Portrait of a pastor.

Christian Century, May 17, 2005 by Martin B. Copenhaver

IT SEEMS as if all the pastors I know either have read Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead or claim that it is on the top of the pile of books they intend to read. Pastors--myself among them--love the book. Some of the reasons are obvious. The novel is beautifully written, a spare meditation on the ways in which grace insinuates itself into the most unlikely settings, like a worn little town in Iowa or the relationship between a father and son. Also, the narrator. John Ames, is a pastor, and Robinson has made him a sympathetic character.

In a recent radio interview. Robinson mentioned that she gets a lot of mail from pastors. and the interviewer asked why that might be so. Robinson replied: "I think one of the main reasons is because ministers and priests are very used to being described in the most unflattering terms in literature, and they are quite pleased ... to find that I have made a character who is likable, positive, intelligent, not a hypocrite."

All of that is true, but clearly there are other reasons why pastors are drawn to this novel. For one, Robinson obviously understands what it is like to be a pastor. She depicts the pastoral life, in all of its vagaries and quiet drama, with a keen eye and such depth of understanding that it is not surprising to learn she is a deacon in her Congregational church in Iowa. Without lapsing into sentimentality, she conveys a pastor's peculiar way of construing the world, revealing throughout the novel some of the reasons those who are called to this vocation can feel strangely blessed by it.

The book is in the form of a long letter from a pastor in his mid-70s to his seven-year-old son. Aware that he is dying, John Ames says that he is writing the letter because he wants to tell his son some things that he never had an opportunity to tell him or that his son will only be able to appreciate when he is older. In a sense the letter is his last will and testament, his testimony.

Almost from the first page pastors can tell that they are in the company of a novelist who knows a great deal about their lives. As he stands on the edge of the mystery of death himself, Ames remembers when he was a young pastor and people would ask him what death is like. They would "hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I blew and they were going to make me tell them." Indeed, when you are a pastor, people seem to expect you to know the unknowable, as if you should be as much an expert on God as appliance salespeople are on the products they are pitching.

Later Ames describes passing a group of "rascally young fellows" who work in the local garage. They are holding cigarettes in grease-stained hands and laughing "in that wicked way they have." When they see the pastor coming, they abruptly stifle their laughter. Ames comments: "That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things." That scene, and Ames's wistful comment, capture well both the distance and the intimacy inherent in the pastoral vocation.

Ames calculates that if all the sermons he has delivered during his lifetime were bound in books, they would total 225 volumes, "which puts me up there with Angustine and Calvin for quantity." He is convinced, however, that his best sermon is one he never delivered. He wrote it during the Great War when many people in Iowa were dying of influenza. The young men who succumbed to the disease, he wrote, were actually being spared a far worse fate. The Lord "was gathering them in before they could go off and commit murder against their brothers." Many years later this sermon is still bold and bright in Ames's memory, and he still believes in its message. He could not bring himself to deliver it, however, because he knew that the only people who would hear it were the beleaguered folk, mostly old women, who were already "as sad and apprehensive as they could stand to be and no more approving of the war than I was." This is a phenomenon that every pastor has experienced, what Reinhold Niebuhr described as "the difficulty one finds in telling unpleasant truths to people whom one has learned to love."

CRAIG DYKSTRA HAS described pastors' way of perceiving and relating to the world as "the pastoral imagination," which both requires and shapes a particular way of construing what is going on around the pastor. It is not a single ability, but a confluence of abilities that enables pastors to live and lead at the intersection of the Christian story and the life of a community of faith. Pastors perceive and interpret to others how the Christian story illumines the lives of the people, as well as how the lives of the people illumine the Christian story.

This is the peculiar perspective Robinson captures through her narrator. Ames recalls a time when his father, also a pastor, was helping men tear down a church that had been destroyed by fire. Ames was too young to help, but he watched the purposeful activity with the fascination that young people sometimes have for adult rituals in which they are not yet permitted to participate. During a brief break in the work, Ames's father brings him a biscuit, giving it to him with hands covered with soot. Ames refers to it as communion and writes, "It seems to me much of life was comprehended in that moment." At another point Ames remembers watching his own son and a friend play in a sprinkler, and it is an occasion for a reflection on baptism. These biblical allusions are not merely dragged in to enrich the narrative. Rather, they flow through the narrative quite naturally because Robinson understands the ways in which the Christian story and the stories of individuals' lives are finally the same.