Gilead is made up of letters that 76-year-old Rev. John Ames writes for his young son to read after John dies. The letters are a mixture of John’s memories, daily events in his life, and reflections on existence and faith in general. John begins by reflecting on the fact that he will miss this earthly life. When he was younger, widowed, and living alone, he didn’t feel at home in the world. But now that he has a wife and son, he does. One of his biggest regrets is that because he remarried late in life, he hasn’t done much to provide for the future, and that means he will leave his wife, Lila, and his son in a vulnerable position.
John was born in 1880 in Kansas; both his father and his grandfather were also named John Ames, and both of them were ministers, too. Seventy-four of John’s seventy-six years have been spent here in Gilead, Iowa. John recalls visiting his grandfather’s grave in Kansas when he was 12 years old. His grandfather had left Gilead in his old age and returned to Kansas, where he’d once fought for the abolitionist cause in the tumultuous years before the Civil War. John’s father and grandfather had parted angrily, and they’d never reconciled before the elder John Ames’s death. That’s why John’s father felt compelled to visit his father’s grave. John’s journey with his father was arduous, dusty, and thirsty, but they eventually found the overgrown graveyard and cleaned it up as best they could. Then John’s father prayed for God’s forgiveness beside his father’s grave. John never forgot the beautiful, simultaneous moonrise and sunset he witnessed during the prayer.
While John was in seminary, he married a girl named Louisa with whom he’d grown up. Then they moved to Gilead, where John took over his father’s position as minister. But Louisa soon died in childbirth, and their baby girl, Rebecca, lived for only a few hours. John reflects that the following decades were “like a long, bitter prayer.” He wrote thousands of pages of sermons, and though he was lonely, he found purpose and solace in study. When John was 67, on a rainy Pentecost Sunday, his future wife Lila suddenly walked into his church and changed everything.
John reminisces about his older brother, Edward, who became an atheist while studying for his doctorate in Germany. When Edward returned home, he tried to unsettle John’s beliefs with skeptical literature, but it didn’t work; John enjoyed the books and kept his faith. He tells his son that writers like the atheist philosopher Feuerbach aren’t harmful, and that when people’s beliefs are unsettled, it’s usually because they went looking to have their faith shaken.
Thinking about the stacks of old sermons around the house, John reflects that the sermon he’s proudest of is one he never actually preached. During the deadly Spanish Flu outbreak, he wrote a sermon proclaiming that the flu was God’s warning sign to people for fighting in World War I. But he ended up burning that sermon, believing it wouldn’t do any good.
While thinking about the poverty his wife and son will likely face after he dies, John recalls his strange, saintly grandfather, who freely gave away the family’s possessions to anyone who needed them. John remembers his grandfather telling him about a vision he experienced as a teenager, telling him to go to Kansas to join the abolitionists. John remembers his grandfather like a restless Old Testament prophet who always looked as if he’d just been struck by lightning. Yet John’s father never put stock in visions or the miraculous.
John wants his son to know that he is a miracle to John—his simple existence. John thinks about the wonder of existence a lot these days, and he hopes his son will live for a long time and enjoy this world. Though heaven will be unimaginably wonderful and will last forever, somehow that makes this world’s passing beauties even lovelier.
John’s best friend Boughton, Gilead’s retired Presbyterian minister, is mostly housebound these days with crippling arthritis. One day Boughton’s daughter Glory comes by to tell John that her brother Jack (John Ames Boughton, named for John) will be visiting from St. Louis soon. Even though Boughton intended for Jack to have a special relationship with John, who spent most of his life childless, John has always found Jack difficult. He has caused his family much grief, and John isn’t sure what to tell his son about the man.
John changes the subject to his grandfather’s efforts to help Free Soilers establish the right to vote in Kansas in hopes of entering the Union as a free state. He also served with the Union Army during the Civil War and lost an eye in battle. John’s father never liked to talk about those days, however. He recalls that after his grandfather’s death, he helped his father destroy his grandfather’s old pistol; its very existence disgusted his father. He remembers the rift that opened between his father and grandfather one day when his grandfather walked out on his son’s preaching. His grandfather disdained his son’s pacifism, while John’s father found war repugnant and felt his father had abandoned the family to serve the abolitionist cause. After the Civil War, John’s father had even left his grandfather’s church and attended Quaker services instead. Looking back on it all, John thinks his grandfather’s single-minded devotion to his cause was both his strength and his weakness.
