giliead and marilynne robinson

I can't pick up Marilynne Robinson's award-winning 2004 novel Gilead without having the soulful, doleful music of the spiritual "There is a Balm in Gilead" fill my mind. Who wouldn't identify with the words, "Sometimes I get discouraged,/ And think my work's in vain;/ But then the Holy Spirit/ Revives my soul again"? For some reason the song is so deep in my mind that, when I was living in Kansas and driving through the nearly uninhabited marchlands between KS and NE on one occasion, I came upon Gilead, NE, population 40, and began spontaneously to sing the hymn.

And then I turned to the novel, cast in the form of a valedictory from a pastor, born in 1880, to his young son in 1956 when the father is about to die. The father reflects on his father and the nature of ministry and life. There is no one to impress, and so the matter-of-fact observations about human nature just fall from his lips as so many jewels from the De Beers diamond mines. This essay ruminates on one of those observations.

The Hidden Things of Life

The father says:

"There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you really wouldn't expect to find it, either" (6).

Let's talk about life's subterranean malice and dread and guilt, and even loneliness where you wouldn't expect to find it.

1. Malice. I ran across the word "malice" last week in an unexpected place--Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous 1897 law review article "The Path of the Law." He used the word to try to illustrate something about law--that in the modern legal world the word malice ought to lose its moral connotation as evil thoughts toward another and simply take a more "objective" meaning, as "false statements manifestly calculated to inflict temporal damage." Then a jury could look at statements that were made and determine if they, from the perspective of an objective observer, were meant to "inflict temporal damage." But, of course, malice in Gilead is good old-fashioned malevolence, ill will, spite, malignity, spleen and grudge. It is a deep seated, and often inexplicable, desire to see another suffer pain. Why is there so much malice beneath the surface of life? People feel malice because they have suffered often unjustly, and feel that life is therefore unfairly limited and constrained. They feel they are stuck in their lives and want another to experience the exquisite sense of hopelessness that they feel. Malice is generated by a heart injured, a mind oppressed, and will stalk the human condition as long as injury happens between people.

2. Dread. Not simply fear, but dread. Plato argues that the best guardians for the beautiful city, the Kallipolis, are those who know what is to be feared, for then they know whether to respond with friendliness or defensiveness to what is before them. But, dread is deeper than fear. As a verb it is, as the OED says, "To have a shrinking apprension of" something, a sort of terror or anxiety about things possibly beyond our control. What do we dread today? In this rich nation, we dread the loss of financial security. The thought doesn't just flit through our minds; it stalks us. We dread that the mark on our skin will turn tumerous. We dread that terrible things will befall loved ones. We sometimes don't know why we feel dread. Like the sense of chill in the air before the air actually turns chilly, we have our premonitory antennae out to warn us about what is to be feared.

3. Guilt. Freud tried to help us with this one. Guilt is simply a projection of the mind, something taught us by our religious traditions, something unhealthy that benumbs and immobilizes which can easily be laid aside. Try it sometime, however. The biggest friend of guilt is a good memory, a memory that can call up its version of the past with as unerring precision as a double click opens the email. Sometimes there isn't anything you can do about having a good memory. Many of us were taught years ago that cultivation of a disciplined memory would stand us in good stead in the future. Those who taught us this were only partiallly right. But people have mountains of guilt mostly about intimate relationships, and sexual feelings, and things said and unable to be called back, like a baseball thrown when a person is not looking. Guilt produces such yawning chasms of hopelessness that it sometimes seems to take a god three times the size of the Scriptural God to be able to attend to it.

4. Loneliness. "And last, but certainly not least, we have loneliness," he intoned. You wouldn't expect to find loneliness in lots of places and people. Those engaged in their children's lives, or those pursuing the excitement of new career paths, or those interacting daily with engaging people--certainly these would be the last you would think would be mired in loneliness. But loneliness seems to attach irrespective of life's conditions, even though there are some life conditions which correlate more with loneliness than others, as a sociologist might say. The sadness about loneliness is that it really could be removed so easily in so many cases, but we are seemingly powerless to bring about those situations aiding its removal. Thus, we travel through inner regions of the mind as if they were musty rooms of an abandoned Victorian mansion, knowing there is nothing there but cold and dusty remains of a once-alive place. We tumble through space as if the tether connecting us to the life-giving space capsule has been severed. Loneliness was the first thing that God mentioned about the world that was not good. We still aren't quite over this one yet.

Conclusion

So, how do you live your life knowing that this is the condition of people, that this is our own condition? What is the role of a pastor, a teacher, a "helper," an "interpreter" of life when you know that these issues terrorize us all? Well, of course, you study and write and think and do your work and watch football on the weekends and try to inject as much normalcy and pleasant rhythm into life as you can. But the knots remain, and we keep praying for the sword, or the prince, who will cut those Gordian tangles.

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