Steve Patterson: I’M IN LOVE WITH A WOMAN I NEVER MET!
By Steve Patterson
“A poet is someone who feels and expresses his feelings through words. That may sound easy. It isn’t.” — e. e. cummings
A provocative title like the one I assigned to this essay deserves an immediate explanation and not leave any doubt for the reader looking for a salacious confession from an old man yearning for a sordid affair with some mysterious young beauty. Sorry to disappoint, but it’s basically just a book review.
I don’t normally read much fiction. Biography and histories are my passions and consumed much of my time until my aging eyes got tired. When I do read fiction, it must be more than the telling of a good story. It must also make me think, make me feel, make me relate.
Anton Chekhov, the Russian literary genius once famously said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Our own Mr. Willam Faulkner was the Goliath of this kind of descriptive writing. Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe, my favorite writer Charles Dickens, and many others used their linguistic creativity to show us the “the glint of light on broken glass.”
Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, James Agee, John Updike, Donna Tartt, and a host of others are great storytellers with an uncanny ability to make one cry and laugh, grieve and rejoice, ponder and act, love and despise. Not all good storytellers employ their prose in a way that elicits those piercing emotions.
I have fallen in love with a writer who makes me see “the glint of light on the broken glass,” and feel and empathize with the sensations of the beating heart. No book since To Kill a Mockingbird has impacted me so profoundly.
Her name is Marilynne Robinson, and the Pulitzer Award-winning book is entitled Gilead. Although this book was published in 2004, I first heard of it from an old friend I recently bumped into at the cigar store in Oxford. After exchanging a few pleasantries and discussing whether Lane Kiffin had matured enough not to leave us, our conversation quickly turned to books we were both reading. As I paid for my cigars, he said, “Steve, I want you to promise me you’ll read Gilead– I just finished it and thought of you as I read it. Promise me you’ll get it and let me know what you think.” He wrote the title, and the author’s name on the back of his business card and again made me promise to read the book.
As I reflected on our conversation, I had no trouble remembering the name of the book. I automatically related it to a traditional Black spiritual we sometimes sing in church,“There is a Balm in Gilead.” I started humming the tune to myself as I drove home.
“There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.
“If you cannot preach like Peter.
If you cannot pray like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus,
Who died to save us all.
“There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal a sin-sick soul.”
Marilynne Robinson’s delicious book Gilead is indeed a balm for the soul. It’s truthfully a soothing balm that “makes the wounded whole.” Her characters endlessly dance in my mind with rhythms I had previously thought were reserved only for the saints.
I ordered the book. It arrived on a Friday and by Saturday afternoon I had read it cover-to-cover. Twice.
To my amazement, Gilead is formatted in a style I have often thought would be a great gift for my own future generations, but I never had the courage or talent to attempt myself.
Gilead is an episodic love letter to an aging, dying father’s young son. It is a slow, reflective letter journey of the Reverend John Ames, a third-generation Congregationalist pastor, to his seven-year-old son. It details family history, lost loves, new-found loves, loneliness, unsettled theological debates, and life and death, especially death. It is a life journey filled with events that touch our sensibilities and transport readers to contemplate and relate to our own journeys. Many times, during my reading of Ms. Robinson’s words, I was magically compelled to lay the book aside and reflect on my own experiences. As Mr. Faulkner famously described in his Nobel speech, Gilead speaks to “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths.”
Gilead contains some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read. As the father of two adult sons and an eight-year-old grandson I adore, I found myself getting all teary eyed as I read what this humble man of God, John Ames, had to say about his pure love for his young son and why he chose to write this letter:
“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder, sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”
Or perhaps this passage that stopped me in my tracks and made me contemplate a parent’s real-life predicament:
“…that is how life goes- we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they were born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s.”
With each turn of the page profound declarations motivate the reader to ponder hard truths that would normally escape our thoughts, but for the beauty and simplicity of the words. One little jewel that shook my own sensibilities was the difference between visions and dreams and how time transforms one into the other. For instance, Reverend Ames observes that young men have visions and old men dream dreams. But with the passing of time, the young men become old men, and their visions are no more than dreams. The old days are forgotten. Our dreams are all forgotten long before we are. Our dreams die long before we do.
The book is a beautiful, 250-page love letter about fathers and sons, true family and found family, mortality and morality, hope and home, faith and failings and love in all its forms. It is replete with references to the 16th century reformed theologian John Calvin and Calvinism. Not only is Calvin frequently debated, the author references his seminal work, Institutes of the Christian Religion, and her characters almost always side with Calvin once his original texts, contained in the Institutes, are consulted.
This aspect of the book, of course, intrigues me greatly given the fact that I named our baby son John Calvin, and have been a proponent of Calvin’s theological thinking all my life.
Have you ever read a book and been disappointed that it ended? Have you ever wanted to play mental gymnastics with a book’s characters? Have you ever been so enamoredby an author that you wanted to call them and have endless discussions about their work?
Well, Marilynne Robinson’s book impacted me just that deeply.
Gilead is probably not for everyone. After all, it’s a virtually plotless memoir, written as a journal type letter. It is filled with history, philosophy, theology, preacher stories, and faith manifested in multiple ways. Our very existence in this world of sin and sorrow are thoughtful themes throughout the book. I was overwhelmed with the book myself, but must confess it may be because it so closely parallels my own views. If pressed to say what the book is about, I’d say it’s about Grace, yep Grace, and Love.
As Reverend Ames says, “Love is holy because it is like Grace, the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”
There is a term we use here that is derived from Italian. The word is simpatico. It means being likable, congenial, sharing interests and opinions on matters of importance. I don’t know Ms. Marilynne Robinson; all I know is she wrote a book that touched me deeply, and I’m pretty sure we are simpatico. I’m going to read her other books as soon as I can.
I hope you will too.
