Gilead

Often I read for sheer entertainment – nothing wrong with that, it’s always a joy provided that the book in question is somewhat well written, with good sense of what makes for good plot and style. But once in a while a book I read ambushes me; what I intended to use for my own entertainment seems to take charge, in a way, and I find myself turning the last page changed, not quite the person I used to be. Gilead, which received the Pulitzer prize for fiction in ’05, was like that for me. Here’s an excerpt:

"This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it."