TOP STORY: ARTS AND RELIGION: Houses of worship, temples of dreams

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-Particles of light trickle through a stained-glass window. The beam of a movie projector casts scenes of grace and grandeur onto the screen of a hushed and darkened theater. To novelist John Updike, both images resonate with ideas of the sacred: the church, a place to offer prayers; the cinema, […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-Particles of light trickle through a stained-glass window. The beam of a movie projector casts scenes of grace and grandeur onto the screen of a hushed and darkened theater. To novelist John Updike, both images resonate with ideas of the sacred: the church, a place to offer prayers; the cinema, a temple for the worship of our dreams.

Ever since the Puritans planted their vigorous Protestant ethic in the receptive soil of the new world, Updike said, a distinctive kind of faith has permeated the American experience-faith in God and in the seemingly limitless capacity to invent and re-invent ourselves.


His latest novel,”In the Beauty of the Lilies”(Knopf), Updike explores how ideas of faith unfold and fade over four generations of one 20th-century American family. Updike said his goal was to take a”spiritual inventory”of the past 100 years.”I wanted to extract some kind of truth about the century as a whole,”he said in a recent interview.”The question is, what do we take forward as a species into the 21st century? How much will be left with what we think of as human?” The novel begins in 1910, as Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, suffers a crisis of faith and falls into a spiritual abyss. The Wilmot fortunes decline over the next generation, until Clarence’s vibrant grandchild, Essie, redeems her family’s drab existence by achieving the secular grace of Hollywood stardom. And as the century comes to a close, Essie’s disaffected son Clark-namesake of Gable-is drawn to a Waco-style cult, whose members believe all too easily in the darkest ideas of apocalyptic redemption.”I meant to take us from strong characters who have no faith to weak characters who have too much faith,”Updike said of the novel, which draws its title from a line in the”Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The moral of the story, if there is one, he said, lies in finding the balance between a paralyzing lack of faith and a blinding superabundance.”The human condition is to be in a state of suspension,”Updike explained.”We must have some faith in something beyond ourselves. On the other hand, too great a confidence makes us intolerant, cruel, and even mad.” The image of being suspended between the agonies of doubt and the buoyant ecstacies of religious faith is a powerful one, both in the novel and in Updike’s personal experience.

For Updike, raised a Lutheran, briefly a Congregationalist and now a church-going Episcopalian, spiritual crisis first arrived in adolescence, when he perceived that the minister of his church didn’t believe in the Gospel he preached. Later, in his 20s, at the beginning of a promising career as a writer, Updike said he found himself, like Clarence Wilmot,”on the edge of paralysis, in sheer horror of the abyss.” His 1962 short story”Pigeonfeathers”is a version of Updike’s adolescent spiritual crisis. And the subject keeps cropping up-from”The Poorhouse Fair”and”A Month of Sundays”to”Roger’s Version”and”The Witches of Eastwick.””Certainly the reasons for doubt and disbelief are abundant,”he said.”I’m not out of the struggle. But I cannot resign myself to a universe in which there is no real goodness and in which my life is meaningless.”My reasons for this are weak,”he continued,”but they basically consist of the notion that it’s somehow good to be alive, that there is a kind of ecstacy in creation, that there is something within it that says `yes’ and that we can tentatively answer `yes’ ourselves.” Nowhere in”The Beauty of the Lilies”is ecstacy more present than in the child Essie, the character Updike places at the heart of the novel. Updike, who writes so rapturously about women, says he liked this character the most.”I liked her spunk, her toughness, her willingness to size up her ambition, her willingness to pay the price,”he said.”She has a fruitful kind of selfishness that I prefer, at least in a fictional character, to barren selflessness.” While her grandfather is paralyzed with doubt and her father retreats from all of life’s challenges, from the moment of her birth Essie exudes vitality, confidence and a certain kind of grace. But her idea of God is uniquely self-referential. To Essie, God is an entity whose mission is to fulfill her every desire.”God was in the clouds and had sent Jesus to earth to make Christmas and Easter, and His love pressed down from Heaven and fit her whole body like bathwater in the tub,”the novel’s narrator says of Essie.”The fact that Jesus came down meant that God wasn’t just up there, but was all around them, invisible, not like a ghost, who would be scary, but like blood in your veins that you can sometimes hear when your ear is against the pillow. …” Essie ultimately re-invents herself as the glamorous movie star Alma Demott. As Updike charts her flashy-and fairly trashy-trajectory to stardom in the Hollywood of the 1940s and 50s, he demonstrates the way secular culture began to function as a moral force in American life.”What I and my fellow Americans got from the movies was two hours of release from the burdens of the real world-which is what some say religion gives you,”Updike said.”You got role models, you got examples of grace-human grace-Fred Astaire’s grace, Gary Cooper’s grace, the grace of all those heroines.”Just like the Episcopal Church, the movies did lead us to lift up our thoughts,”he said.”And until the studio system broke up, there was a fairly strict morality that prevailed on screen. The moguls were having a lot of pagan fun, they were making movies in which virtue was rewarded and vice punished. It was a rigorous moral order. It was churchly. We may not have identified it as such, but a kind of happiness and direction came out of the movies for awhile.” But the innocence of the movies that Updike recalls with nostalgia gave way to a darker era of confusion, excess and violence.”You go to the movies now and feel you’ve witnessed a kind of mess,”he said.”There are too many voices, too many attempts to please this or that segment of the imagined audience. … There’s no real esthetic, no sense of anybody being in charge. There are too many people trying to inform us, there is a terrible lack of peace.” In the novel, the moral confusion of that cinematic world leads Essie’s son Clark to a heavily armed religious cult in the Rocky Mountains engaged in a standoff with police. It is a world in which faith is strong and life is cheap, where a trigger can be pulled as effortlessly as a remote-control can change a TV channel. It is here that Clark must decide whether to meet a moral challenge or succumb to the madness.”In the Beauty of the Lilies”is no clear-cut morality tale. Rather, it is a flickering set of images of how the sins and virtues of one generation are handed down to the next, how the polar forces of faith and doubt move the human spirit like a tide.

Updike nevertheless remains upbeat. Critics who believe he has a dark vision of the human condition, he said, miss the point.”I don’t see much evil in people,”he said.”I do see considerable frustration and anger. We are thinking animals and that in itself is an awkward situation. We can foresee our deaths. We are able to perceive our own absurdities. We are in the grip of sexual impulses that we can hardly control. To be human is no picnic, in my view. And if you think that’s a pessimistic message, so be it.”

MJP END CONNELL

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