Gilead

may never hear one good word, and I just don't know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him.

That was two days ago. Now it's Sunday again. When you do this sort of work, it seems to be Sunday all the time, or Saturday night. You just finish preparing for one week and it's already the next week. This morning I read from one of those old sermons your mother keeps leaving around for me. It was on Romans I: 'They became vain in their reasonings and their senseless heart was darkened, professing themselves to be wise they became fools,' and so on. The Old Testament text was from Exodus, the plague of darkness. The sermon was a sort of attack on rationalism and irrationalism, the point being that both worship the creature rather than the Creator. I had glanced over it a little, but as I read it, it surprised me, sometimes because it seemed right and sometimes because it

seemed embarrassingly wrong, and always because it seemed like something someone else must have written. Jack Boughton was there in that weary suit and tie, sitting beside you, and you were very pleased, and I believe your mother was, too.

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Now, it does not at all agree with my notion of preaching, to stand there reading from a stack of yellowed pages full of what I must have thought once, trying to play down the certainty I had written into the language some black night half a lifetime ago. And there in the second pew was young Boughton, who always seems to see right through me. And I, being newly persuaded that he might come into a church with some however cynical hope of encountering a living Truth, was obliged to mouth these dead words while he sat there

smiling at me. I do think there was a point in associating rationalism and irrationalism, that is, materialism and idolatry,

and if I had had the energy to depart from the text I could have made something of that. As it was, I just read the sermon, shook all those hands, and came home and took a nap on the couch. I did have the feeling that young Boughton might actually have been comforted by the irrelevance of my preachments to anything that had passed between us, anything to do with him at all, God bless the poor devil. The fact was, standing there, I wished there were grounds for my old dread. That amazed me. I felt as if I'd have bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own.

I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is

in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone's. I was thinking about the things that had happened here just in my lifetimethe droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars. It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand. The word 'preacher' comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

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Well, we didn't ask the question, so the question was just taken away from us. We became like the people without the Law, people who didn't know their right hand from their left. Just stranded here. A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them? It was just a dogged little outpost in the sand hills, within striking distance of Kansas. That's really all it was meant to be. It was a place John Brown and Jim Lane could fall back on when they needed to heal and rest. There must have been a hundred little towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into the making of them, now just look awkward

and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better. It looks ridiculous to me. I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back.

I have mentioned that my father and my mother left here. Well, they certainly did.

Edward bought a piece of land down on the Gulf Coast and built a cottage for his own family and

for them. He did it mainly to get my mother away from this ferocious climate, and that was kind of him, because her

rheumatism became severe as she got older. The idea was that they would spend a year down there getting settled in, and then they would come back again to Gilead and only go south for the worst of the winter until my father retired. So I took his pulpit for that first year. And then they never did come back, except twice to visit, the first time when I lost Louisa and the second time to talk me into leaving with them. That second time I asked my father to preach, and he shook his head and said, 'I just can't do it anymore.'

He told me that it had not been his intention to leave me stranded here. In fact, it was his hope that I would seek out a 234

larger life than this. He and Edward both felt strongly what excellent use I could make of a broader experience. He told me that looking back on Gilead from any distance made it seem a relic, an archaism. When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, 'Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.' And that irritated me. He said, 'Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it.' He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving in my heart never to risk the experience of them. He said, 'I have become aware that we here lived within the limits of notions that were very old and even very local. I want you to understand that you do not have to be loyal to them.'

He thought he could excuse me from my loyalty, as if it were loyalty to him, as if it were just some well- intended mistake he could correct for me, as if it were not loyalty to myself

at the very least, putting the Lord to one side, so to speak, since I knew perfectly well at that time, as I had for years and years, that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have

of Him, which makes loyalty to Him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him. I know that, and I knew it then.

How ignorant did he think I was? I had read Owen and James and Huxley and Swedenborg and, for heaven's sake, Blavatsky, as he well knew, since he had virtually read them over my shoulder. I subscribed to The Nation. I was never Edward, but I was no fool either, and I almost said as much.

I don't recall that I actually said anything, taken aback as I was. Well, all he accomplished was to make me homesick for a place I never left. I couldn't believe he would speak to me as if I were not competent to invest my loyalties as I saw fit. How could I accept the advice of someone who had such a low estimation of me? Those were my thoughts at the time. What a

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