Brian Hamilton

Gilead

I started Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead this morning, already I’m enamored of her penetratingly simple style and her unassuming theological profundity. The prose reminds me of Wendell Berry, it’s quiet and gentle and makes you slow down. The whole thing is a letter from a dying Iowa minister to his young son, recounting memories and hopes and disappointments. There’s no real logical progression, there are just reflections that come when they come. Here’s a long quote from one, on war (pp. 41–43).

“People don’t talk much now about the Spanish influenza, but that was a terrible thing, and it struck just at the time of the Great War, just when we were getting involved in it. It killed the soldiers by the thousands, healthy men in the prime of life, and then it spread into the rest of population. It was like a war, it really was. One funeral after another, right here in Iowa. We lost so many young people. And we got off pretty lightly. People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They’d sit as far from each other as they could. There was talk that the Germans had caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them, from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.

“The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask me how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking the, what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn’t allow something. But instead I would comfort them, by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. Most of the took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing. It was just like a biblical plague, just exactly. I thought of Sennacherib.

“…Now, if these things were not signs, I don’t know what a sign would look like. So I wrote a sermon about it. I said, or I meant to say, that these deaths were rescuing foolish young men from the consequences of their own ignorance and courage, that the Lord was gathering them in before they could go off and commit murder against their brothers. And I said that their deaths were a sign and a warning to the rest of us that the desire for war would bring the consequences of war, because there is no ocean big enough to protect us from the Lord’s judgment when we decide to hammer our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God.

“…Most of the young men seemed to feel that the war was a courageous thing, and maybe new wars have come along since I wrote this that have seemed brave to you. That there have been wars I have no doubt. I believe that plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning, and since then we have had war continuously.”

29 December 2006 |
tags: Fiction, Peace