Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Gilead, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Life, Death, and Beauty
Christian Faith, Mystery, and Ministry
Memory, Vision, and Conviction
Estrangement and Reconciliation
Loneliness and Love
Summary
Analysis
John says that he can’t give an account of his life without speaking of his “dark time,” the long period of his loneliness. He remembers listening to countless baseball games, envisioning the plays in his mind while listening to the staticky radio. He often thinks of pastoral conversations in a similarly analytical way—studying the people who came to speak to him, their grief and guilt and joy. This is another privilege of ministry that few ever talk about.
John moves from discussing a particularly noteworthy sermon to considering his approach to ministry more generally. His attitude toward his ministry seems to be closely tied to his years of loneliness. Since he didn’t have much else in his life, he applied his mind to analyzing his parishioners’ problems, much as he would the plays in a baseball game.
Themes
John says that a good sermon must be heard as “one side of a passionate conversation,” though there are actually three sides to it. This is even true, remarkably enough, of private thought, John says—there is the “self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds,” and the Lord. He’s never tried putting any of this into words before, and it’s tiring.
In preaching, John doesn’t believe he’s simply giving a lecture—he is addressing his congregation, but he is also conversing with God through engagement with the Bible. He sees the same three-way dynamic present even in individual thought, as though God is mysteriously present everywhere, even in human consciousness.
Themes
John is reminded of a poem he wrote once that mentions the image of a seashell and the sound of “the priestly susurrus,” a word he’s loved for a long time. But back in those days he didn’t know much besides “texts and priestliness and static.” At that time the book The Diary of a Country Priest, by Bernanos, was very popular. John remembers sitting up all night with the book, still reading the next morning. He felt sympathetic to the protagonist, though Boughton just said the character drank too much and was unsuited to his position.
Though his meaning is a bit obscure, John suggests that in his younger days as a minister, he was mostly wrapped up in books and ideas—more interested in the idea of being a pastor than the gritty reality of it. This would fit with his absorption in Bernanos’s novel about a young priest, which was translated into English in the late 1930s. Though the novel clearly resonated with John, Boughton responded to it more crankily, showing a humorous contrast between the friends’ personalities even when they were younger.
Themes
