Birth, Cancer, Gilead

I've been re-reading Gilead, the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Marilynne Robinson lately and I am constantly amazed by how much depth can be communicated in a novel. It is striking how a story about fictional characters can pack more insight into, well ... life, the universe and everything, than just about anything else. I just find it so exceedingly odd and wonderful that a total stranger can think and say things so important and meaningful to me; can be so important to me just because of words thought up, written down, and sent out into the world, directed to who knows whom.

The novel takes the form of letters written by an aging Midwestern preacher to his young son set around the mid-twentieth century. Through them, the father tries to communicate everything he would want to tell the man his son will become but won't have a chance to as he is not expecting to live long. Along the way he relays the story of the boy's grandfather and great-grandfather who were also preachers, but men very different from each other and from the writer of the letters, the boy's father. In this way, there is never any regurgitated platitudes, however noble, but a transfer of embodied ideals. The father strives to give the son as much of what he has learned about what matters enfleshed in the story of where the boy has come from even as the father lovingly, understandingly expects for his son a life very different from any of the preceding generations.

Well it may be more than a coincidence (though I'm usually quick to be dismissive of these kinds of things) but it is at the very least a quite remarkable coincidence that I am by happenstance reading a novel about a dying father addressed to a son who will barely remember him at the very time that I have a two week-old son at home and find myself with a cancer diagnosis.

My son, Jonah Gregory, was born August 18th, just past two weeks ago. He is doing very well by all accounts, including that of the Doctor who saw him the morning of Friday the 31st of August for his two week well-child visit. This was also the same visit that brought me to my first physical in something like eight years at which I heard that I had testicular cancer, something I should have seen as likely given the symptoms, but which was completely, totally, off my radar screen.

Now I don't mean to be melodramatic. I don't think I'm on my deathbed. I fully plan on raising and knowing and loving my new son and his older sister until I'm old and gray and they're so full of all the advice and insight I can manage from whatever wisdom I hope to be able to scrape together by then that they're just itching for me to quit it already and kick the bucket. But illness of any seriousness does put certain thoughts in mind. Reading a novel that depicts the most convincing, sincere attempt to reach out and love someone from beyond the grave, even if one's own situation is only a brief scare (as I hope this will be) is, well, a balm for the soul.

So as I've hinted at, I believe Gilead to be just about the most beautiful and poignant thing I can imagine being written in my age, in my language. At least every other page is a sentence or paragraph so perfect, so sublime that it would bear hours or days of reflection.

The proper response to beauty is on the one hand a recurring theme of the book, as much of what the father wants to say is about loving the world, and on the other hand constitutes the body of the book; the father's very act of writing is an overflowing of love and gratitude for the life he has lived. One of his refrains is to declare how much he will miss this world. What makes the novel so transcendent is how the sheer beauty of the writing and the story itself participates in and reproduces the theme, giving the appreciative reader the overwhelming urge to thank the bearer of the message and then to share it with others.

[Ms. Robinson, I can't imagine your ever reading this, but if you are, Thank you! I want to say "you'll never know how much..." or "there aren't words to say..." but I believe there are. You have said them. What you have written is a thing to be grateful for as well as a portrayal of the most sincere and intimate gratitude. So I believe you already know what I want to tell you. It's what anyone who feels a profound debt of gratitude wants to tell the one who has been a medium of grace in their life. The feeling is like the student who experiences that 'click' in their understanding - a small epiphany even - maybe over something small like a mathematical proof or a poem, and getting so excited by the elegance of it they want to go back to the teacher who showed it to them and explain to them exactly why it is so worthy of wonder. Maybe the teacher needs these reminders of the weight and worth of their material from time to time. It is all another example of that wonderful economy of love and grace, their way of increasing the more they are given away. {This also puts me in mind of how love might mirror knowledge in the paradox of the learner: both Plato's solution of positing that learning is mere remembering what we once knew - which is really less absurd than it sounds when one grapples with it - and also of Kierkegaard's reflections on the need for the teacher to bear both the message and the means of understanding the message and the relation this has to the learner-disciple of faith. But even I won't pursue this tangent further}]


(Again, related to this business of beauty eliciting or even demanding response, I've thought many times before of how the aesthetic dynamic has parallels to religious piety. True worship can really be thought of as just the same overwhelming impulse directed toward the creator of the universe as appreciative fans experience with respect to their favorite artist, movie star or sports hero. True evangelism then would not be some guilty obligation or arrogant imposition but just that love spilling over the brim of one's soul onto anyone who is nearby but especially toward those with whom one feels the bonds of affection. True love does not compel but woos. One should probably not attempt to evangelize someone one is not in love with or be an evangelist for a story one has not utterly fallen for. Evangelism then, should be like courtship in that it should be at least as hard to keep quiet about one's faith as it would be to not tell a friend about the person one has fallen head-over-heels in love with and plans to spend the rest of one's life with.)

(If you'll suffer me one more related parenthetical: I think it might be interesting to measure a book by its blurbs. Not by a who's who of the reviewer or which media outlet they represent type of yardstick but by how beautiful the language is that the reviewer is inspired to summon in their response. I am more swayed by poetic praise from a nobody than by pedestrian suggestions by the most noted of writers. I say this because the blurbs on the back of Gilead, about the author's previous novel, Housekeeping, are themselves beautiful pieces. Like all good writing, they give the reader the impression of stretching the language to say what it can't contain.)

Now Marilynne Robinson can write wise and beautiful things in just about any setting, on just about any topic, as in fact she has. But the setup of Gilead gives it a distinct advantage for reaching profundity. Art often reaches to extremes to depict the depths and heights of the human soul. Think the Iliad and the Odyssey, Henry V and Romeo and Juliet, Saving Private Ryan and Gone With the Wind. We find the deepest resonance in stories of war or love, or love in the midst of war, even if these extreme situations are utterly foreign to us. Even relatively shallow instances like my boyhood favorites: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Last of the Mohicans - stories of love worth dying for in the midst of a world in turmoil - point to the need of humanity to take up a meaning that exceeds it. Mankind can fathom no greater absolute than death and no greater force with which to oppose it than love.

The format of Gilead gives the author the unique ability to conjure a credible 230-page deathbed scene. This seems a fortuitous circumstance for a story but also a tall order to follow through on. Robinson does not waste one page of the opportunity. Some of the (I'm running out of adjectives) best parts are where the father steps back to try to explain again his purpose in writing in the first place.

Here are a few short selections:

"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." p. 52

"I'm trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all." p. 102

"The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe. ... It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift." p. 114

These are not my words, but they are the words - the sentiments - I would want to communicate to my children, my wife, my parents, my siblings and all my family and friends, were I to leave tomorrow or some day decades hence.