In the spirit of the season, I want to reflect on what being religious might mean today, in light of a superb — let’s call it religiously informed — 2004 novel, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. I somehow missed it at the time but a friend recently gifted me with it. By season, I mean this darkest time of year, when we seek out signs of light and hope.
The book is imbued with a sense of “hallowing,” a rare term now outside of Halloween and the Harry Potter books. It’s exemplified in the main figure of Reverend John Ames, an aging, dying Christian minister in a small, dying Iowa town in the 1950s.
Hallowing isn’t directly about God. It’s about a sense of set-apartness in almost anything, large or small, that’s suddenly, um, illuminated. A moment, a leaf, a face, a pang. Shock — that such things simply are. My teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, called it “radical amazement.” Sometimes known as awe. It’s kind of religion without God or tradition, much less doctrine. The raw material. It’s what suddenly mesmerizes Doctor Zhivago in the film of the same name, as he sees the moon while crossing an icy lake.
Anyone can experience these things, but a minister has, or had, a special shot since he’s designated “spiritual” by his community. He’s less likely to seem odd. He has permission to seek those moments out; it’s almost expected. We aren’t talking mystically gifted individuals. It’s something nurtured and valued by institutions through their history — en principe, if not often in reality.
This sensitivity to hallowing also defines Ames’s work with his congregation. True, “you can spend 40 years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery,” as he says in Gilead. Note that this is how Reverend Ames sees his role, versus saving or converting them — “and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten.” Sounds about right.
There’s an unfamiliar sense of scale here. Ames expends his life’s energy in a small church in a decrepit town — yet he’s not dismayed; it seems worthwhile, though he’s not famous or widely known. He’s on no magazine covers. Whence his sense of validation? In the eyes of God, I guess, who sees him do it all. So fame and worldly success aren’t essential, even if they might be attractive.
And what about God? Reverend Ames lives in a time of expanding atheism, though less than our own, but he refuses to “defend religion” or give “proofs.” Because “nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defence.” He finds the phrase “believing in God” to be odd: “There’s a problem in vocabulary.” I used to attend classes with the renowned Talmudist and thinker Joseph Soloveitchik, who maintained that faith preceded philosophy and heavy thinking wouldn’t ever lead you to it. Perhaps it’s like love and relationships that way.
When Ames meets someone new, he tries to ask himself why God put them in his path. This frees him to search for possibilities in the encounter, beyond what’s evident. It’s almost a trick, and likely to work whether or not you’re a “believer.” So when he meets a character who evokes his envy and jealousy — the deadliest feelings, forbidden in the Bible even though it’s futile to prohibit emotions — he wonders what God expects of him from this and he wrestles with the awful feelings productively, in a way people usually wouldn’t.
Mondays are his Sundays, because on Sunday he preaches his sermons. I used to attend a seminary, though I never finished, and I did take “homiletics,” which was about sermonizing. I’ve sometimes wondered if writing a weekly column, as I have for years, is an attempt to reinstate those sermons, though of course they’re in the oral tradition and this is written. But I do try to keep them conversational in tone and as interactive as possible.
Have a good holiday. I hope you find some peace and light.
This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.
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