Gilead Gems

Marilynne Robinson's book, Gilead, has been out about 5 years, but I just got to it. It's a first-person narrative of an old and dying man, a pastor. It's written to his young son, born late in his life, in hopes that the boy will have some knowledge of his father after the man is gone and the boy is grown.

Fine writing. Some gems:

• "To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear." . . . "It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather's grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire."
• "When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'I' whose predicate can be 'love' or 'fear' or 'want,' and whose object can be 'someone' or 'nothing' and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around 'I' like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned."
• "The Tenth Commandment is unenforceable, even by oneself, even with the best will in the world, and it is violated constantly....I believe the sin of covetise is that pang of resentment you may feel when even the people you love best have what you want and don't have. From the point of view of loving your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18), there is nothing that makes a person's fallenness more undeniable than covetise--you feel it right in your heart, in your bones. In that way it is instructive. I have never really succeeded in obeying that Commandment....'Rejoice with those who rejoice.' I have found that difficult too often. I was much better and weeping with those who weep."
• "grace has a grand laughter in it"
• "Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning."
• "There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."
• "There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and the occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us."

Time to pick up her new one, Home.