{"id":2618,"date":"2009-04-07T10:03:42","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T15:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=2618"},"modified":"2014-04-18T17:20:43","modified_gmt":"2014-04-18T21:20:43","slug":"april-7-2009-on-easter-and-updike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2009\/04\/07\/april-7-2009-on-easter-and-updike\/2618\/","title":{"rendered":" On Easter and Updike"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David E. Anderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Easter is not easy for most poets and writers, the difficult mystery of resurrection being more intractable than incarnation.<\/p>\n

One of the best examples of the problem is perhaps the most famous Easter poem of the second half of the 20th century, John Updike\u2019s \u201cSeven Stanzas at Easter<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Updike<\/a> identifies the difficulty in the opening line:<\/p>\n

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
\nit was as His body;
\nif the cells\u2019 dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
\nreknit, the amino acids rekindle,
\nthe Church will fall.<\/em><\/p>\n

The crucial word in the center of the first line\u2014if<\/em>\u2014starkly states what might be called \u201cthe Easter problem\u201d and Updike\u2019s insistence on the orthodox doctrine of the physical, bodily reality of the resurrection, even when hedged with the doubting if, provides a succinct but apt statement of one of the key themes of his work\u2014the terror of death and the search for some sense, some promise, of overcoming, and he will not brook any evasions:<\/p>\n

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
\nanalogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
\nmaking of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
\ncredulity of earlier ages:
\nlet us walk through the door.<\/em><\/p>\n

The tension between belief and doubt in the face of death, between faith and its opposite\u2014certainty, and the need for resurrection run through all of Updike\u2019s vast body of writing, from his early novels, stories, and poetry (\u201cSeven Stanzas at Easter\u201d was written in 1960, just a year after his first novel was published, and the poem was the winning entry in a religious arts festival sponsored by a Lutheran church on Boston\u2019s North Shore) to his later work, including Due Considerations<\/em>, his final collection of essays and criticism, and Endpoint<\/em>, a posthumous book of poems published this month.<\/p>\n

\u201cEndpoint\u201d does not directly address Easter, but its many meditations on Updike\u2019s impending death\u2014he died January 27 at the age of 76 and was battling cancer as he wrote many of the poems, specifically addressing his illness in a number of them\u2014underscore the tension he wrestled with throughout his career between the fear of death and the hope for some kind of afterlife. In a poem entitled \u201cDeath of a Computer,\u201d he writes of an old computer\u2019s final crash and the \u201chopeful garble\u201d on the monitor\u2019s screen: \u201cI in a spurt of mercy shut it down. \/ May I, too, have a stern and kindly hand \/ bestow upon my failing circuits peace.\u201d In \u201cFine Point 12\/22\/08,\u201d the last of the seventeen poems in the title sequence, he asks, \u201cWhy go to Sunday school, though surlily, \/ and not believe a bit of what was taught?\u201d He praises Jews who \u201ckept faith \/ and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites \/ from table to table as Christians mocked\u201d:<\/p>\n

We mocked but took. The timbrel creed of praise
\ngives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
\nThe tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
\nsaying, <\/em>Surely\u2014magnificent, that \u201csurely\u201d\u2014
\n<\/em> goodness and mercy shall follow me all
\n<\/em> the days of my life, my life, forever.<\/em><\/p>\n

Updike wrote in an early autobiographical essay, \u201cThe Dogwood Tree,\u201d of his fascination with what he called \u201cthe three great secret things\u201d\u2014art, sex, and religion and how they combined and interacted in his artistic mission to \u201ctranscribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery.\u201d While the appreciations and obituaries that poured forth at his death duly noted how art, and especially sex, wove themselves into his work, few noted what British novelist Ian McEwan called Updike\u2019s \u201creligious seriousness,\u201d his being \u201cconstitutionally unable to \u2018make the leap of unfaith.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

