JetBlue comes Through . . . sermon addendum

Jet Blue delivered my errant duffle bag back sometime between 5:30 and 7:00 Monday morning. Interestingly, there was a note in it about the TSA having looked through it. Apparently, my worn Hawaiian shirts were a threat to national security (actually, it is good, in my view, to know that these checks happen and, as one who has nothing to hide (okay, some of the shirts are a little over the edge of good taste, A LITTLE), I do not at all mind what others might seem to think is intrusive. Anyway, what follows is an excerpt from the review by Nick Hornby to which I referred in Sunday's message. Hornby writes clever This is an excerpt, first published in 2005, now available in his book Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. San Francisco: Believer Books, 2006. I've probably not gotten this right, but it seems to me that Believer is a magazine several generations younger than me (whose original "working title" was "The Optimist."), and is aimed at those intellectuals in their twenties to forties. Nick Hornby himself is a great writer but, like the magazine, not a Christian.

Anyway, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is clearly a modern classic, and it hasn’t even been in print for five minutes. It’s a beautiful, rich, unforgettable work of high seriousness, and you don’t need to know that the book has already won the Pulitzer Prize to see that Robinson isn’t messing around. I didn’t even mind that it’s essentially a book about Christianity, narrated by a Christian; in fact, for the first time I understood the point of Christianity—or at least, I understood how it might be used to assist thought. I am an atheist living in a godless country (7 percent of us attend church on a regular basis), so the version of Christianity I am exposed to most frequently is the evangelical U.S. version. We are a broad church here at the Believer, and I don’t wish to alienate any of our subscribers who believe that gays will burn in hell for all eternity and so on, but your far-right evangelism has never struck me as being terribly conducive to thought—rather the opposite, if anything. I had to reread passages from Gilead several times— beautiful, luminous passages about grace, and debt, and baptism-before I half-understood them, however: there are complicated and striking ideas on every single page.

Gilead is narrated by a dying pastor, the Reverend John Ames, and takes the form of a long letter to his young son; the agony of impending loss informs every word of the book, although this agony has been distilled into a kind of wide-eyed and scrupulously unsentimental wonder at the beauty of the world. It’s true that the book contains very little in the way of forward momentum, and one reads it rather as one might read a collection of poetry; it’s only two hundred and fifty pages long, but it took me weeks to get through. (I kept worrying, in fact, about reading Gilead in the wrong way. I didn’t want it to go by in dribs and drabs, but it seemed equally inappropriate to scoff something containing this amount of calories down in a few gulps.) This column has frequently suggested that a novel without forward momentum isn’t really worth bothering with, but that theory, like so many others, turned out not to be worth the (admittedly very expensive) paper it was printed on: Gilead has turned me into a wiser and better person.