Gilead: Pages 166-173 Summary & Analysis

John slept poorly last night. When he got up, he made an effort to shave carefully and dress neatly, wanting to look more like a “gentleman” than a “codger.” Then he walked to church to wait for Jack Boughton and fell asleep in a pew. Before he fell asleep, he’d been praying for wisdom in dealing with Jack, and he figures he must have reached a sense of resolution on the matter, or he wouldn’t have fallen asleep. Jack, who’s also nicely dressed, apologizes and sits down to give John time to pull himself together. They chat about the congregation’s history, and Jack remarks that it’s “an enviable thing” to inherit an identity from one’s father.

John has a bad habit: he forms an opinion of a conversation early, and at this point, his hopes aren’t very high. He’s always been a little touchy about this, and he tells Jack that regardless of who his father had been, he assumes that God still would have called him to his vocation. Jack says that he always seems to cause offense without meaning to, and that he wishes he could have been like his own father. When John says that Boughton has been an example to all of them, Jack looks grieved and frustrated. He says he’d hoped to speak more directly and starts to go, but John encourages him to sit down; they’ll try again.

They sit quietly together for a while until Jack says that when he was a little boy, he thought God lived in the attic and paid for their groceries. That was the last time he was capable of religious conviction. He couldn’t believe anything his father preached, and he still doesn’t. And there’s another thing—he lies a lot, because people believe him, and telling the truth tends to go badly for him. By telling the truth now, he implies, he’s taking a big risk.

John asks Jack what he wants to tell him. Jack says that earlier, he’d asked John a question. John admits that’s true. He just doesn’t know how to answer it. Jack says it does not make sense to him that there is “a great gulf fixed” between him and John, across which they can’t communicate. John isn’t sure what Jack is asking—does he want to be persuaded that Christianity is true? Jack isn’t sure.

Jack remarks that a man he met in Tennessee had heard of Gilead and of John’s grandfather. He’d also heard that in the Civil War, there was a regiment of Black soldiers. He hadn’t realized that so many Black people ever lived in Iowa. John says it’s true—many of them came from Missouri before the war began. Jack recalls that there used to be more Black families in Gilead, but that they’ve all moved away.

Shifting to the sly, angry tone that John has never been able to stand, Jack brings up Karl Barth, whom he knows John admires. He points out that Barth doesn’t respect American religion very much. He asks John why American Christianity “seems to wait for the real thinking to be done elsewhere.” John starts to feel as if he is losing this conversation. He said that it’s presumptuous for anyone to judge the authenticity of anyone else’s religion. Suddenly he realizes he is crying, and Jack apologizes, contrite. After he leaves, John knows he has to write Jack a letter, but he has no idea what to say.