Gilead

In this section, John’s attitude toward his age and infirmities is colored by a greater sense of bitterness. His anxiety about Jack increases and begins to affect his health. He feels that his heart contains both “illness and grief,” and he increasingly has trouble sleeping. He frets, “it bothers me to think I might be bothered to death” (186). Referring to Jack, John wonders (not rhetorically), “Why must I always defend myself against this sad old youth? What is the harm I fear from him?” (180). Yet John does feel the need to defend himself, partly to rationalize his unforgiving attitude toward Jack.

Now that Jack is in town, John is even more anxious about his approaching death. He is upset that Jack will still be around when he is dust. John’s grandfather quotes “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past,” a hymn by Isaac Watts (176), and John uses the same words from the hymn but elaborates, using them to express his personal fears of leaving no legacy and losing his family: “We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for” (191). John fears that Jack will take his family, destroy the memories he is creating for his son, and possibly harm the boy emotionally. John is also concerned how women, especially, “love where they pity” (186) and can be drawn into harmful situations. Here, John obliquely infers that Lila will pity Jack, want to help him, fall in love with him, and be hurt. Jack has the potential to destroy everything John holds dear.

John tries to work out his feelings toward Jack in the context of scripture. He knows that he should love his enemies because God loves them, although Jack isn’t really an enemy and hasn’t really transgressed against him. Yet John admits to struggling with “the true gravity of sin over” the “free grace of forgiveness” (190). Jack’s sin is one John can’t yet forgive. This is all the more evident in John’s very biased, very human addition to his rational, religious philosophizing that Jack is “just mean” (184).

Jack’s comment that John received his identity from his father rankles John, who still feels anger toward his own father. John defensively counters that his vocation was the same as his father’s, but even if he’d had a different father, the Lord still would have called him (169). John feels that he is forced to defend his faith to Jack much as his own father built up defenses of his beliefs after Edward became an atheist. John avows, “nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense” (177). Rather, defending can actually “unsettle” belief. John uses this argument to justify (and defend) why he is under no obligation to “save” Jack, because Jack’s skepticism requires proofs, which are impossible to give.

Still, John is uneasy about his treatment of Jack because his fallible human emotions are getting in the way of his ministerial detachment. This feeling of guilt goes all the way back to Jack’s baptism. Despite its being “magical thinking,” John worries that Jack, at his baptism, felt John’s abstraction and lack of genuine blessing (189), which possibly led to his bad life choices. John wishes he could rechristen Jack to assuage his own guilt.