Gilead is a story of strife between fathers and sons: John’s grandfather and father fought bitterly over war and pacifism, John’s best friend Boughton is estranged from his troubled son Jack, and John himself struggles to love Jack, who’s a kind of honorary son to him. To deal with his regret over the estrangement with John’s grandfather, John’s father goes on a long, difficult pilgrimage through the Kansas countryside in search of John’s grandfather’s grave. Tending the grave and praying there seem to bring John’s father a measure of real peace, but the reconciliation is limited since John’s grandfather is dead.
Meanwhile, Jack Boughton has caused his father, and John, much heartache over the years—especially when, 20 years ago, he had a child with a destitute young woman and abandoned both of them in squalid conditions, leading to the child’s death. The whole situation colors John’s perceptions of Jack’s character, and he’s convinced that Jack can never amount to anything good. But near the end of John’s life, Jack reveals that he’s married to a Black woman in St. Louis, and that they have a son together. For years, he’s struggled to provide for them because of unjust anti-miscegenation laws, but he’s hidden the truth for fear of hurting Boughton. Recognizing that Jack truly is a good man, John blesses him before he leaves Gilead, letting go of the resentment he’s harbored for decades. John also believes that even though Boughton never learns his son’s full story, he would completely forgive him regardless, because real love doesn’t depend on the recipient being deserving. Through several generations of fraught father-son relationships, the novel suggests that even the closest human beings often don’t fully understand one another, and yet when love is unconditional, those barriers can be overcome.
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Estrangement and Reconciliation ThemeTracker
Estrangement and Reconciliation Quotes in Gilead
Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says. I can’t claim to understand that saying, as many times as I’ve heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a deeply mysterious fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
He could make me feel as though he had poked me with a stick, just by looking at me. Not that he meant any harm to speak of. He was just afire with old certainties, and he couldn’t bear all the patience that was required of him by the peace and by the aging of his body and by the forgetfulness that had settled over everything. He thought we should all be living at a dead run.
To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear. I have a lot of respect for that view. When I spoke to my father about the vision he had described to me, my father just nodded and said, “It was the times.” He himself never claimed any such experience, and he seemed to want to assure me I need not fear that the Lord would come to me with His sorrows. And I took comfort in the assurance. That is a remarkable thing to consider.
Having looked over these thoughts I set down last night, I realize I have evaded what is for me the central question. That is: How should I deal with these fears I have, that Jack Boughton will do you and your mother harm, just because he can, just for the sly, unanswerable meanness of it? You have already asked after him twice this morning.
Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me. That may be one great part of what I fear, now that I think of it.
I have wandered to the limits of my understanding any number of times, out into that desolation, that Horeb, that Kansas, and I’ve scared myself, too, a good many times, leaving all landmarks behind me, or so it seemed. And it has been among the true pleasures of my life. Night and light, silence and difficulty, it seemed to me always rigorous and good. I believe it was recommended to me by Edward, and also by my reverend grandfather when he made his last flight into the wilderness. I may once have fancied myself such another tough old man, ready to dive into the ground and smolder away the time till Judgment. Well, I am distracted from that project now. My present bewilderments are a new territory that make me doubt I have ever really been lost before.
“We are married in the eyes of God, as they say. Who does not provide a certificate, but who also does not enforce anti-miscegenation laws. The Deus Absconditus at His most benign. Sorry.” He smiled. “In the eyes of God we have been man and wife for about eight years. We have lived as man and wife a total of seventeen months, two weeks, and a day.”
And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant. That is a thing I would love to see.
As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father’s house—even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.
