Gilead: Pages 140-149 Summary & Analysis

John has had a more leisurely morning today, and in the course of reshelving his books, it occurred to him to wonder what he’d say to himself if he came to himself for counsel. He decides to put his conundrum down in a Question and Answer format, calling himself “Moriturus.” He asks “Moriturus” what he fears most, and he replies that he fears leaving his wife and child “in the sway of a man of extremely questionable character.”

Continuing to question himself, John asks himself what makes him believe that Jack will have a damaging influence upon his family. This strikes him as a good question—after all, Jack has come to the house a handful of times and to the church only once. The truth is that when John looked down and saw Jack sitting with his family, covetousness rose up within him—the way he once felt “when the beauty of other lives was a misery and an offense to me.” He’s glad he thought this through.

The truth is that John doesn’t want to be old—“the tremulous coot you barely remember.” He wishes his son could have seen him when he was trim and fit, even into his sixties. He reminds himself that Jesus wept in the face of His impending death, and the Bible’s promise that “we shall all be changed […] in the twinkling of an eye.” He’s saying all this because he’s aware that he’s failing, “as though I’m some straggler” that people keep leaving behind. This morning, when his son came up to show him a picture, he was finishing a magazine article and didn’t look up immediately. He was struck that his wife said to his son, “He doesn’t hear you”—not “he didn’t hear you.”

The article was in a 1948 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal; Boughton had marked an article to show John a long time ago. The article is called “God and the American People,” and it claims that 95 percent of Americans say they believe in God. But the writer thinks all those churchgoers are “the scribes and the Pharisees.” The writer clearly thinks of himself as a prophet, but to John’s mind, the scornful tone marks him as a “scribe” himself.

“Believe in God” is an odd phrase, and it makes John think of Feuerbach, who doesn’t imagine any existence beyond this one. John observes that humans’ notion of reality is very limited. He tried giving a sermon on this last year, and he was very pleased with it, but people seemed puzzled, and he realized that he lives in his thoughts too much. It occurs to him that nowadays people might chalk up his abstract preoccupations not to eccentricity but to senility, “by far the worst form of forgiveness.” In any case, in his waning years, he has felt it important to tell people that many of the attacks on religion that have been so popular in recent centuries are actually meaningless. He wants his son to understand this, too.

This afternoon John and his son walk to Boughton’s to return the magazine. Every once in a while, his son runs off to chase drifting milkweed seeds, but he always comes back to take John’s hand again. John knows it’s hard to be patient with his shuffling gait. He drinks lemonade with Boughton on the porch. As soon as John brings up the magazine article, Boughton starts laughing—he knew it would exasperate John. They figure that lots of people in both their congregations must have read it, because it appeared in the same issue as a recipe for a horrible gelatin salad that has haunted both of their lives in recent years.

John says there are two “insidious notions” about Christianity in the modern world. The first is the view of Feuerbach and Freud, that religion and religious experience are basically illusions. The second is that religion is real, but that the individual’s belief that they participate in it is an illusion. John points out that people are always vulnerable to this second accusation, because no one’s understanding meets the highest standards of faith. But if religion’s failures mean that there’s no truth to religion (a view that the Bible itself rejects), then people cannot believe in the dignity of their own or their neighbors’ inevitably flawed expressions of belief. It seems to John that this article is written in exactly that self-righteous spirit that the writer criticizes.

John points out an especially “fraudulent” point in the article, which claims that the majority of respondents expressed confident views about heaven, even though the Bible doesn’t say much about it that’s clear. John argues that just because a subject is ambiguous doesn’t mean that someone can’t or shouldn’t form ideas about it; indeed, it may not be possible to avoid doing so. He’d love to talk to the 29 percent of people who claim they have no ideas about heaven to see how they manage it. Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day—he just multiplies the world’s glories by two (and would multiply them more if he had the energy).

Jack comes outside to sit with his father and John. He mentions a point in the article that Americans’ treatment of Black citizens seems to indicate “a lack of religious seriousness.” Boughton says it is easy to judge. This is the first John has seen of Jack since he came to church, and he feels a little embarrassed. He realizes he mainly came to visit Boughton to see if he and Glory were mad at him, if he’d driven off Jack by bringing up “the old catastrophe” in church. But he hesitates to bring up the issue because he doesn’t want to stir up needless offense. Thankfully, everyone seems to be in fine spirits.

John’s wife comes up to Boughton’s to tell them supper is ready. John coaxes her to stay for a moment, which she is always reluctant to do, and she says little. He loves the way she talks, though he knows she is self-conscious about it—like the “prodigal” way she says “It don’t matter” when she forgives someone.