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Reading Guide for Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Use this journaling guide for your own reading and contemplation of the themes in Gilead, or discuss these questions within a group setting.

Balm in Gilead: Reflection and Healing

Though a work of fiction, Gilead is also a letter and written record of spiritual reflection. Reading Gilead slowly and meditatively can prompt readers toward spiritual reflection and prayer. Writing in response to Gilead may make such reflection even more fruitful.

Reading Gilead

Describe your reading experience of the novel as precisely as possible, and your feelings at various moments in the text (illumination? wonder? absorption? boredom? distraction? skepticism? agreement?) Your responses can help determine what is at stake for you in the reading of the novel, and where God might use the reading and discussion of this text in your life.

Consider the Unnamed Son

Some readers are frustrated by the fact that the narrator’s son isn’t named.

Preparing for the End

In the opening paragraph of Gilead, the narrator John Ames says, “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime.” In that way the novel may set itself up as a reflection on mortality and a preparation for a good death.

Living a Good Life

In that same opening paragraph, John Ames also says “there are many ways to live a good life.”

Practices of Discipleship

As you read, note some passages that describe John Ames’ practices of discipleship (e.g. “I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.”; his practices of sermon-writing; his relationships, etc.) even from his youth--and things perhaps, too, that he and Lila are passing along to their son.

A Legacy for the Next Generation

John Ames seems to have written his letter to his son in small chunks over a period of time. Such a letter not only instructs the next generation, but also helps John himself work through some major issues in his country and himself as he prepares for the end of his life. American literature boasts some captivating letters in this tradition: “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew” (part of The Fire Next Time) by James Baldwin, and even The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Practices of Remembering

Facing Challenges to the Faith

Gilead alludes at several points to Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, a 19th-century work of skeptical philosophy that critiques Christianity as a projection of the human mind onto God. Some of these references are funny, as when Lila suggests that they name the cat Feuerbach. Most of them, though, have to do with challenges to Christian faith. The Essence of Christianity marks John Ames’s brother’s departure from the faith of his youth (23-27, 63-65), and seems to contribute to his father’s departure from his ministry and from Gilead (176-179). Yet John Ames seems ultimately unfazed by the book, though he has read it carefully, and he even sees some positive aspects of it.

Engaging Enduring Questions

At various moments in the novel, John Ames encounters people struggling with really difficult, enduring questions.

Race and Christian Community

John Ames writes, “There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either” (6). And Gilead seems to be the record of a man’s trying to grapple with what’s happening under the surface of life. One of the main subterranean aspects of life in Gilead for its 1950s residents is its race history. Ames tells a funny story about its misguided support of the underground railroad (58-63--literally underground!); John Ames’ grandfather has fierce and morally questionable ties to Bleeding Kansas and abolitionist history (105-110); and the town has become, mid-twentieth century, even more racially segregated than it had been (171-172) in a state that had prided itself on being a “bright, radical star” against slavery and racial injustice.

I think that was a big part of [Ames’s grandfather] running off to Kansas. That and the fire at the Negro church. It wasn’t a big fire--someone heaped brush against the back wall and put a match to it, and someone else saw the smoke and put the flames out with a shovel. (The Negro church used to be where the soda fountain is now, though I hear that’s going out of business. That church sold up some years ago, and what was left of the congregation moved to Chicago. By then it was down to three or four families. The pastor came by with a sack of plants he’d dug up from around the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they’re still there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the deacons where they came from, so they’ll know they have some significance and they’ll save them when the building comes down. I didn’t know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because this town had once meant a great deal to them.)

Loneliness and Community

Place and Community

Gilead is a novel named after a place-- a place where some people leave and some people stay. The name alludes in part to a biblical phrase from Jeremiah 8:22 “Is there no balm in Gilead? / Is there no physician there? /Why then is there no healing / for the wound of my people?” that became an African American spiritual, “There is a Balm in Gilead.”

Conflict, Faith, and Relationships

Radically different theological and political positions are at the heart of some of the most painful relationship ruptures in Gilead--between John Ames’s grandfather and father, between his father and his brother, and between his father and Ames himself.

Reconciliation in Christ

The question of whether we or someone we love is reconciled to God in Christ (or reconciled to others we love) is often quite troubling--and it comes up a number of times in the novel, for Ames as he considers his brother Edward on pages 63-65, and also as all the characters think of Jack Boughton.

Longing for the Past

Some readers of Gilead wonder if the novel is a bit too nostalgic for a time in American history that has disappeared.

The Beauty of Prairie

Very close to the end of the novel, John Ames bursts out a surprising paean to an often overlooked midwestern landscape:

I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment “when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view. / / To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is, as little regarded. (246)

1 Daryl Smith, Dave Williams, Greg Houseal, and Kirk Henderson. The Tallgrass Prairie Center Guide to Prairie Restoration in the Upper Midwest. University of Iowa Press, 2010. For more on the Illinois prairie, pay a visit to the Nature Conservancy website.  Other relevant reading on the prairie: Cindy Crosby. The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction. Northwestern University Press, 2017.