JOHN UPDIKE, THEOLOGIAN

By RAY WADDLE
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Sex, art, religion -- the three great secret things of life, novelist John Updike once said. (Who can argue?) They’ve served him well. For five decades, they have defined his prodigious fiction, essays and poetry. Updike today is America’s reigning man of letters.
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He speaks in Nashville Nov. 4. Not since Norman Mailer in 1997 (promoting his Jesus book) has such a literary patriarch made a local visit.
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Updike will receive Nashville Public Library’s annual Literary Award at a gala fundraiser Saturday night. He also appears at the downtown library at 10 a.m., discussing his long career and taking questions.
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I hope he throws religion into the mix. Updike has a funny way of looking calmly into the abyss, wrestling with despair, imperturbably noting the latest would-be faith-killing scientific news about a lonely, godless universe -- yet finding reasons for his religious faith and New England churchgoing.

“Our concepts of art and virtue, purpose and justification are so tied up with the supernatural that it is hard to foresee doing altogether without it,” he wrote regarding the future of faith.
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Raised Lutheran in Pennsylvania (now Episcopalian in Massachusetts), Updike never shook his Protestant sense of sin. It proved a durable way for mapping the human condition and understanding his own characters -- the bewilderment, panic and emptiness, but also the hunch that daily life is a matter of majestic significance worth dramatizing.
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“The modern Christian inherits an intellectual tradition of faulty cosmology and shrewd psychology,” he said in a 1997 speech.

This is a rare confession from the contemporary literary scene, where so many celebrated writers have no ear for religion. (One reason: Some scribblers resent God as a rival storyteller, the overbearing Editor who would smother their little patch of creativity.)
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Born in 1932, Updike came of age when orthodox biblical faith was still an animating theme among serious writers, he says. W.H. Auden, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Walker Percy, Chaim Potok, Herman Wouk and Graham Greene all agonized over belief in their own mid-century ways. Today, many novelists don’t bother to “aspire to hope of heaven, fear of hell, or think of any life but this present one of bone and blood and eventual crushing disappointment,” he writes in More Matter: Essays and Criticism.
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Assaulted by frantic non-stop media and anonymous struggle and pruned families, the self today gets smaller, thinner. Or that’s the impression, the experience of many. And so the drama of sin and redemption seems less urgent, less possible, a ghostly second-rate business. Yet religion won’t disappear. Updike says fiction and poetry themselves are “religious exercises” requiring self-denial, devotion and otherworldly standards.
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Jewish writer I.B. Singer once declared, “God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.” That suggests life is a plot with an Author behind it, giving it a beginning, middle and end. For my money, Updike king of novelists has competition: Updike seat-of-the-pants theologian.
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(Columnist Ray Waddle can be reached at ray@raywaddle.com.)