gilead

A few years ago the choir I sing with, Crowd Around, sang the old spiritual, Balm in Gilead. It's a song that would create the kind of emotional landscape at a Revival Meeting to kick doubters into the believers camp, if only for a week or two. Last night I finally finished the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson.

It's truly a beautiful, reflective book about (and I won't spoil the story) an ageing minister of religion, who, blessed late in life with a young wife and a little boy, writes up a kind of account of things for his son. He knows he hasn't long to live and he wants to speak to him from beyond the grave, as it were. Set in a declining Mid-West town, the novel spans three generations, spilling from the skirmishes of the Civil War over into the next century of major world-wide conflict. These form a backdrop to the meditations of the narrator, John Ames, and the events that occur in and around Gilead.

Just as Balm in Gilead the song might give a shove to the equivocator into journeying across the Jordan, so Gilead the book gave me constant pause for thought, and prayer.

"Grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways" Ames writes. In that nugget, there is much to hope for.