Introduction
“Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable”. These words, penned by novelist Marilynne Robinson and articulated by Gilead’s protagonist, the reverend John Ames, provide a helpful analogy for the way that memory works to form our present selves. It is precisely the memory, interpretation, and evaluation of our past “civilizations” and the ways that they interacted with the world in which they existed that provides the necessary material to build our current “civilization” which will be under construction until eternity. As our memories help to form us, they also impact the way we form the world around us. Our memories inform the ways we construct our systems and build our cities.
Of course, there are faithful as well as irresponsible ways to remember, and the integrity of our civilization depends, in part, on the quality of the material used to construct it. Memories which faithfully, honestly, and constructively reflect the realities which were once their present are quite useful and burst with potentiality for the present and the future. John Ames, in writing his own memories for his son, hoped to form him into a particular kind of person. However, the reader gradually becomes aware that Ames does not always remember well and thus, his own formation is also compromised. In the end, there is redemption for the old preacher, and this redemption speaks of the hope that Christ might work even our faulty remembering together for the good of those who love him.
Sacramentality in Gilead
In the ruins of the old church building, a young John Ames received half of a biscuit, blackened with ash from his father’s hands, and he took it and ate it. A now elderly John Ames recalls this moment in a letter to his young son to be read when he is older and his father is dead and gone. The aging reverend remembered the moment with his father and the half of a biscuit as a kind of communion, a eucharistic moment, and in turn, the moment has truly become for him, sacramental. This recollection of a moment of spiritual and relational intimacy between father and son against the backdrop of singing saints rebuilding their broken edifice would become more than a fond memory; it would result in an entirely altered hermeneutical lense through which to remember the past, act in the present, and hope for the future. But this is just the way it is with memory. There is a creative power in the act of remembering that is illustrated beautifully in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. As John Ames anticipates that twinkling of an eye when he will put on imperishability, he considers eternity and cannot bear the thought that we might forget the beauty of the world and the drama of this life once we are beyond it. Robinson writes in the voice of the narrator, “In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.” Ames believes that eternity will, at least in part, consist of remembering humanity’s past and thus engages in a sacramental act of remembrance in the form of a letter to his son. Robinson’s Gilead illustrates that the act of remembering is meant to be an act within time which not only anticipates the remembering of this life that we will do in eternity, but is also meant to form the interpretation and embodied performance of the present.
The plain beauty of the Iowan prairie provided the setting for much of Gilead. This plainness allowed Robinson to draw out the wonder of nature and to consider at length humanity’s interaction with the natural world. In this way, Gilead is a very ‘earthy’ book. Even the sacramental language in the novel seems to emphasize the temporal and human qualities rather than the lofty and eternal realities to which they point. Baptism, significant in its imaging of our union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection, is taken up by Robinson, through John Ames, to highlight the way that water makes this eternal reality temporally meaningful. It is the cloak and shimmer of the water dripping off of the Baptists, or the electrifying touch of the Congregationalists’ wet hand that makes the difference for Reverend Ames. Likewise, the chief eucharistic symbol in the novel is the half of a biscuit covered in soot presented to a young Ames by his father. Earlier in the story, the elderly Ames would be made to sip water out of a honeysuckle flower by his young son, conjuring images of a congregant sipping wine from a cup in the hands of an administrator of the elements. This eucharistic meal has an earthly quality to it which is not meant to diminish the eternal significance. These glimpses of love, provision, and joy between fathers and their sons is meant to enhance our understanding of our participation in things which are in many ways, too lofty for us, the things that we do in remembrance of Christ.
The very act of remembering is just such an ordinary phenomenon in Gilead. The narrator zips back and forth between memories of the past, musings on the present, and thoughts of the future. These thoughts of future are sometimes expressed as thoughts of his own eternal future once he puts on imperishability, sometimes they are thoughts of the temporal future of the loved ones he will leave behind. Other times they are the thoughts of an even further future, in which he and his loved ones will be united in eternity. It is in this ultimate future that the reverend Ames cannot imagine that “we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.” This hope of eternal remembrance carries significant implications for the way we think and move in the present.
Memory as Formation
In “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past”, the Roman Catholic church considered the task of evaluating history for the purpose of present and future reconciliation and ethical responsibility. In a portion of the paper dedicated to the historical and theological judgment, the authors work to disaggregate the process of ‘historical hermeneutics’ or, the interpretation of history. They write, “The past is grasped in the potentialities which it discloses, in the stimulus it offers to modify the present. Memory becomes capable of giving rise to a new future.” The act of remembering is formational. The fact that we are able to be formed into different kinds of people because we remember, gives rise to new possibilities for the future. In other words, “The encounter with the past, produced in the act of interpretation, can have particular value for the present, and be rich in a “performative” efficaciousness that cannot always be calculated beforehand.” It not only matters that we remember; how we remember is of crucial importance. In Gilead, and perhaps in our world too, the act of remembering carries implications that ripple into eternity.