in his chair. He chose not to disillusion his flock in their kind assumptions about their pastor, mainly because he never wanted their sympathy—something he’d much rather give than receive. Boughton was the only person whose comfort he never minded. He wishes his son knew what Boughton was like in his prime.

Thinking about Boughton’s fine preaching reminds John of his stacks of old sermons. He supposes it’d be best to burn them, but he knows that would upset his wife. It’s embarrassing to have written so much and now have to find a way to dispose of it all. Of course, he meant every word he wrote at the time. But now it’s awful to think of reading 50 years’ worth of his own deepest thoughts.

Of course it’s natural to wonder about those sermons, since John pastored hundreds of souls over the years. To this day, he sometimes still wakes up at night thinking of something he should have said, or suddenly understanding what someone meant, when it’s much too late to put anything right.

There’s one sermon John burned the night before he was supposed to have preached it. It was during the Spanish Flu outbreak, and right at the outset of America’s involvement in World War I. The flu killed off so many that it really was like a war. Even here in Iowa, many young people died—and the community still got off relatively lightly. If people came to church at all, they wore masks and sat far apart.

Parents of young soldiers who died of the flu approached John to ask how God could allow something like this pandemic, and often John would reply that they didn’t know what their sons had been spared. They took it to mean that their sons had been spared trench warfare, but John meant that they were spared from having to kill.

The sickness was like a biblical plague. Seeing the stacks of bodies and the local college turned into a hospital ward, John thought that it all looked like a sign. He wrote a sermon about how God was rescuing these young men from their foolish courage before they went and committed murder. He also wrote that these flu deaths were a warning about the consequences that war would bring, since people were determined to go to war against God’s will.

John was pleased with the sermon. But he didn’t preach it, because he knew the only people at church would be a few elderly women who didn’t approve of the war anyway, and who came to church even at risk of catching the flu. It was perhaps the only sermon that he wouldn’t have minded answering to God for in heaven, but he burned it.

John says it’s hard to understand another time. His son couldn’t imagine the nearly empty church, with the women wearing veils to conceal their masks, and John preaching with a scarf around his mouth, and everyone smelling like onions. Meanwhile, magazines were filled with pictures of soldiers wearing gas masks. To this day John believes that the plague was God’s sign, and that we didn’t heed the sign, because there’s been war ever since.