Wednesday 13 March 2019

Still Quarrying 7: John Updike.

John Updike was recognised as one of the major American authors of the twentieth century.  He died in 2009 of complications arising from prostate cancer.  In that same year a volume of poems called ‘Endpoint’ appeared which reflected on his past life and the experience of his final illness.  One is entitled ‘Hospital 11/23 - 27/08’.  It is not the most optimistic of poems reflecting as it does on the inevitability and indignity of death and the shallowness of the exchanges he has with visitors.  

On death:

‘God save us from ever ending, through billions have.
 The world is blanketed by foregone deaths,
 small beads of ego, bright with appetite,
 whose pin-sized prick of light winked out,
 bequeathing Earth a jagged coral shelf
 unseen beneath the black unheeding waves.’  

Thinking of his family as they visit he remembers himself falling into ‘the conversational mode’, particularly with his grandchildren:

‘ . . . politely quizzing them
 on their events and prospects, all the while
 suppressing, like an acid reflux, the lack
 of prospect black and bilious for me.’  

He brings to mind those he has loved and lost and the struggles they had as they approached the final challenge.  Nothing encouraging for him there.   ‘Grampop in his nightshirt on the floor;/my first-wife’s mother, unable to take a bite of Easter dinner . . . my mother in her blue knit cap, alone/ on eighty acres, stuck with forty cats,/too weak to walk out to collect the mail,/waving goodbye from her wind-chimed porch.’  

His hope was that ‘Endpoint’ would bring a prospect of a future ‘reset in crisp exotic type  . . . a miracle! . . .’ which he could read.  It’s not absolutely clear  what he means by this.  Continuation of this life?  The opening up of a life beyond death? At this moment the one source of relief he has from the darkness of his thoughts is the sound of his wife’s voice on the phone: ‘ . . . I need her voice;/ her body is the only locus where/my desolation bumps against its end.’  

Another voice has broken into his day, however:

‘A clergyman - those comical purveyors/of what makes sense to just the terrified - /has phoned me, and I loved him, bless his hide.’  

Like many lines of poetry I have lingered over this without feeling I totally get it.  There is something patronizing perhaps even dismissive about the tone that puts me off and yet Updike is definitely on to something.  In a sense we clergymen are ‘comical’.  The best comics are those who are literally eccentric, apart from the centre of things, drawing our attention to things we see but have not noticed, calling us to recognise things about ourselves that perhaps are best left hidden.   Clergymen represent things that people would rather forget, big issues like right and wrong, forgiveness, death and then what?  Sadly sometimes those who rise to prominence in popular culture are those who help people forget.  The less like a clergyman you are the more acceptable you are.  ‘He is not like a minister.’  

I once conducted a funeral after which the grandson of the deceased said to a Christian friend: ‘It was a bit heavy-going wasn’t it?’  The problem was that as well as paying tribute to the deceased I read from the Scriptures, briefly shared the Christian hope of Resurrection and offered prayers.  The friend responded: ‘What do you expect a Minister to do?‘  

Updike is on to something.  Perhaps we are called to proclaim a message that ‘makes sense to just the terrified.’  Sometimes this is what it takes to see in Jesus ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life.‘   Terror of the power of evil, terror of the burden of failure, terror of the inevitability and perhaps gross indignity of death.  Who else is facing these issues, addressing them honestly and offering a way forward?   The American ‘humourist’ Joe Queenan has commented on funerals in his own country:

‘Funerals have become a cabaret.  There is no recognition that someone has died.  Eight or nine friends get up and tell jokes and talk about your golf game.’  

Terror has been taken from the grave not by the hope of Resurrection but by a refusal to acknowledge that something momentous has taken place and implications remain.  Frederick Buechner chides preachers who hold back the things that are of ultimate importance:

‘The joke of it is that often it is the preacher who as steward of the wildest mystery of them all is the one who holds back, prudent, cautious, hopelessly mature and wise to the last when no less than St Paul tells him to be a fool for Christ’s sake, no less than Christ tells him to be a child for his own and the kingdom’s sake.’  

So, yes, Updike has got it right whether he knew it or not.  Lord help me to be a ‘a comical purveyor(s) of what makes sense to just the terrified.‘   In the end, it’s when we face the terror that we know that peace that Jesus promised to all those who will trust in Him:

‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.  I don not give you as the world gives.  Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.‘  (John 14: 27.) 


Updike says of his clergyman: ‘I loved him, bless his hide.’  I like to think there is hope there, an openness, and that in the end what he purveyed made sense.