In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  “I’ve given things some thought,” Mr. Orr said, not without pride. “I’ve had no missus and a lot of lonely nights to do some pondering and a little reading. All the modern thinkers have come around to it—a lot of losers, a few winners. Eternal damnation it has to be, if there’s any sense to any of it at all. Mark my words.”

  “I have and will, Mr. Orr. I wish you well. Forgive me”—he gratefully stood, lifting his thin, tilted, handsome head away from this foul deathbed into a level of atmosphere smelling of ether and antisepsis—“if I can’t quite believe damnation is for you. Maybe more for the likes of me. I can see the signs of election sparkling right in your eyes.”

  The little man as if spitefully closed them, leaving his caller gazing down at a shrivelled yellow death mask.

  Some weeks later, when that debilitating onset of June heat had settled into a daily drone of July temperatures in the nineties, the cycle of the lectionary had brought round, to the tenth Sunday after Pentecost, the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, the parable of the tares:

  As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.

  The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity;

  And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  Attendance was sparse; the gentry of the congregation would be enjoying with their families the breeze and waves of the Jersey shore or the heights of the Catskills, and those unable to afford summer homes or rentals would have trooped by mid-morning to the shaded picnic groves of Garrett Mountain. Clarence, mounted into the pulpit through the skeleton choir’s wavering “Amen,” looked toward the left wall and was sorry to see that Mr. Orr’s round, implacable, attentive face was gone, forever gone, from beneath the translucent row of unsmiling Reformers. The minister had meditated hard upon this sermon, to please the dead man. Feeling the plain black Geneva gown upon him as a gentle, inhibiting weight of consecration, and aware at his throat of the encasement of the upright wing collar which he wore, with a white bow tie, in modern echo of the traditional clerical bands, he faced the upturned faces scattered through the varnished pews. Paper fans imprinted with oily Biblical scenes methodically beat back and forth in front of these sweating, courteously expectant faces. He commenced in a quiet, factual voice, “The notorious agnostic Robert Ingersoll, whose imprecations did so much to arouse and refortify the church of my father’s generation, once began an essay as follows:

  “ ‘One great objection to the Old Testament is the cruelty said to have been commanded by God. All these cruelties ceased with death. The vengeance of Jehovah stopped at the tomb. He never threatened to punish the dead; and there is not one word, from the first mistake in Genesis to the last curse of Malachi, containing the slightest intimation that God will take his revenge in another world. It was reserved for the New Testament to make known the doctrine of eternal pain. The teacher of universal benevolence rent the veil between time and eternity, and fixed the horrified gaze of man upon the lurid gulf of hell. Within the breast of nonresistance coiled the worm that never dies. Compared with this, the doctrine of slavery, the wars of extermination, the curses, the punishments of the Old Testament were all merciful and just.’ ”

  Stella and the three children—hard-mouthed Jared and fair-haired Esther looking superior if not quite sneering, soft-bodied Teddy gazing with that aggravating undercurrent of fright—were seated in the front pew, and Mr. and Mrs. Dearholt, having elected for this weekend to stay and roast in Paterson, were behind them, with four empty pews intervening. Dearholt’s oval glasses flashed; his wide wife wore a ghost of a deferential smile behind her dotted veil. Clarence had captured the congregation’s attention. He had knotted his straitjacket; now to get out of it, like the great Houdini.

  “What might we say to this fierce indictment? That there is pain and brutality in the Bible, no one denies; it describes Mankind, and pain is a fact of human existence. The God of the Old Testament did not distance Himself from His chosen people; He participated in their struggles and made Israel’s enemies His own. Israel’s own transgressions grieved Him and incited Him to a terrible wrath. Ours is no aloof Lord—no Buddha beyond it all or Zeus making light of mortal travail. Among the world religions Christianity is unique in presenting a suffering God, a God who took human suffering upon Himself and in His agony gave birth to mankind’s salvation. He defeated death, which means He had to lay His hands upon death, as the Old Testament Jehovah laid hands upon Jacob and wrestled with him all the night long. We do not worship a God immensely above us, out of human reach, but One Who does not disdain to touch us, to lay even rough hands upon us, and in that brief Lifetime recounted in the New Testament to descend to our condition, and to speak to men in metaphors drawn from their daily lives.

