The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Baptized kittens and the sacrament of everyday life in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

February 21st, 2006

Gilead has been on my must-read list for over a year now, and I finally secured a copy from the local library. Had I known it was as good as I suspected it might be, I would have plunked down money and bought my own.

Robinson’s novel, first published in 2004, made available in paperback last month, won a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award, not to mention many less famous prizes. I’d read Housekeeping (Robinson’s only other novel, published to high critical acclaim 25 years ago) in a graduate seminar, and when I heard she was coming out with a novel that had to do with religion, I had high hopes that, if any religious-themed work of fiction could gain entrance into the fiercely guarded halls of academia, Gilead would be that book (and I’ve recently seen a call for presentation on Marilynne Robinson at a big conference in 2006, so it looks like I’m not wrong).

Academic accolades aside, the book is full of small moments of grace in a seemingly insignificant life in rural Iowa. The narrator John Ames, Congregationalist pastor in a long line of Congregationalist pastors, describes the town this way: “To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is, as little regarded.” The place has seen miracles, too, such as Ames’ marriage in his late sixties to a much younger woman, and the child born from their marriage. It is this seven-year-old son to whom Ames writes in letter form, telling him all the things he would have told him had he lived (Ames has been told he has a serious heart condition and knows that he will miss out on most of his son’s growing-up years).

Of all the miracles in Gilead, my favorite is one of Ames’s memories of a day when he and other neighborhood children decided to play “church” and baptize a new litter of kittens—not, Ames explains, out of lack of respect for the Sacrament, but because “we thought the world of those cats.”

Ames writes,

“I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.”

I happened to read this passage on the very day that my 22-year-old cat, hardly a kitten anymore, had to be put to sleep, and I think the timing was no coincidence. I thought of all the ways our old feline had blessed us simply by being the mysterious creature she was created to be.

I’ve always struggled with what the word “bless” means, especially when the Psalmist says “Bless the Lord!” Sure, God blesses us, but how can we bless him?

I don’t yet understand it completely, but maybe I see a glimpse of what blessing God means when I think of how cats bless us simply by being cats. Is it possible that when I am most fully myself, I bless God? That God touches my warm little brow and takes joy in me just as young Ames took joy in the kittens (and later human parishioners) that he baptized? That blessing flows back and forth between Creator and created, sort of (but not exactly) as it flows back and forth between created beings who salute each other’s createdness?

I don’t usually think about it that way, but that’s the kind of thing that Gilead makes you appreciate: God’s love and grace expressed in the everyday.

Entry Filed under: Books