Wisdom from Gilead

I recently finished reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book Gilead, a beautiful little piece of fiction that requires slow, contemplative reading. Marilynne Robinson writes from the perspective of a small-town Midwestern pastor jotting down letters to his son. While a slender plot does exist, the real treasures of the book are the words of wisdom and powerful prose sprinkled throughout the pages. It is very hard to leave the life of this gentle, Christ-centered narrator behind without being challenged or changed in some way.

Here are my 10 favorite quotes from Gilead:

§ “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.”

§ “Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never what really matters.”

§ “People tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness, but because God their father loves them.”

§ “Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced.”

§ “Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior…How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it?...I do like Calvin’s image, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us.”

§ “Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it.”

§ “These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to do better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.”

§ “Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it.”

§ “You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

§ “There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”