Gilead - Marilynne Robinson [78]
My mother found the cap in a closet and did what she could to shape it up a little. But the old man said, "I'm preaching," and put it back in the closet again. I have the sermon, the ipsissima verba, because it was among the things my father buried and unburied that day in the garden. It is very brief, so I'll copy it here as he wrote it. My father encouraged him to write it out, I remember, probably to discourage rambling, and most likely in the hope that he or my mother might get a look at it and discuss it a little with my grandfather if need be. But he kept it very close, dropping his drafts into the kitchen stove and keeping the text on his unapproachable Nazirite person.
Here is what he wrote and what he said: Children When I was a young man the Lord came to me and put His hand just here on my right shoulder. I can feel it still. And He spoke to me, very clearly. The words went right through me. He said, Free the captive. Preach good news to the poor. Proclaim liberty throughout the land. That is all Scripture, of course, and the words were already very familiar to me at the time. But it is clear enough why He would feel they needed special emphasis. No one lives by them, unless the Lord takes him in hand. Certainly I did not, until the day He stood beside me and spoke those words to me.
I would call that experience a vision. We had visions in those days, a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams. And now all those young men are old men, if they're alive at all, and their visions are no more than dreams, and the old days are forgotten. We fly forgotten as a dream, as it says in the old hymn, and our dreams are forgotten long before we are.
The President, General Grant, once called Iowa the shining star of radicalism. But what is left here in Iowa? What is left here in Gilead? Dust. Dust and ashes. Scripture says the people perish, and they certainly do. It is remarkable. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His Hand is stretched out still. The Lord bless you and keep you, etc.
Only a few people seemed to have been paying attention. Those who did came very near taking offense at the notion that they were perishing even though the terrible drought had begun to set in that would bankrupt and scatter so many families, even whole towns. There was a little laughter of the kind you hear when the outlandishness of a thing is being generally agreed on. But that was the worst of it. My grandfather stood there on the stage in his buzzard-black preacher's clothes, eyeing the crowd with the dispassionate intensity of death itself, with the banners flying around him. Then the band struck up, and my father went to him and put his hand on his left shoulder, and brought him down to us. My mother said, "Thank you, Reverend," and my grandfather shook his head and said, "I doubt it did much good."
I have thought about that very often—how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next. You might think I am under some sort of obligation to try to "save" young Boughton, that by inquiring into these things he is putting me under that obligation. Well, I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it. It is even destructive. Young people from my own flock have come home with a copy of La Nausee or L'Immoraliste, flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief, when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible. And they are attracted to it by the very books that tell them what a misery it is. And they want me to defend religion,