By Chaplain Mike

My dearest children,

This weekend I had the profound pleasure to visit with the Rev. John Ames, a Congregational minister from Gilead, Iowa. He came to my attention and told me his stories through Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead.

Hearing him speak and weave his tales was a revelation, I must say.

Like you, John was born into a preacher’s family. However, unlike our family, the vocation of minister was everywhere among his kin, on both his father and mother’s side. It was in their blood.

Ames’s father and grandfather were particularly strong influences on him. His father’s father was a legendary, larger than life figure who had moved from Maine to Kansas in the 1830’s to support the abolitionists. Over the years, he kept a lot of secrets about his activities in Kansas–it was a wild and tempestuous era in our history–and it’s likely he had a great deal of human frailty and perhaps downright impiety to confess to the Lord when all was said and done. He joined a graybeard regiment in the Civil War and ended up losing an eye, came home and moved in with his son’s family for a time, and then ran back off to Kansas, where he died in a town that died too, because of the railroad and drought.

One of the formative events in John’s life was when his father took the boy (at age twelve) and set off to find the old man’s grave. They had a hard time of it, travel being what it was then, and the parchedness making food and comfort hard to come by. They put themselves at great risk of dying themselves, out there in that desolate land. But John’s father had to make the journey. The last words he and his own father had exchanged were angry and bitter, and it drove him to find one last way to honor the man.

Father and son finally found the unkempt graveyard, which John describes as “just a patch of ground with a half-fallen fence around it and gate on a chain weighted with a cowbell.” They fixed up the fence as best they could. Then, borrowing some tools from a nearby farmhouse, they tended to the ground, cutting the brush, righting the falling markers, and being careful not to tread on the graves. After scattering flower seeds they had carried from their own garden, John’s father offered a prayer, asking for pardon and remembering his father to the Lord.

It was during that prayer that John had an epiphany. I will let him describe it.

Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time. I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon.

My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.”

And that, dear children, is one of the main things you should know about John Ames. He’s learned what it means to stand squarely between the horizons, and he can describe the light.

Continue reading “A Letter from Gilead”