  “For what does a farmer do with tares, with weeds? He burns them, to keep his fields tidy and to destroy those weed seeds, which otherwise would find fertile soil and bring forth in the next season a crop of weeds greater than ever. The economy of agriculture demands selection, demands winnowing. Earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, John the Baptist announces to Judea’s generation of vipers, ‘Every tree which bringest not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.’ One greater than he, John the Baptist announces, will come and ‘baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’

  “Pity the chaff, will say some to whom the mercies and the justice of Christ are obscure. Pity the weeds, and the fruitless fig tree. But”—Clarence paused, gazing about, his pale-blue eyes distended, his mouth ajar beneath the drooping sandy mustache—“I suggest to you that men are not plants, they have minds and souls and free wills, they are responsible for their deeds and for the eternal consequences of these deeds. They have made themselves chaff, if they are so judged when the great farmer comes with his winnowing fan. The tree has made itself fruitless, the weeds—” His voice snapped on the word; he lost his place, his thought, and looked down into his scribbled text, written in a desperate rush of inspiration last night after dinner, and still could not find it. He looked up, and felt how his pause had drawn the congregation’s attention tighter to him, like a strangling embrace. “The weeds,” he stated levelly, “have grown where they were not wanted, and have elected themselves to be uprooted and cast away.”

  He changed tone, into a matter-of-fact pitch. “Actually, the number of times that Jesus invokes Hell are not many. The most celebrated verses, and the most severe, come in the fifth chapter, and are echoed with variation in the eighteenth chapter and also in Mark. Our Savior is portrayed as preaching:

  “ ‘Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

  “ ‘But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

  “ ‘And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into Hell.

  “ ‘And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into Hell.’ ”

  The words seemed to parch Clarence’s throat, which had become fearsomely dry; not one but several audible, partial throat clearings were necessary before he could proceed to his consoling mitigations: “The word translated here as ‘Hell’ was ‘Gehenna’ in Greek, based upon the Hebrew ‘gehinnom,’ a name derived from the valley of Hinnom, a rubbish dump near Jerusalem. Hell is therefore a trash heap, and the fires of Hell, to which Christ sometimes refers, should be understood not as eternal torture but as the purifying action whereby trash—whose accumulation would otherwise over
whelm us in our homes and in the streets of a busy city such as Paterson—whereby trash is returned to nature: is broken down into its basic elements, and returns to air as smoke and heat, and to the earth as ashes. Those who are condemned to damnation have already condemned themselves to non-existence, as understood in the light of the miraculously full existence which Christ’s coming and His redemption has made possible. Possible for each of us, but not certain. Promised, but not, my brothers and sisters in the hope of that promise, necessarily attained.”

  Clarence felt his voice giving out, closing up. The effort to push words out into the great space of the church, with its clutch of unresponsive listeners, was taxing his chest; his lungs felt to be heaving within him. His family in the first row was staring up at him with visible worry. “We,” he announced, as emphatically as he could, “must bring something to the new covenant. The mountain has come to us, but we must climb it. He who stands at the base of a mountain and refuses to climb it stands in an abyss. That abyss of non-attainment is Hell. That is why the infidel Robert Ingersoll’s charge that the New Testament brought Hell into human history is correct and true. Those outside the light of Christ’s new dispensation exist in outer darkness—a phrase, to skótos to exóteron, unique to Matthew, though it is found in rabbinical writings and in intertestamental writings such as Enoch. Matthew, chapter eight, verse twelve: ‘But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ By ‘children of the kingdom’ the Gospel-writer means those who should be participating in the kingdom, now that its news has arrived—those who have had their chance. Those who do not know Christ now are infinitely more ignorant than those who lived before He came. By not accepting Christ, we make ourselves trash, fit for nothing but to be burned on the dump of Gehenna. The pain of having lost Christ will be so great we will not feel the flames. That is the meaning of Hell—a giant space of comprehended loss, of self-recrimination, of self-despising”—he had to pause here, his voice clinging precariously, with a painful, scraping grip, to a crumbling inner slope; he finished in a hoarse rush—”that has been carved from the universe by Christ’s cosmic victory.”

