Books: Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)

"When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters." 

My colleague gave me the novel, Gilead, for Christmas. He knew I had just gotten a Kindle, and he said this was one of his favorite books, a most thoughtful gift I thought.

I've finally gotten around to reading it now after finishing six months of inpatient wards. The book is so beautiful and bittersweet, it's sometimes hard to read. The narrator is an old preacher, John Ames, who is dying of heart failure. He has a young son, about 7 years old, who's he's writing to in the future so that his son will know who he is after he has passed. It's a pretty heartbreaking premise, and yet it's not meant to be sad.  The preacher spends a lot of time describing the relationship with his own father and his father's relationship with his father before that. He describes the physical world with the wonderment of someone seeing it for the first time; I suppose it's easy to take nature's art for granted when life's distractions fill our days the way they do. Only when our days become numbered do we seem to recognize the awe inspiring beauty of this world and our place in it. Robinson's language is simple and the prose spare, but every sentence seems filled with emotion nonetheless. I think one must write a novel like this in that way. 

Reading this book reminds me of the time in my life when I lived next to beautiful Catholic church called St. Vincent de Paul. I'm not Catholic but for a month or two I'd walk there every morning to catch the weekday morning service at 7am. I remember how sweet the flowers would smell after a summer rain, and how I could never avoid the puddles that drenched my feet with rain water. I'd sit in the farthest pew in the back behind a pillar because I was an outsider, a heathen, I suppose. And once the service ended I'd scurry out of the church lest someone ask me what I was doing there because I wasn't quite sure myself. But I loved the Father who was there and the short liturgy he'd give every morning. I've never felt peace like that before. The other people in the church included 2 nuns, a few older people in the front pews, a person in a wheelchair that would sit in the back with me, and a young Indian doctor, always in his scrubs with his pager hanging on his hip. I wasn't in medical school then but I remember thinking how the sermons probably reinforced his commitment to helping others. 

Today I went to the chapel in our hospital. It is a bare, minimalist space without any kind of religious symbols so as to remain inter-faith. There wasn't a service going on at the time, but the room still felt sacred for some reason. Maybe if I could hear again that Father talking about love, the good of humanity, and our spiritual purpose, I can be redeemed for forgetting beauty, forgetting the sense of mission I so admired in that doctor many years ago.