Updike!

During his first marriage Updike attended the local Congregational Church and was active on committees. However, references to his church experience often revealed the lame and the ineffectual. In Sunday Teasing we find the protagonist waking on Sunday morning and lacking the will to,

……go be disillusioned in the ministry by some servile, peace-of-mind- peddling preacher. If it was not peace of mind it was the integrated individual, and if it wasn't the integrated individual, it was the power hidden within each of us. Never a stern old commodity of sin or remorse, never an open-faced superstition.

This description denotes the worst kind of liberal Protestantism. It is one with the Reverent Eccles in Rabbit Run who gives a kind of limp pastoral care on the golf course and who is confronted by the Lutheran pastor with the following:

……do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people's lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now; this psychology and that. But I don't agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don't think that. I don't think that's your job.

Updike knows that he and Rabbit have been sold short on God. He also knows that a price is to be paid. Couples ends with the congregational church burning down; "God's own lightning had struck it." Piet picked up a sermon blown from the wrecked church dated 1795 and read:

It is the indispensable duty of all nations of the earth, to know that the LORD he is God, and to offer unto him sincere and devout thanksgiving and praise. But if there is any nation under heaven, which hath more peculiar and forcible reasons than others, for joining with one heart and voice in offering up to him these grateful sacrifices, the United States of America are that nation.

The Congregational church is the church that Piet had abandoned during his adventures ploughing the wives of Tarbox. Its destruction was an act of God, a judgment on Piet's world that saw an abortion arranged for Foxy and a society numbed with meaninglessness and capable of any act that would afford comfort. The couples had become their own church gathered around the dentist Freddy Thorne whose world was dominated by decay and nihilism.

In the absence of a faithful Church the couples spent their time at sport and boozing and adultery. Their children were tended absently such was their desire for the good time. Even their patriotism failed when they went ahead with a black tie dinner that had been organised before they knew that their young president would be shot in Dallas.

How should we understand Updike in relation to the Faith? He stands in the line of Protestantism in his love of every ordinary thing. The world for Updike is shot through with God. His celebration of sex is the celebration of the joys of the body, a celebration of incarnation, of fleshliness. However, the boundaries that ensure the continuity of love and the care of children are overreached and damage is the order of the day. In the second creation story in Genesis we are told that the man leaves his mother and father and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh. The truth of this is the truth of family life and human flourishing. Updike understands this even though in his first marriage he flouts it and he and his family suffer the consequences. Judgment comes.

Can the church claim Updike as a son and does it matter? There have been American writers that are called "Catholic" like Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy in whose writings we may find an orientation that is distinct from the surrounding culture, an alternative vision that may be described as Christian. I must say that I do not find a similar alterity in Updike. What we do find is a stunning facility for description of the world and for feeling. There is faithfulness and great skill in his relentless searching for the kernel of the human condition, a work of faith to be sure. Augustine of Hippo held that the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man are overlaid and interpenetrated each other so much so that we find discernment between the two perilous. So it is with Updike. It would be shallow to categorise him in terms of religious affiliation. Yes, he is pro-choice, yes he sees America (a vast conspiracy to make you happy) in golden terms verging on idolatry, yes he was notoriously unfaithful in marriage. But his description of contemporary life, its drives and urges and uncertainties, the place of the person in time opens up to a theological analysis that is sorely wanting and surely earns him a place at least among the minor saints. After all, if we damned artists who did not live up to theological or moral standards where would we be?