The final piece in \u201cDue Considerations\u201d is a contribution to National Public Radio\u2019s \u201cThis I Believe\u201d series. Written at the age of 73, Updike acknowledged, \u201cCosmically, I seem to be of two minds.\u201d While affirming the power of science to explain much of the universe, he also noted that \u201csubjective sensations, desires, and, may we even say, illusions compose the substance of our daily existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address and placate these. We are part of nature,\u201d he continued, \u201cand natural necessity compels and in the end dissolves us; yet to renounce all and any supernature, any appeal or judgment beyond the claims of matter and private appetite, leaves in the dust too much of our humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDue Considerations\u201d also includes Updike\u2019s 1999 essay for The New Yorker<\/em>, \u201cThe Future of Faith,\u201d a combination of personal and journalistic observations that seems a prescient anticipation of the recently released American Religious Identification Survey\u2019s finding that the percentage of Americans who claim to be Christian is declining, especially among mainline Protestants. \u201cAs the year 2000 draws to a close, faith in America hangs on,\u201d he wrote, describing the state of belief in signature Updike style that is instantly recognizable: \u201cA Protestant Christian on the eve of the third millennium must struggle with the sensation that his sect is, like the universe itself in the latest cosmological news, winding down, growing thinner and thinner as entropy works an inevitable dimming upon the outspreading stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Updike wrote that The New Yorker<\/em> assignment was given to him because he was the magazine\u2019s \u201ctoken Christian,\u201d and he undertook it only reluctantly: \u201cThe attempt felt dangerous; I feared it might empty out of me the last drops of what feeble faith had got me thus far.\u201d Finding himself fearful and sleepless in a hotel room in Florence, Italy overlooking the city\u2019s stolid Santa Maria del Fiore, the fourth-largest church in Christendom, Updike reports an epiphany in the midst of a thunderstorm: \u201cLightning. Hectic gusts. The rain was furious. I was not alone in the universe. \u2026 I was filled with a glad sense of exterior activity. My burden of being was being shared. God was at work\u2014at ease, even, in this nocturnal Florentine commotion, this heavenly wrath and architectural defiance, this Jacobean wrestle\u2026. All this felt like a transaction, a rescue, an answered prayer.\u201d It is, in a sense, the mature, aging Updike\u2019s personal encounter with one aspect of the Easter problem\u2014abandonment, the solitariness of being alone in the universe, and the need for transcendence.<\/p>\n

The passage echoes the famous closing of his short story \u201cPigeon Feathers,\u201d written almost 40 years earlier, in which a young boy is plagued by doubt, the fear of death, and questions about the afterlife. The fourteen-year-old protagonist, David Kern, has a series of unsatisfying encounters with adults, including the Reverend Dobson, a Lutheran pastor who tells him the afterlife is like Lincoln\u2019s goodness living on after him. Despite the minister\u2019s vacuous answer, Updike wrote of David: \u201cThe sight of clergymen cheered him; whatever they themselves thought, their collars were still a sign that somewhere, at some time, someone had recognized that we cannot, cannot<\/em>, submit to death.\u201d<\/p>\n

As David goes about the farm-boy business of burying six pigeons he has killed as pests, he loses himself in studying the intricate designs on the birds\u2019 feathers: \u201cAs he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

In some senses, including what he called his \u201cfragile\u201d faith, Updike was the emblematic mainline Protestant. He was raised a Lutheran but, like many other Americans, held his denominational affiliation somewhat loosely. After marrying his first wife, a Unitarian, the couple attended a Congregational church as a sort of mixed-marriage compromise, and in the mid-1980s, after divorce and remarriage, Updike identified himself as \u201ca card carrying Episcopalian.\u201d He could even, as he said in a brief note he wrote about his 1988 novel S., the third book in his trilogy based on Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s The Scarlet Letter<\/em>, write of becoming \u201can increasingly enthusiastic disciple of Indian religions.\u201d That appears to have been more a literary and linguistic enthusiasm than a discipleship, yet his poem \u201cReligious Consolation\u201d seems to acknowledge a need for the varieties of religious experience:<\/p>\n

