The hymn’s lyrics, though, are a quotation from another part of the Bible. Most significantly, it’s the place in the book of Genesis to which the patriarch Jacob flees from his father-in-law Laban with his two wives, their two handmaids, and his brood of children, including the 12 sons whose descendants would become the tribes of Israel. Gilead, an area east of the Jordan River, shows up a few times in the Bible. Not everyone has always gotten to speak in their own voice. Old American attitudes about who belongs in our cities and towns and who does not also thrum beneath these stories.Įven more fundamentally, the reasons those attitudes remain are there, too: the shame and fear that govern systems that push people away from one another in both free lands and fascist ones. Some Biblical scholars think the word “Gilead” means “hill of testimony.” So it may not be all that surprising that the concept of testimony - of crying out, of speaking up, of not being silent - is what links all three of these invocations of Gilead. And that’s significant, for a revealing reason. These seem unconnected, but for one thing: the name. The Handmaid’s Tale tests our loyalty in a puzzling season finale And it’s the much darker setting for a dystopian fundamentalist republic in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale and Hulu’s TV adaptation. More recently, it’s been the name of a sleepy fictional mid-century Iowa town for a trio of award-winning novels by Marilynne Robinson. The old hymn evoked it for more than a century before it was picked up as a song of protest and liberation by the civil rights movement. “Gilead” is a Biblical place, but it’s called up in American culture over and over. There are many versions of the song, which has morphed through centuries of American history, but the version in our hymnal had this refrain: Whenever he filled in for a service, he requested that we sing the same hymn - “There is a Balm in Gilead,” the traditional African American spiritual. One frequent visitor was a kindly British man who had been the church’s pastor years ago and retained an “emeritus” title. If all the church’s ministers were out of town, we’d have a visiting preacher. Our cavernous, old-fashioned wooden sanctuary didn’t have air conditioning. The hard, uncushioned pews got sticky in the heat, five decades or so of dust and dirt and sweat turning a little tacky no matter how often they were cleaned. When the midsummer air gets so thick that it glows pink in the sunset hours, and it’s too hazy to do much more than sit and listen to the crickets and passing traffic, I am transported to Sunday evening church in the summertime, in my hometown in New York’s Hudson Valley.
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