Gilead (Gilead #1)

by Marilynne Robinson

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.

I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord.

“I tell them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”

“I’m just trying to find a slightly useful way of saying there are things I don’t understand. I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do.”

That is just a way of saying I could never thank God sufficiently for the splendor He has hidden from the world—your mother excepted, of course—and revealed to me in your sweetly ordinary face.

I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained.

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life.