Strange, the extravagance of it\u2014who needs
\nThose eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints
\nWhose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,
\nThose joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books
\nMoroni etched in tedious detail?
\nWe do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.<\/em><\/p>\n

Unlike most of his characters and many Americans, Updike was theologically sophisticated. He cut his teeth on Danish Lutheran theologian Soren Kierkegaard, Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, and, to a lesser extent, existentialist German philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. All three continued to engage him, and in \u201cMidpoint,\u201d a long autobiographical poem published in 1969, he paid tribute to Kierkegaard and Barth:<\/p>\n

An easy Humanism plagues the land;
\nI choose to take an otherworldly stand.
\n—
\nPraise Kierkegaard, who splintered Hegel\u2019s creed
\nUpon the rock of Existential need;
\nPraise Barth, who told how saving Faith can flow
\nFrom Terror\u2019s oscillating Yes and No;<\/em><\/p>\n

In his conclusion to a 1976 review of biographies of Barth and Tillich, Updike wrote that both men \u201cconfronted the apparent withdrawal of God from the world around them\u2014Barth by claiming He was Wholly Other and thus immune to detection, Tillich by suggesting that He was present, weakly, in everything. Theology buttresses the faith that would hold off mortal fear, and these two theologians, a decade after the decade of their deaths, present a merged afterimage, positive and negative slants on the problem of Angst<\/em>. What lingers of Barth, still ringing in the air of churches and seminaries, was his tone of fearlessness, his bold, encyclopedic, and hearty exposition of the word of God as over against the word of Man; whereas Tillich, unable to exclude anxiety and doubt, brought them into the sanctum, and called them holy emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than any other contemporary novelist Updike also made clergy significant, even central characters in his work. It is hard to imagine another writer who has created such a range of clerics, from the dueling figures of orthodox Lutheran pastor Fritz Kruppenbach and liberal Episcopalian priest Jack Eccles in Rabbit, Run<\/em> to the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, Updike\u2019s version of Hawthorne\u2019s Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, in A Month of Sundays<\/em>, to his epic yet intimate In the Beauty of the Lilies<\/em>, in which he richly described the loss of faith of Presbyterian clergyman Clarence Arthur Wilmot, to his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick<\/em>, and its depiction of the Reverend Deborah Larcom, a Unitarian clergywoman. When she preached, one of the other characters observes, \u201cit was with utter naturalness and clarity, taking Jesus and Buddha as equivalent embodiments of goodness, citing Doctor Schweitzer and Mohandas Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King as manifestations of the divine in human form.\u201d Drawn from across a range of denominations and theological perspectives, Updike\u2019s clergy are never cardboard or stick figures, but fully realized and embodied characters. As he said in a 1978 interview, \u201cThe practicing minister is in a terribly difficult position in our pretty well de-Christianized, inconsolable age. But they keep going, don\u2019t they \u2026 and I admire them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, it must be noted that despite Updike\u2019s insistence that if <\/em>Jesus rose it was a bodily rather than metaphorical resurrection, Jesus himself and the events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection are largely absent from his poetry and fiction. His hope, the unstated Easter hope for eternal life that runs through his work, is dependent on what he called in one story \u201csupernatural mail\u201d with its \u201cdecisive but illegible\u201d signatures, those very immanent things and events that contain within them the promise of more. In \u201cPigeon Feathers\u201d he provided a telling example: \u201cThe sermon topics posted outside churches, the flip, hurried pieties of disc jockeys, the cartoons in magazines showing angels or devils\u2014on such scraps he kept alive the possibility of hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or as Updike affirmed in the last line of the first poem in his final book: \u201cBirthday, death day\u2014what day is not both?\u201d<\/p>\n

–David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on novelists Marilynne Robinson<\/a> and Alice McDermott<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by David E. Anderson Easter is not easy for most poets and writers, the difficult mystery of resurrection being more intractable than incarnation. 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