(By James Davisson) – “For Preservation is a Creation, and more, it is a continued Creation, and a Creation every moment.”
To be sure, a number of you have heard me talk about this book, and one or two may already be sick of my constant admonishments that you read it. If you have yet to do so, you would do well to pay attention to these few words. There’s not enough space to speak to even half of what makes this book so great, so I will poke about it a little and tell you what I think is most important, and hope that you will follow my advice and sit down with ‘Gilead’ for a few hours one day.
Gilead is a letter from a father to his son. The father, John Ames, lived his whole life in a small town in Iowa, spent most of it preaching and living alone there; when he was very old, a woman came to his church, and asked to be taught the faith and baptized, and told him to marry her, and he did. So John is very old, and has a young son, and decides to write him a letter telling him whatever he thinks his son should know about his life, and his father and grandfather’s life, and the world and the loveliness of it.
Friends, there is such beauty in this book I cannot tell you even the smallest part of it. To read this book is to see the world with an old man’s eyes, and the world he sees is achingly beautiful. John Ames talks about how Creation is really a great Preservation, the Lord’s continual re-creation everything as it is, holding it together in His mind, so to speak:
“There’s a mystery in the thought of the re-creation of an old man as an old man, with all the defects and injuries of what is called long life faithfully preserved in him, and all their claims and all their tendencies honored, too, as in the steady progress of arthritis in my left knee. I have thought sometime that the Lord must hold the whole of out lives in memory, so to speak. Of course He does . . . the finder I broke sliding into second base when I was twenty-two years old is crookeder than ever, and I can interpret that fact as an intimate attention.”
The great beauty of creation, the love for God’s world, even though it be but the shadow of what we will have in Heaven, is a big deal in this book. Whenever I read it, things like sitting and drinking tea in the dark, or walking in the night snow, or looking at the sky off the back porch, take on a lovely, sacred quality that hardly bears description. John Ames likes to think that in Heaven, the world as we know it and the events that happen here will be “the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
Since John Ames is trying to tell his son about himself, much of the book concerns his relationship with his own past, trying to tell a story about himself and his family so that his son will understand where he comes from, and what the world is really like. The other part of this book that speaks most directly has to do with memory. Ames wants to tell a story, but he wants his story to mean something to his son, and to us, and he understands that what that means is finding meaning in memory. He puts it like this:
“Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth.”
For me, this is a powerful thing. I so rarely have any inkling of what any particular experience may really mean; I worry that I will never see the plan of my life, because I have no prophetic visions, just as John Ames never has any such thing. For him, and for me, and perhaps for you, too, the visionary aspects of life are meant to unfold in memories of things. Part of what this means, I think, is that understanding the way God works in our lives takes time, and we are often, if not always, unaware at any given moment what we are meant to understand from a particular experience.
I’ll leave you with some final words on the subject from John Ames:
“‘Strange are the uses of adversity.’ That’s a fact. When I’m up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it’s nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it’s as though I’m back in hard times for a minute or two, and there’s sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand. But that only enhances the value of it. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain water dripping from his hat, feeding me a biscuit from his scorched hand . . . I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned me to that morning, when I took communion from my father’s hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that’s what it was.”
There you have it, folks. Please read this book. If you need to borrow a copy, I’ll have a few handy, and you can ask me for one next time you see me. The Lord bless you and keep you all.
James