John Updike's Curiosity About Faith & Resonance with J.D. Salinger

Copyright © 2014 Wendy Murray.

By Wendy Murray

John Updike was born on this day, March 18, in 1932 (d. Jan 27, 2009). He is best known for his "Rabbit" series in fiction, two of which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Rabbit is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1991).

Updike's Rabbit novels:

(1960) Rabbit, Run 

(1971) Rabbit Redux 

(1981) Rabbit Is Rich  

(1990) Rabbit At Rest 

(1995) Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels  

(2001) Rabbit Remembered (a novella in the collection Licks of Love)

I did not take to Updike's novels -- they seemed more a man's game. But I devoured his essays that New Yorker and elsewhere, particularly those he wrote late in his life when he explored spiritual themes.

In 1961 he wrote a review in the New York Times of his contemporary J.D. Salinger's, book Franny and Zooey. (Prior to its publication as a novel it had appeared as two short stories in the New Yorker.) Even at this ascending phase of Updike's career, he resonated with Salinger's religious exploration in the book embodied in the character of Franny. The story centers around her near- despair: “All I know is I’m losing my mind. I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting--it is, it is.” Her disenchantment incited her to want to pray, but she did not know how to pray. Then she latched onto a little book called the Philokalia, which emphasized the transformative value of repeating the “Jesus Prayer”: Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me, which Franny began to recite compulsively. The novel explores the shock this induced for those around her, as well as the change it affected in her own soul.

In his review of Salinger's book, Updike wrote:  "Let me say, I am glad he is hopeful. I am one of those -- to do some confessing of my own -- for whom Salinger's work dawned as something of a revelation. I expect that further revelations are to come."

(Salinger died the year to the day following Updike's death, January 27, 2010).

It is the day of Patricius Qatrikias Pádraig Padrig

Irish Kings and Archers, 13th Century

Patricius;  Qatrikias;  Pádraig;  Padrig, -- also known as Saint Patrick -- was born on March 17 in A.D. 385  (d.461). A Romano-British Christian missionary and the bishop in Ireland -- of equal importance, he was also a poet.

Patrick composed a poem call "The Lorica," the first hymn written in Gaelic. ('Lorica' is a type of poem that invokes God's protection.) In Patrick's poem he asks for God's protection from druids, whom he believes are planning an ambush as he and his friar traveled to the King's court in A.D. 433.

(The portion below, called Faed Fiada, is translated by Seumas MacManus in The Story of the Irish Race.)

"Deer's Cry" (Faed Fiada)  ~ For protection from an ambush of the Druids"

I bind me today, God's might to direct me,
God's wisdom for learning,
God's eye for discerning,
God's ear for my hearing,
God's word for my clearing.

God's hand for my cover,
God's path to pass over,
God's buckler to guard me,
God's army to ward me
against snares of the devil,
against vices, temptation, against wrong inclination,
against men who plot evil, anear or afar, with many or few.

Christ near, Christ here, Christ be with me, Christ beneath me,
Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ be o'er me, Christ before me.
Christ in the left and the right, Christ hither and thither,
Christ in the sight, of each eye that shall seek me, in each ear that shall hear, in each mouth that shall speak me --
Christ not the less in each heart I address.

(Go here to read a Celtic prayer for endangered travelers.)

Thomas Merton: "Your Life Is Shaped by the End You Live For."

"On the last day of January, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in the year of the great war, and down the shadow of some French mountains on the border of Spain, I came into the world."

Today is the birthday of contemplative writer and Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton (31 Jan 1915 to 10 Dec 1968). He stands out as among the most influential spiritual writers of the 20th century, being read and respected by Catholics, Protestants and members of other faith communities.

Thomas Merton ~ Conversion

He was raised by parents who were artists and experimental intellectually, and thus came of age under the influence of avant-garde intellectualism, sympathizing with heady notions such as Communism. After a wild and tumultuous youth that included fathering a child out of wedlock, Merton converted to Catholicism while attending Columbia University. In December of 1941 he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky -- a community of monks belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists) taking the name Frater Louis. Thereafter he spent the rest of days writing what have now been deemed spiritual classics on topics such as solitude, contemplative prayer and spiritual direction.

Thomas Merton ~ Ongoing Appeal

Merton's works reflect his personal struggles as well as the struggles of the age in which he lived, both spiritual and cultural. Yet, book sales and the ongoing popularity of his writing suggest his sensibilities transcend culture and situation. They have resonated, and continue to resonate, with thinkers and spiritual seekers of all backgrounds and situations, and he remains one of the most widely read and written about spiritual figures of the modern times.

Merton died tragically by accidental electrocution while traveling in Asia in 1968.

Thomas Merton ~ Quotes

Some quotes from Thoughts in Solitude:

"If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life . . . . Your life is shaped by the end you live for."

"What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to prayer?"

"Before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves."

"This then is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under the hope of the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness. If we wage it courageously, we will find Christ on our side."

Other writings include The Seven Storey Mountain, Contemplative Prayer, Life of Holiness

He is the author of more than seventy books that include poetry, personal journals, collections of letters, social criticism, and writings on peace, justice, and ecumenism.

Thomas Merton ~ A Prayer

A Prayer of Thomas Merton, from Thoughts in Solitude:

"I have found and have known, by Your great mercy, that the love of a man's heart that is abandoned and broken and poor is most pleasing to You and attracts the gaze of Your pity, and that it is Your desire and Your consolation, O my Lord, to be very close to those love You and call upon You as their Father. That You may have no greater 'consolation' than to console Your afflicted children and those who come to You poor and empty-handed with nothing but their humanness and their limitation and great trust in your mercy. Amen."