The Welcome Table
On the First Five Chapters of The Gospel According to James Baldwin
Dear Friend,
One of the things I appreciate about Greg Garrett’s approach in The Gospel According to James Baldwin is the way he refuses to treat Baldwin like a monument. Garrett treats him as a living voice, a writer you meet, and then keep meeting, because each return changes the angle of your sight. Early on, he reminds us that “art and culture can and must be read not just critically but also in the light of how they represent, distort, and transform our own lives” (2). Baldwin is not meant to remain safely “over there” in the category of “Great American Writers.” He is meant to touch the nerve of the reader’s life.
On Pilgrimage, Seeking St. James
Garrett frames this book as pilgrimage, and I keep thinking about what pilgrimage implies, movement, hunger, the willingness to be changed by where you go. To seek St. James, in Garrett’s framing, is also to seek a way of reading that makes demands on the reader. Baldwin, Garrett says, “is the sort of writer who alters your perception of the world and forces you to consider and reconsider your place within it” (3). Place becomes a key word for me here. Baldwin presses on the question of where we stand, what stories we have inherited, and what it costs to keep standing there.
Garrett offers a concise description of Baldwin’s moral center, “how we are called to love each other and to be responsible for each other” (5). I hear a dare inside that sentence. It brings to mind Kelly Clarkson’s “I Dare You (to Love),” because the phrase captures the risk embedded in love as Baldwin understands it. Love requires a kind of attention that does not let us slide past one another, and it requires a responsibility that keeps showing up even when it would be easier to retreat into principle, posture, or distance.
The Life of James Baldwin
In the biographical chapter, Garrett offers a reading of Baldwin’s novels that shifts what rises to the surface. He writes that the point of Giovanni’s Room “was not that its narrator David loves a man, but that he doesn’t love him enough” (15) and that Go Tell it on the Mountain is “about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody.” Garrett’s phrasing leaves me thinking about the casualties created by fear, the quiet ways fear makes us less generous, less brave, less present, and how easily it turns another person into a site of consequence.
Garrett also names what he believes Baldwin teaches. “It is nothing less than a commitment to being fully alive, a way to be fully human, an awareness that love, freedom, and justice are the universal desires of every single human being. It is a commitment to look at our world and at our lives and to strive to tell nothing but the truth” (18). The insistence on truth is not abstract here. It points toward a life lived awake, and it connects the inward work of honesty to the outward work of justice.
Baldwin as Prophet of Humanity
When Garrett turns to Baldwin as prophet, one line arrives like a bell that keeps ringing across decades. As Baldwin said in Notes of a Native Son, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I have carried that sentence for a long time, partly because it refuses the easy moral logic of our public arguments. It makes room for critique as a form of devotion, and for devotion as something sturdy enough to withstand the truth.
I felt the personal tug in this chapter too. I often have a similar response to political opposites who tell me I should “just leave” if I don’t like it here. Baldwin’s line helps me name what I mean in those moments, that love can include insistence, and that insistence can be a kind of fidelity to the lives harmed by the nation’s myths.
Baldwin on Culture
This chapter felt like it had a hand on Baldwin and a hand on the classroom. Garrett writes, “Baldwin believed that great art should take on the sicknesses and psychoses of those who consume it, show them their flaws and failings, and offer them the chance to become well, to help those readers, listeners, and viewers to live into their full humanity” (29). The language here echoes what my students and I have been circling lately after reading an assigned article on bibliotherapy, as we try to articulate what it means to connect with oneself, and to connect with others, through the act of carefully consuming literature, or film, or any art that refuses to leave us unchanged.
This is also where I can imagine weaving in Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” because it sits near Baldwin’s recurring question about purpose, personhood, and what it means to live awake. Garrett suggests Baldwin’s primary premise is, “art is about life, love, and telling the truth, and art that doesn’t do that divides us from each other and from ourselves instead of uniting us” (30). Garrett threads this forward into Baldwin’s late-life distillation, “I know that we can be better than we are. That’s the sum total of my wisdom” (39). There is a kind of tenderness inside that, and also a demand, because it implies capacity, and therefore responsibility.
Garrett adds, “despite Scorates’s dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living, the American experience remains largely unexamined, marked by ignorance, blindness, and intellectual dishonesty” (44). Baldwin’s analysis of whiteness appears here as a trap of story and history, white people are “trapped in their own histories, histories that end up ensnaring all of us because of bad art and harmful myths” (45). Garrett keeps returning to honesty, and Baldwin’s sense that witness is part of an artist’s calling. That “artists . . . serve as an unimpeachable witness to their own experience, which requires that they accept their vision of the world, ‘no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others’” (43). The point, as Garrett frames it, is transformation, and the standard is whether art moves a reader into deeper sight. Ultimately, “what separates good art from unsuccessful art is that [good art] teaches us something about the world and ourselves. It challenges us. It moves us to a new place” (55).
Baldwin on Faith
Garrett’s faith chapter brings forward Baldwin’s sense of the sacred as something tangible. Baldwin’s final work, a never performed play, [speaks] “about the Christian concept of the Welcome Table, a place where all would be respected, loved, seen, known, and fed” (60). The image is disarmingly simple, and it opens into bigger questions about belonging, about who gets named as neighbor, and about what love looks like when it becomes practice.
Garrett also offers Baldwin’s warning about misapplied belief. “What Baldwin believes about faith . . . is that belief and action badly applied make us more dangerous, more limited, more blinkered in our vision. A bad religious understanding may breed jealousy, greed, and hatred. Baith faith may in fact be worse than no faith at all” Garrett 63). The danger here feels familiar, religion that forgets its responsibility to human beings, religion that offers moral permission for cruelty, religion that calls itself truth while shrinking its capacity to see.
The most personally affecting moment for me in these first five chapters comes on page 79, in the section about Buddy in The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Buddy is “a young man from his church on the street, and how this young man . . . has been cast from the community and seemed to him ‘sad and weary,’ ‘lightless and lonely, unbelievably lonely, looking at something far away or deep within’” (79). As Garrett said, Buddy was lost and lonely, and the narrator wonders “if love for him” might have saved him. I cannot stop thinking about the question that hangs in the air there, the possibility that love was present as language and absent as action.
This is where Twenty One Pilots’ “Heathens” feels like an emotional echo, the atmosphere of someone marked as outside, surrounded by people who can still refuse to welcome. The command to “love” has to be fulfilled, but it’s often a lie, or at least it becomes something performative, something spoken without the risk of being enacted.
Where I am after five chapters
After these opening chapters, I feel Garrett presenting Baldwin’s “gospel” as a moral ethic, one that asks for truth telling, and for a refusal of the myths that keep us cruel, and for a love that understands responsibility as part of its definition. It keeps turning me back toward the concrete question, whether our lives, our art, our politics, our classrooms, our churches, our friendships, actually become a Welcome Table
Meditation
“It is a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.” --James Baldwin
Love,
~Adam
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