In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  Mr. Dearholt’s smile persisted, along with the hard gleams from his oval spectacles. He was not yet bald but his hair was thin enough to reveal the curious shape a man’s skull has, as of a dome that has taken a dent or two. “Gadarene swine, Mr. Wilmot—think of the Gadarene swine. Our Savior cast the devils into them and sent them squealing over the cliff into the sea. That is what you must do, sir. Cast out your devils, pure and simple. I wouldn’t touch their filthy freethinking tracts myself; life’s too short to get yourself hot and bothered. Think of these Huxleyites and Higher Critics and socialist scoffers not as reasonable men of good will like you and me but as devils in disguise, devils sent to test you, sent to test the church. Of course, they are clever; of course, they seem plausible. The Devil’s campaign is not to be sneezed at. He sends good soldiers—smart, sincere soldiers. But they are enemy soldiers, Reverend Wilmot, to the likes of you and me. They serve the Beast and the Great Dragon, Gog and Magog, in the battle at the end of the thousand years, before the Devil is cast into the lake of fire, and all are judged. Are you with the devils or with the Lord in the battle is the question. Yes?”

  Clarence looked with wonder at the dented curve of Mr. Dearholt’s skull, that it would hold such mad and fiery contents. He tried to see timid, ailing, painstaking Darwin and sweet-voiced, pedantic Renan by the apocalyptic light his ruling elder had provided, or even bluff Ingersoll, and could not. As to the socialist scoffers, former workmen like Debs and Haywood, why not scoff, after the misery they had witnessed, and the jail terms to which they had been condemned? These were men groping after justice, after truth, which was a live presence moving always ahead of them, rather than the strangely shaped and petrified old dogmas defended with such vigorous complacence by the man settled, with his cigar and lemonade, before him. Mr. Dearholt was devoted to the newest devices; an electric fan, its head a flattened cage and its body a single brass stem, stood before the fireplace and battered the air so loudly that both men had to speak at an uncomfortable volume. The current of stirred air, Clarence noticed, was directed mostly at his host, lifting stray strands now and then from his dented, gleaming skull.

  “Yes, still …”

  “Yes, still, you are too gullible. Out of your gullible nature you’ve let the enemy infect your thinking, my friend. Think of your state of mind as a disease. You need to convalesce, to rest. Take no offense; these are trying times, as I heard you say last month when I had the pleasure of being your guest at dinner. August is imminent; what are your vacation plans? Your missus and children should already be out of the city, safe from pestilence somewhere where the breezes blow. That little fellow of yours especially needs some outdoor pursuits; I thought he looked woefully underexercised.”

  “I haven’t thought much about it.… My sister Esther and her husband have a house down in Delaware, not too far from the water, we generally go there for a few days. The two older children have summer employment, and the work of the church …”

  “Will survive without you, I guarantee it. With your permission I will canvass the board of elders and ask that your vacation begin now, the fees for pulpit supply to come out of general funds rather than your salary. I happen to know a man—a man not of our humble parish but of our denomination, whose contributions to the First Presbyterian are significant, believe me—this man among his holdings owns an excellent seaside cottage at Ocean Grove which he and his family are unable to use this August because of a planned excursion to Europe, as a college-graduation present to his older daughter. He had not planned to rent, risking exposing his property to any sort of person who might offer themselves as a tenant. But for a pastor and his family—”

  “This is a bewilderingly generous offer, but—”

  “Nothing is definite, understand, my friend. But I think I can make it so. I will whisper a word to this man concerning your, shall we say, nervous condition. This is not charity, believe me—entirely a matter of enlightened self-interest on the part of the parish. A sound investment, to ensure a proper return on the call that brought you among us. We were not mistaken; you have the endowments. How does our Book of Discipline put it?” Dearholt closed his eyes behind his glasses; his lids trembled with the effort of memory. “ ‘Natural, acquired, and gracious endowments fitting him for the office.’ That’s what it takes, for the church to extend the call. The call went out, you answered. I haven’t agreed with every position you’ve adopted—you are much too cautious, in my view, about our building requirements—but you have what it takes, as they say in the mills. I can size a man up pretty quick; that’s part of my business. You know, quite frankly, the Presbyterian church of the U.S. of A. isn’t getting the kind of vocations it used to—mostly average or below boys looking for the nearest way off the farm or up from the factory floor but with nothing about them of the gentleman. A man of your qualities—your endowments—is treasure not to be wasted. We don’t want to lose you in the Almighty’s ongoing battle, Clarence.”

  Clarence brushed at the tickle as a gust from the noisy fan agitated the hair of his long sideburn. “Maimed as I am?”

  “Don’t say maimed, say momentarily indisposed. Under the weather, as even young men sometimes are, eh? You’ll emerge from this siege of trouble strengthened, I am a hundred percent certain.”

  “I fear that my will—”

  “And consider your own personal welfare. Think selfishly for a moment. What lies outside the church for you? Nothing compared to what is within. You are no longer young, my friend. You have invested your assets in the office you occupy. How does Paul put it to Timothy? ‘Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery.’ Neglect not the gift that is in thee,” Dearholt repeated, and began, “Faith—” He was becoming reflective, as when he revealed his desire to go to Alaska, and interrupted himself, “Would you like another lemonade? Would you disapprove if I fortified it with a splash of something stronger—say, a dash of good old Jamaican rum?”

