Fathers and sons and their mysterious and maddening relationships -- loving, prodigal, forgiving -- are the spine of Robinson's story, and the biblical resonances reinforce how timeless and wondrous those themes are. Ames himself was the good son in the prodigal parable he tells his own son, "one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained." But, he adds, almost in the "pulpit voice" he tries to subdue, "There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal."

Less obtrusive but also a constant theme in the novel, as it is in American life, is race. Ames's grandfather is formed by the abolitionist vision; the Iowa town of Gilead was a stop on the Underground Railroad (Ames's recounting of pieces of that history provides the novel with some comic elements); and race figures importantly in the novel's denouement. Robinson's handling of the issue is careful and tragically appropriate for the story's time: two years after the landmark BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION school desegregation decision and just months before the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which would launch the modern civil rights movement. In a moving passage, Ames writes about an arson fire at the black church in town:

That church sold up some years ago, and what was left of the congregation moved to Chicago. ... The pastor came by with a sack of plants he'd dug up from around the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they're still there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the deacons where they came from, so they'll know they have some significance and they'll save them when the building comes down. I didn't know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because the town had once meant a great deal to them.

Very little of the politics of the outside world intrudes directly into Ames's letter to his son, but the events that forge and form the characters -- war and the Great Depression especially -- are there as a constant backdrop to what, in a liturgical calendar, would be called "ordinary time." GILEAD is a profound, prayerful meditation on, and a joyous thanksgiving of, life in "ordinary time" -- the sacramental character of physical, everyday existence as well as "the gift of physical particularity and how blessing and sacrament are mediated through it."

"I have been thinking lately," Ames writes, without either despair or melancholy at the approaching end, "how I have loved my physical life." As the novel concludes, he tells his son, "It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor grey ember of Creation and it turns to radiance -- for a moment or a year or the span of a life." It is a vision of transfiguration -- the ordinary stuff of life made extraordinary in the apprehension of it. Marilynne Robinson has done the same with the life of John Ames. In the imagining of it she has shown the sacramental possibilities of the world.

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service.