Tomorrow, I’ll kiss the children goodnight and slip out of the house for a much anticipated gathering. Since arriving at our church, I’ve experienced the concepts of my faith taking shape in the humans around me in a way I had long stopped expecting to see. Having grown up with regular Sunday worship, I had a rote understanding of spiritual gifts: take a little quiz, add up the points, prayerfully discern how to act out your gift; and also, no talent is of greater value than the rest, for “if the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?” and so on. Teaching, hospitality, exhortation, etc., all parsed out in abundance by a loving God and lived out with earnest diligence by his people.
But here, spiritual gifts are incarnate. Here, a woman named Patty grieved the two years that she could not spread a white cloth and set a silver platter of donuts out for tiny hands and grown hands alike, as though each of us were kings, as though Sundays together were a kind of celebration. (Oh, and they are. How did I not perceive this before?) And in these months since we have reestablished our norms, I have seen her glowing quietly in the background, watching as our church family spools and unspools around her tables.
Here, a man called Joel offers up his vocation as a professor of psychology in the context of our adult community group, guiding us through practical and theological applications of gratitude. Steeped in the work of counseling, he creates a space where we can safely share the moments of our lives that could have been a disaster without God’s intervention. At 9:15 on a Sunday morning, he offers us a chance for healing and praise.
Mindy, Aimee, and Leah greet harried parents and their children as though we are actual celebrities, as though the week spent apart was too long and they are filled to the brim with joy to see us again. In the hour that I worship, I know my children are loved and cared for to an even greater degree than I, in my depleted state, could offer them.
Entering the doors of this church, I find an abundance of talents, poured out joyfully and without hesitation—a celebration of the unique image of God found in each of us. No wonder I felt so inspired to use my own.
***
By 2019 as I entered the third semester of my MFA program, I had reached a state of exhaustion with the very genre of fiction that I most adored: literary fiction. What is literary fiction? I appreciate the simplicity of this definition by Writers.com: “Literary fiction describes work that aims to resemble real life.” It is generally character driven, and unlike “genre fiction” (mystery, sci-fi, historical fiction, romance) does not adhere to any particular (here, I search for a kinder word than “tropes”)... um, rules, other than it seeks to be of “greater artistic merit” in its use of language.
For me, a lover of language and people, literary fiction is my writerly home. But for a while, I wondered whether I would manage to exit my program with any remaining love of reading, let alone writing, because the “real life” the best writers chose to describe was so often terribly disheartening. The women writers, many of them finding their footing in their writing career in the late 70’s and 80’s wrote about broken marriages. “If I have to read one more short story about adultery, I swear I’m just going to QUIT!” I texted my friend Emily that fall.
Even so, I followed suit, leaning into edgier explorations, looking considerably beyond my own domestic sphere for inspiration. Little did I know that the cafeteria tray of my life, where faith and art sat in separate and distinct squares, was about to receive a holy reorganization by a loving and faithful God.
***
As the Israelite people neared the end of their 40 years in the wilderness and Moses prepared them to cross the Jordan River to claim the Promised Land, leaders of two (and a half) tribes came to him. They saw that the land east of the Jordan was good for livestock and asked that it be given to them as their inheritance, promising to play their part in conquering the land across the river before returning to their wives, children, and livestock in this land called Gilead.
So, Gilead became a land inhabited by God’s people, proximate to the Promised Land, but not within it. It is possible to use this as an illustration for settling for less, and historically this geographical tangent did create strife among the tribes of Israel. But in Marilynne Robinson’s fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, I think she is (at least partially) speaking to the desire to live our lives as close as possible to the Word and Heart of God, while recognizing the significant distance yet to go. Through the Spirit and Word of God, we endeavor to tend to our parcel of promise on this earth: our families, our children, our spiritual inheritance, until we ourselves cross over the Jordan.
That is what the novel Gilead is really about, I think: the reflections of one man—a third generation preacher in 1950’s Iowa—as he prepares to “cross into the Promised Land” at the end of his life. There are other uses and meanings behind the name Gilead that are relevant to themes Robinson explores in her work, but for me, this one is the most meaningful. Gilead represents the “already and not yet” time in which we live, where Christ has already come to redeem us, but the earth has not yet been made new.
Gilead is a novel. It is fiction. A Pulitzer Prize-winning work of art. And yet it has illuminated aspects of the heart of God to me. It reveals the character of God and the precious finitude of man better than (excuse me) any sermon series I’ve ever heard.
How can this be?
***
As much as I squirmed through Flannery’s violence and Munro’s ambivalence toward motherhood that semester, I resisted any notion that I might write “Christian fiction” like the prairie romances lining the dusty basement shelves of the Baptist church where I grew up. It seemed to me that those books were no more than watered down, gussied up fairytales. They had no bearing on my life. Perhaps they wouldn’t harm the reader, but neither would they change them.
I told God, silently and resolutely, No—but steadily, he put books into my path that changed my mind. The first was the Book of Ruth, which delivered the question and inspiration for my first published short story and the genesis of my novel-in-progress. Then came the manifesto for art and faith, Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle, followed by the works of Marilynne Robinson, Wendell Berry, Makoto Fujimura, and others. Book by book, God gently, patiently led me to a higher, clearer vantage point so that I could understand art as an expression of faith, and a vocation to which he has graciously called me.
***
Here is another trope I resist: A writer alone in his cabin, suffering for the work.
And another: The idea that we have only one gift.
It seems to me that each of us has been given a whole pallet of gifts and we make what we can out of it only through our exchange with others. I love people and I love language. I love stories told over coffee and campfires and those found in the pages of books. As God stoked the fire of my heart around the purpose and possibility of artists for His Kingdom, I longed for incarnate conversation with other believers. I wanted to understand how novels like Gilead broke open inside the minds of other readers, to see their faces as they discussed these works. What did they notice? And could their appreciation for work that I admired help me as I endeavored to make something equally beautiful and true?
***
Tomorrow, I’ll drive through the dark to reach our local bookstore, where a small gathering of merry souls will take up residence at a table near a cafe to discuss Gilead. It feels like switching on a porch light. It feels like the beginning of a journey. And because I cannot contain my desire to talk about faith and art to one gathering a month, I’ll be continuing the conversation here with reflections on what I’ve read, snippets of what I’ve made, and the redemptive art I find hiding in plain sight along the way.
Will you join me?
2023 Reading List
February—Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle
March—Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
April—Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura
May—Virgil Wander by Leif Enger
June—Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley
Well, you know I love all of this. ❤️ Can't wait to follow along.