Relative to their population size, the Great Plains of North America have spawned more great literature than perhaps any other landscape. The vast grasslands stretching from the Canadian prairies southward to Texas and New Mexico inspired Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and Willa Cather’s novels (just for starters). For many, the sky and the frontier and the grasslands became an irresistible muse—but the faith of the frontier settlers is also a defining feature of almost every work.
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is a Great Plains masterpiece of such power that F. Scott Fitzgerald felt that The Great Gatsby was a failure in comparison. It is narrated by the orphaned Jim Burden, who is sent to live with his grandparents in the 1880s in Nebraska. Josiah and Emmaline Burden were based on Cather’s paternal grandparents William and Emily, who moved from Virginia to Nebraska in 1877.
The fervent faith of Josiah and Emmaline Burden is an undercurrent throughout the novel. The Burdens are devout Baptists, and their Christianity is a source of goodness and moral boundaries; of strictness, and self-sacrificial kindness to everyone around them. When they are grieved by their grandson going to the dance halls on Saturday night, he agrees to stop—and Cather writes the scene without a trace of contempt. Theirs was the quiet faith that built a country, and Cather treats it with sincere respect.
Grandfather Burden is one of the most beautifully written Christian characters I’ve encountered in American literature. He is uncompromising in his beliefs and unfailingly kind to those who do not share them. When Mr. Shimerda, a recent Catholic immigrant from Bohemia, commits suicide, his family is deeply distressed that he died without a priest. “We believe that Christ is our only intercessor,” Grandfather says kindly.
The grieving family cannot bury Mr. Shimerda in a Catholic cemetery, and a handful of pioneers gather on a wind-blasted winter day to bury him on his own land. Mrs. Shimerda asks Grandfather to say a few words at the graveside, and he solemnly agrees, a Baptist at the burial of a Catholic who died by suicide. What follows is a beautiful reflection on the sovereignty of God; of divine justice, and divine mercy:
He took off his hat, and the other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable. I still remember it. He began, “Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee.” He prayed that if any man there had been remiss towards the stranger come to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart. He recalled the promises to the widow and the fatherless, and asked God to smooth the way before this widow and her children, and to “incline the hearts of men to deal justly with her.” In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda at “Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat.”
The gathered neighbors, led by a farmhand, sing “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and Jim recalls: “Whenever I have heard the hymn since, it has made me remember that white waste and the little group of people; and the bluish air, full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying: ‘While the nearest waters roll, While the tempest is still high.’”
Cather’s description of Mr. Shimerda’s final resting place on the corner of his property, still visible decades later, recalled the graves I have seen in overgrown, century-old prairie cemeteries, the wooden crosses long gone, marked only by slumps in the soil where the rotted wooden coffin lids finally gave way.
When My Ántonia was published in 1918, Cather could expect her readers to understand all that. Her descriptions of the Great Plains were shot through with biblical imagery, and the language of Scripture lends power to her prose. “The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.” Anyone who has watched the sun sink into seas of grass will instantly know what she means.
That brings me to a second prairie novel I read this year, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It is written as a long farewell letter by elderly Iowa pastor John Ames to the young son of his old age, filled with his reflections on his land, faith, and forefathers (including his fiery abolitionist grandfather, an accomplice of John Brown). Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and Robinson was surprised that such a religious book received an overwhelmingly positive reception from critics and readers.
Some did note that those unfamiliar with Christianity might struggle with the themes. “Simply put, practically everybody agrees that Gilead is a wonderful, even classic literary creation—like Robinson’s Housekeeping of 25 years ago—but practically no one feels fully comfortable with the new book’s status as both a novel and a genuine (real) expression of spiritual understanding, spiritual belief, spiritual truth,” Will Joyner noted in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.
Like Cather, Robinson has near-perfect renderings of prairie scenes. Last year, driving through Iowa with my family on a hot July night, we found ourselves in a sea of fireflies. They hung in the cornfields and spangled the tassels; they drifted over the long grass alongside the gravel road; they sparkled in shifting constellations on the horizon. We pulled over to watch. It was breathtaking. Robinson describes a similar scene, with Ames and his fellow pastor, the Presbyterian Robert Boughton:
Once when Boughton and I had spent an evening going through our texts together and we were done talking them over, I walked him out to the porch, and there were more fireflies out there than I had ever seen in my life, thousands of them everywhere, just drifting up out of the grass, extinguishing themselves in midair. We sat on the steps a good while in the dark and the silence, watching them. Finally Boughton said, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” And really, it was that night as if the earth was smoldering. Well, it was, and it is. An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. I don’t know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever since.
The entire book is packed with passages like that, and I find it hard to believe that the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded a book that appears to be written for a previous generation with one of literature’s most prestigious prizes.
Only a handful of other novels have achieved a similar status this century, including (to name just one) Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, which sold over a million copies and received rave reviews, including one from Frank McCourt. The lesson here is easy to discern: literature grappling with complex Christian themes on their own terms, without doubt, sneers, or deconstruction with can still reach a wide audience–so long as it is genuinely great literature.