  There was more, a concluding and uplifting paragraph addressed to the late Mr. Orr’s concerns, and meant to brighten, for all who shared the ideas of this departed spirit, the darkest corner of their Calvinist heritage. “Election,” Clarence strove to say, “is not a leaden weight laid across our earthly lives, rendering our strivings as ridiculous as the”—he fluttered the fingers of his free hand, and a young person in the congregation tittered—“as the wrigglings of an impaled insect or bug or butterfly. Election is not a few winners and many losers, as we see about us in this fallen, merciless world.” He must hurry, he must shorten; he had hardly any voice left; he could hear his listeners rustling in their dryly creaking pews. “Election,” he mouthed, “is winners and non-players. Those who do not accept Christ’s great gift of Himself waste away. They become nothing. Election”—the word hurt and scratched—“election is choice. Our choice. It is God’s hand”—he stretched out that same white, long-fingered hand that had been an impaled insect—“reaching down, to those who reach up. If we cannot feel God’s hand gripping ours, it is because”—and now his throat felt catastrophically closed, his breath reduced to a trickle, a wheeze—“we have not reached up. Not truly.” He could speak no more. He felt strangled, his voice scorched to less than a whisper, a dry web stuck in his throat. The faces of those looking to him for faith pressed upon his chest in a hushed throng. Their paper fans had stopped beating.

  For moments that approached eternity he hung there, in the pulpit, his milk-blue eyes protruding, his mouth ajar, until Stella from her front pew leaped up, turned to face the congregation, and with a smile and in her sweet-pouring unabashed Southern accent recited what came by second nature after a lifetime of observant Sunday mornings: “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen. Mr. Wilmot has been battling just the most terrible catarrh. Now let us all join in singing hymn number three seven seven, ‘Soldiers of Christ, Arise’!” The organist, Miss Miriam Showalter, glanced over at Clarence questioningly, and at his nod hit the first chord, and the congregation with a thin and ragged shuffle stood and sang,

  “Soldiers of Christ, arise,

  And put your armor on,

  Strong in the strength which God supplies

  Through His Eternal Son.”

  The hymn had six verses; as they unfolded in these manifold healthy throats, Stella sidled around the altar rail, as expertly as if dodging around her kitchen table, and conferred with Clarence in whispers: “Apostles’ Creed or Nicene?”

  He nodded, irritably. She should know that the Nicene was said only on Communion Sundays. “Apostles’,” he silently replied. His lips were able to move even in the midst of this curious disgrace, this oubliette that had risen up around him with its slippery invisible walls. His cheeks felt hot, but his fingertips felt cold, and a shiver kept passing uncontrollably across his chest.

  “Which prayer of thanksgiving?”

  “You choose,” he mouthed, exasperated. In the midst of this grotesque affliction, he was expected to worry about details. She had the book of worship in her hands; she had been at a thousand services; she could lead these sheep out the door. He wanted only to be alone with his miserable miracle, his glaringly clarified condition. The hymn concluded,

  “From strength to strength go on;

  Wrestle, and fight, and pray;

  Tread all the powers of darkness down,

  And win the well-fought day.”

