"Magnificent," That 'Surely'"

The March 16 "New Yorker" contains ten poems, collectively titled "Endpoint," by John Updike, Episcopalian, who died of lung cancer on Jan. 27. The last in the series (his last poem?) was written on Dec. 22:

FINE POINT

Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel's defeats--
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
By Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely--magnificent, that "surely"--
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

"The Most Available Democratic Experience"

St. John's Church at Easter; flowers by Kathe Hayden

A Sunday or two ago on the Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor read out a John Updike passage about churchgoing. Several listeners, including your correspondent, wrote in for the citation, and someone from the show thoughtfully provided it. It's from a "New Yorker" essay by Episcopalian Updike entitled "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car," published on December 16, 1961.

I'd always wondered why I'd extravagantly bought the complete "New Yorker" on DVDs a couple of years ago. It turns out that this (maybe the third time I've consulted it) was why: Vocational encouragement at a pivotal time in my ministry:

There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for use one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts? To listen, or not listen, as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts, hopelessly compromised by words, of those intimations of divine joy that are like pain in that, their instant gone, the mind cannot remember or believe them; to witness the windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers arranged by withdrawn hands and the whole considered spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance; to pay, for all this, no more than we are moved to give -- surely in all democracy there is nothing like it. Indeed, it is the most available democratic experience. We vote less than once a year. Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one equals one.

"Quench Not The Spirit"

Coverage of John Updike's funeral at St. John's Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts includes this excerpt from the homily by the Rev. Wendel W. Meyer, the late novelist's parish priest:

Shortly after he was diagnosed with lung cancer, I visited John on a Sunday in Advent bringing him communion. I brought with me a copy of the Scripture lessons appointed for that Sunday and I read that passage from First Thessalonians, the same one that John later chose to have read at this service.

After communion, John talked about the lesson and the phrase that prodded his imagination: Quench not the spirit.

"You would think," he reflected. "that the goal of the spiritual life would be the opposite: to quench the spirit, satisfying our hunger and longing for God, but no, Saint Paul seems to be telling us that our thirst of God should never be slaked for it is the very means by which we are drawn to God."

The Words, The Sacraments, And The Company

As word comes of novelist John Updike's death at 76 from lung cancer, St. Batholomew's Episcopal Church in Manhattan remembers him discussing the comforts of church during a 2004 talk:

“When I haven’t been to church in a couple of Sundays I begin to hunger for it and need to be there,” he said, standing at a podium in front of the altar, against a backdrop of Byzantine-style mosaics and dressed in a gray suit befitting one of America’s elder statesmen of letters. “It’s not just the words, the sacraments. It’s the company of other people, who show up and pledge themselves to an invisible entity.”

I believe his last novel was Terrorist, a riveting story about a Jersey-grown jihadist who blinks, thinks, and doesn't kill. Hope indeed!

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.