Gilead (Gilead #1)

by Marilynne Robinson

A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.

He asked if she would like to come along, and she thanked us and shook her head and said, “There’s the cow.” She said, “We’ll be just fine when the rain comes.”

Simplicity

For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough.

In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.”

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.

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.

Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I’m about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.

Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant.

Remarkable things went on, certainly, but there has been so much trouble in the world since then it’s hard to find time to think about Kansas.

“Never mind,” he said, “there’s nothing cleaner than ash.”

And I know what I wanted in that moment was to give you some version of that same memory, which has been very dear to me, though only now do I realize how often it has been in my mind.

If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person.

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense.

But the fact is that his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books.

There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel.

Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.

Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams.

Source?

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.

The word “preacher” comes from an old French word, prédicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?