Finished Gilead at the first of the year. Had been intending to read it for a long time. After reading it, I recognize why it is so very popular and meaningful to a great many people. It touched me in a number of ways. This afternoon, I decided to review the highlights of books in my Kindle that I've read in the past year or so. Had forgotten how many highlights I made. Below are most of them, some with comment. Will be reading more books by her. She is marvelous.
- Your Highlight on page 7
There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.
My comment
People would confide in my Dad who was a minister into his eighties. He kept many secrets to himself. I know just the barest outline of a few things that slipped out.
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- Your Highlight on page 7
My father was a man who acted from principle, as he said himself. He acted from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it.
My Comment:
So did my Dad.
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- Your Highlight on page 27
It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.
My Comment:
I understand why the old fellow felt that way. I'm one of those who had his faith unsettled. I did not consciously question my faith because of fashion, though, in retrospect, that had to be part of it. I am a man of my time. We all are and we cannot escape that.
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- Your Highlight on page 32
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
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- Your Highlight on page 49
It is hard to understand another time.
My comment:
I know that is true. I've now lived long enough to perceive the gulf between now and the 1950's when I first came to consciousness. And how the 1960's were different. And then how the succeeding decades built on or terminated what went before.
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- Your Highlight on page 51
A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought—the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.
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- Your Highlight on page 53
But he was a fine preacher in the style of his generation, so my father said.
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- Your Highlight on page 55
He never encouraged any talk about visions or miracles, except the ones in the Bible.
My comment:
Same as my Dad who preached for about sixty five years. The most he would proffer was the hope of Divine Providence. And so it grates on me when evangelicals are so glib about the Lord helping them do this or that.
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- Your Highlight on page 56 | Location 689-689 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 6:11:22 PM
To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.
My Comment:
That describes me. Expressed it to my friends in my early twenties. And to be useful and seen as competent has been my ardent desire.
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- Your Highlight on page 64
I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.
My comment:
That is me too.
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- Your Highlight on page 75
Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.
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- Your Highlight on page 131
I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!
My comment
Oh what a wonderful description. I played baseball for ten summers of my life. Am thankful she reminded me of the great physical pleasure of playing catch.
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- Your Highlight on page 141
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?
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- Your Highlight on page 146
My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child.
My comment:
I never had considered or heard that before. But it has to have been intended by the author/editor(s). Great insight.
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- Your Highlight on page 162
How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do.
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- Your Highlight on page 164
There have always been things I felt I must tell them, even if no one listened or understood. And one of them is that many of the attacks on belief that have had such prestige for the last century or two are in fact meaningless.
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- Your Highlight on page 201
I have thought about that very often—how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.
My Comment:
I am hoping some of today's political catch phrases and slogans become like that.
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- Your Highlight on page 202
And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them “proofs.” I just won’t do it. It only confirms them in their skepticism. Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
My Comment:
Now that is a different take than I have encountered. Insights like that which she makes I find compelling.
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- Your Highlight on page 203
I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.
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- Your Highlight on page 215
I fell to thinking about the passage in the Institutes where it says the image of the Lord in anyone is much more than reason enough to love him, and that the Lord stands waiting to take our enemies’ sins upon Himself.
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- Your Highlight on page 224
Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.
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- Your Highlight on page 228
But your mother said, “I was in St. Louis once. Some of us went there looking for work.” She laughed. “No luck.” He said, “It’s a miserable place to be broke.”
My Comment:
I recall visiting Dad's relatives in St Louis, the summer of 1956 I believe. Watched chimps riding bikes at the Zoo. i thought it was great. All of life was enchanting as i was five years old.
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- Your Highlight on page 237
Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.
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- Your Highlight on page 268
When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, “Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.”
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My Comment:
I needed this.
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- Your Highlight on page 268
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.”
My Comment:
Wished I'd had an older brother who gave this advice. But it turned out I would being him.
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- Your Highlight on page 273
I thought he should be aware that grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways.
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