I believe so that I may see (Gilead pp. 1-86)

Each morning, my wife and I get up between 5:15 and 5:30. We hope to be at our desks by 5:45 so that we can spend some time writing before our son wakes up.  There’s something about writing in those wee hours that allows me to be more productive in 75 minutes than I often am for the rest of the day, even when that productivity just means a lot of thinking and a lot of staring at a blank notebook page. Around 7:00 each morning I close the notebook because I hear,  “Babbo! I wake up! I wake up, Babbo.” I know it’s time to get my son out of his crib, get his milk and oatmeal ready and make sure Mamma can keep at work for another hour or so. As you can imagine I enjoy being the first person my son sees in the morning more than I enjoy the tranquility of pre-dawn Chicago.

I’ve read Gilead three or four times. I read it when it was first published in 2004, when I was a graduate student in theology, reading Augustine and Calvin and Barth in the Midwest, subsisting on simple grad student-friendly meals, and wishing I were watching more baseball. I could relate to John Ames. But this is the first time I’ve read the book as a father, and I have to admit some trepidation when I picked up the book again. I was a little worried, to be honest, that the book would hit too close to home. Now that I’ve begun my latest rereading, I won’t say that my fear was unfounded, but I can say that it was exaggerated. I’m struck in a way I wasn’t before at how good and devoted a father John Ames is. What I’ve noticed this time is how in his letters Ames hopes to help his son see. It’s surely no accident that John is named after the Evangelist who noted that Jesus was the light of the world, a light that darkness could not overcome.