  The congregation, more rustlingly and coughingly than usual, seated itself, and Stella stepped forward to the rail and called into the varnished depths of the ill-attended church, “With gladness, let us present the offering of our life and labor to the Lord.” The two ushers, bumping together at the back, launched themselves with tentative, mismatching footsteps down the aisle. Stella looked at Clarence with a wild dark glance and then dartingly about the chancel, her composure shaken; languidly, in a daze of ironic impotence, he stepped to the side bench where the felt-bottomed collection plates reposed and presented them to the ushers, with a grave nod meant to soothe the disquiet in their faces. Kindly, long-chinned Mr. McDermott was one, and Mr. Cyrus Terhune, the stout proprietor of a Market Street dry-goods emporium, the other. Behind Clarence, as he gave the two men the briefest of ceremonial bows, Stella ringingly declaimed, “Remember the words of the Lord Jesus: It is more blessed to give than to receive.” She seemed, to his ear, to be overacting.

  In view of the sparse size of the summer choir, the organ was supposed to accompany the collection with a solo, but Miriam Showalter’s hands were still, as if they had been stricken along with his throat. The wooden plates floated through the hushed pews eerily, hand to hand, the drop of coins dulled by the felt. The plates came forward with the ushers; Clarence took them—the wood felt warm from their grips—and turned and lifted them up to the stained-glass Jesus, Who was darkly ascending, with gracefully upturned hands and uprolled eyes and unweighted toes pointing downward and the hem of his robes a-flutter, between the two ranks of dusty organ pipes. In reflex Clarence opened his mouth to say the customary words; but Stella’s voice rang out instead: “Yours, O Lord, are grandeur and power, majesty, splendor, and glory.”

  “All in the heavens and on the earth is yours,” the congregation dubiously rumbled, “and of your own we give you.”

  He was wondering now if he might not find it in him to pronounce the prayers, but Stella had firmly found her place in these familiar, inflexible procedures. “We praise you, God,” she sang out, with a swelling confidence, “for you are gracious. You have loved us from the beginning of time and remember us when we are in trouble.” The sound of a woman’s voice pronouncing the syllables of this litany was of course a blasphemous astonishment to most of its hearers, yet they had little choic
e but to respond, “Your mercy endures forever,” and to be led through the Lord’s Prayer and the morning’s final hymn, “O Daughters Blest of Galilee,” and to be sent forth into the world, “rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit,” and to be blessed. Stella had looked toward her husband, asking with her eyebrows if he was up to pronouncing the benediction, but he shook his head impatiently, and so she melodiously, theatrically bid “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord be kind”—kaaand—“and gracious to you. The Lord look upon you with favor and give you peace.” He joined in the “Amen” but not the “Alleluia!”

  Miriam Showalter’s burst of postlude Bach sounded angry. Stella, seeing Clarence move to follow the choir in his robes, showed an inclination to process to the entrance ahead of him, as befit her role in the service; but he restrained her with a grip that sank deep into the fat of her upper arm in its sheath of summer batiste.

  “Go to the children,” he directed, hoarsely yet audibly.

  Her eyes flared; her mouth tensed in a little “o,” making wrinkles all across the arc of her slightly hirsute upper lip. “You can talk again! What on earth happened?”

  He shrugged helplessly, began a sentence with the word “God,” then waved it away, saying, “It won’t do.”

  “I would say not,” Stella responded, turning on him her broad rounded back. Her wifely ability to sympathize, he saw, had been curtailed by her liturgical triumph, her taste of forbidden fruit. Briskly maneuvering her corseted heft, in her voluminous dress trimmed with ivory Valenciennes lace, upon her small, button-shoed feet, she stepped down from the chancel, replaced her book of worship in the pew-back, and also her chromolithographed paper fan, and collected her parasol and black leather purse. “Well, that was an experience,” she sighed to her children. Their three children, all that was left of those who had witnessed Clarence’s disgrace, stared in amazement, even Jared, with his clever slant eyes and wised-up mouth, too stunned to mock the event.