Ah, it's so lovely and bittersweet to visit Iowa with Marilynne Robinson's characters again! I think of it, and I feel inspired to take a deep breath and let it out slowly, just being in Robinson's beautiful and painful world. 
 Reading this book, I'm struck by the idea that "right" and "wrong" are relative to some degree, or at the very least difficult to classify, and the idea that redemption can be gained by choosing whether to continue or break the patterns of one's earlier life. There's also this element of how anticipating previous patterns can produce the very outcome that we're dreading, as with Lila and John's anticipation of her and the baby's leaving (by various routes). I also find it interesting that although Lila hears and follows the call towards love all along, she can't perceive it with any clarity until she moves to Gilead, away from all of the people and patterns and history that's been obscuring her vision. 
 I love how Lila reflects so personally on the stories in the Bible. She's like a natural seminarian (at least in my limited experience of seminarians). Lila seems much rougher in this book than I thought of her in Gilead and Home, perhaps because in this one we see Lila more through her own eyes than through others', and she's much less forgiving of herself than those around her are. Now I need to go back and re-read Gilead and Home with this new perspective. 
 This is a difficult book to quote, but I've picked out one that speaks to me that I think will hold up well even pulled out of the context of the whole story. It's from when Lila observes John Ames performing the baptism at the river. She sees him as: "A preacher doing what preachers do to give you what safety they can." (100) That one partial sentence describes for me both the powerlessness of the preacher and the profound hope that he has to keep people safe despite this powerlessness. It's not magic, but only words and ritual, and it's amazing not just that the preacher continues offering these things despite his awareness of their limited power but also that sometimes this offering seems to work.