John tells his son about a memory from when John was a young child. His father was helping a group of people tear down a church that had been struck by lightning and burned. Everyone sang hymns as they worked in the warm rain. He remembers his father offering him a sooty biscuit to eat. The memory encapsulates both the hardship and joy of those poorer days.
John recalls his father telling him about an experience when his father was a little boy. His father (John’s grandfather) had ridden off with a group of men in the middle of the night and didn’t say where he was going. John’s father later found a limping soldier sitting in the church and surmised that his father had shot the man. When the man never returned, John’s father assumed he had died, and he felt sickened by his complicity in keeping John’s grandfather’s secret.
John struggles with what to tell his wife and son about Jack Boughton; he feels an obligation to warn them. The strain of worry is beginning to take a physical toll on him. One day, during a conversation on Boughton’s front porch, John is especially exasperated by Jack’s persistent questions about whether a person can be consigned to perdition; he feels like Jack is testing him and not taking him seriously. Lila, on the other hand, senses that Jack is unhappy and struggling.
Unable to sleep, John decides it’s time to write down Jack’s story. He explains that when Jack was in college, he had a relationship with a very young, destitute girl, and their relationship resulted in a child. Jack refused to do anything to support the young woman or her child, and John deems it cruel that Jack told his parents about them. The Boughtons agonized over their sickly grandchild living in squalor, and they tried to support her materially, but it didn’t help—the baby died of an infection at age three. In the 20 years since, John has never been able to forgive Jack for “squandering[] his fatherhood,” or to believe that he will ever make anything of himself.
Soon after, Jack asks to meet with John at the church. There, Jack admits that he’s never been able to muster up any religious conviction; but it isn’t clear that he wants to be persuaded of Christian beliefs, either. The conversation ends in frustration, and later John reflects that he’s never found it effective to argue with skeptics, because it usually just reinforces their doubts. Besides, human categories can only stretch so far when speaking of ultimate truths.
John realizes he hasn’t yet told his son how he and Lila came together. After Lila unexpectedly showed up in church one Sunday, John couldn’t stop thinking about her. Over the coming weeks, he even began writing sermons with her in mind. He’d never experienced this kind of passionate desire and distraction before, and especially given their age difference (Lila was about 30 years his junior), he felt incredibly foolish. Eventually, Lila approached him about getting baptized, so John instructed her in basic doctrine and later baptized her. In time, she also came to his house occasionally to tend his gardens. One day, when he asked her how he could repay her kindness, she said, “You ought to marry me.” It was the most thrilling moment of John’s life, and he agreed.
One day Jack surprises John in his church study and shows him a picture: it’s Jack with a Black woman and a young, light-skinned Black boy. They’re Jack’s wife and child. He’s afraid Boughton is too fragile to receive this news, he explains, so he’s telling John instead. He and Della have been together for eight years, but due to anti-miscegenation laws in Missouri and Della’s father’s disapproval, they’ve only lived together intermittently, and Jack has struggled to provide for his family. They managed to live in a racially mixed neighborhood in St. Louis for a while, but then John got in trouble with his boss, sent his wife and child back to her family in Tennessee, and came to Gilead to see if they could establish an easier life here. At this point, though, it’s not even clear if Della wants to stay together. When Jack asks if he thinks a life in Gilead is possible for them, John doesn’t know what to say. He embraces Jack and tells him, truthfully, that he’s a good man.
Days later, after learning that Della has rejected him, Jack prepares to leave Gilead for good, even though it’s clear his father is near death. John walks to the bus stop with Jack and offers him God’s blessing, which Jack humbly receives. John wishes Boughton could have witnessed that moment and knows his friend would have been delighted to meet Jack’s son, Robert Boughton Miles.
John reflects on God’s beauty gloriously reflected in creation, even in forgotten, unassuming places like Gilead. In his final letter, he tells his son that he will pray that he will grow up to be brave and find a way to be useful—he’ll pray, and then he’ll sleep.