  “Oh no, no thank you.” The denomination was temperance, but not as fanatically as the Methodists and Baptists. “My pipe is vice enough. I wonder too if I have not taken enough of your evening. Mrs. Dearholt—”

  “Is happy upstairs,” Dearholt concluded for him. “Obelia has her embroidery. Faith,” he went on, “is not some merely intellectual choice. It is basic human strength. It is manliness, and womanliness. It gives courage and cheer from the infant’s first steps to the aged’s last breath. Without it, we’re not alive, Reverend Wilmot. Without it, we’re the servant who buries his talent in the ground. It may seem strange for me to be telling you this, but you need to hear it, as I once needed to hear it, years ago. I was close to forty and the Panic of 1893 had knocked the stuffing out of a little business I had put my heart and soul into. I felt sorry for myself and walked the streets, right here in Paterson, and in the park by the Falls I heard a self-appointed preacher, a man some could say was simple, who catered to the poor without benefit of a church over his head or a vestment over his shoulders, but he told me what I needed to hear, and I’ve lived by it; it’s given me life, and pleasure in life. The Word is life, just as the Book says. The way, the truth, and the life. Everything outside the Book is just the hollow show of life. Oh, it can be plausible. It can be alluring. But the show belongs to the Devil’s realm, and in the end, when they wrap the show up, there’s nothing left onstage to see, just the fact of death.”

  Clarence was moved that the other man had opened up to him so completely his innermost convictions, but he left Dearholt’s fine house still believing that the exact opposite was true: life, with its risks and ultimate defeat, lay with the calm, merciless, impersonal truths that godless men were daily uncovering in the wide world spread beyond the moldering walls of the shrinking castle keep. The Christian castle’s precincts had become for Clarence so claustral and musty and dark that they felt like the Devil’s tenements.

  The minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church was
a member of the Presbytery of Jersey City, in the Synod of New Jersey. Clarence one day in August—having evaded the bribe of the Ocean Grove cottage—boarded a train at the Erie Railroad station on Market Street, and then stared out the sooty windows as Clifton and Passaic slid by. Coalyards, small brick factories, summer-tired trees, backyards dingy in their proximity to the tracks scattered and broke into a gap of Aquakanonck farms before Nutley and Belleville yielded to the outskirts of Newark. Slowing its pace, the train clacked diagonally over the Passaic River and entered upon a glorious stretch of the Meadows—tall tawny cattails and saltwater grasses still as green as spring, flickering with white butterflies and red-winged blackbirds—before crossing the Hackensack into the city of his destination. The presbytery kept its modest offices on the sixth floor of an eight-story building a healthy little walk from the station. A creaking birdcage elevator lifted Clarence to a hall lined with carefully lettered doors half of frosted glass. The presbytery was hardly to be distinguished from Spitz and Quinlan, Legal Attorneys, or I. H. Levine, Expert in Chiropractics. The waiting room was equipped with well-worn, uncushioned oak furniture and an overweight receptionist-secretary. When she sighed and heaved up from her desk and went into a room whose ajar door revealed shelves of archives arrayed in boxes of marbled cardboard, the action was performed with the aid of a cane, her massive hips seesawing with a strenuousness painful to see. Clarence spied in a gap between her long skirt of navy serge and a black shoe that seemed less creased than the other some inches of drab brown stocking covering what he took to be a prosthetic leg. Yet her amber hair, in whose uniform bright tint some artificial rinse was implicated, gleamed a glossy pompadour, and a smile dimpled her plump cheeks with a quicksilver coquettishness. When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: thus does the church, built upon the stone which the builders rejected, declare its mercies to a ruthlessly selective world. Clarence meekly returned her smile and for fifteen minutes’ wait shared with this other maimed person a companionable silence. He would miss, he thought, all such nooks in the ecclesiastical maze, wherein a blameless quotidian industry concealed and overarched the essential unreality. His journey had taken over an hour and left his summer suit of cream-colored linen wrinkled. Through the room’s one window he enjoyed a view whose foreground consisted of tarred flat rooftops burdened with wooden water tanks and chairs and even weather-soaked couches for residents escaping the swampy heat, and whose middle ground was a green waste of marsh grass and cattails brutally bisected by railroad tracks on a built-up embankment, and whose hazed distance held lower Manhattan, its granite-girded skyscrapers bristling like a conglomerate horn on the nose of a rhinoceros whose body could only be guessed at. Faded white letters on a nearby building advertised BEECHAM’S PILLS and elsewhere his eye picked up advertisements for WEINTRAUB BROS. HIGH CLASS TAILORS and SHINOLA and DR. WERNET’S POWDER FOR FALSE TEETH and DREAMLAND, a dance hall or moving-picture theatre, presumably.

  His perusal of the cityscape was interrupted by the emergence of the moderator of the presbytery from his office. Thomas Dreaver had been recently elected to the post; like Clarence a clergyman, he was younger than expected, younger than his petitioner. Pale and rounded in feature, with short fair hair brushed away from a central parting, he wore a single-breasted, slate-blue business suit and was businesslike in manner, save for an extra smoothness, a honeyed promissory timbre to his voice that marked him as an executive of Christian business. For some perverse theatrical reason Clarence had, for this fateful encounter, dug into Stella’s cedar chest, packed with clothes from their past, and found his one surviving rebato, worn in his Missouri days to distinguish himself in dignity from the shirtsleeved Baptists, and a black rabat vest. Though Calvinist thinking had always shied from these Roman appurtenances, they had never been officially proscribed, and the Princeton approach had tended to be playfully “high,” not even abstaining, in chapel celebrations on major holy days, from colored stoles decorated with the Chi Rho in gold thread.

  “I was very troubled by your letter,” Dreaver said, yet offered a deft, untroubled smile, while flicking a smooth hand toward the chair in his office which Clarence should occupy.

  “And I was somewhat perturbed by yours,” said the visitor, seating himself. “My mentors at seminary failed to spell out—or else I was inattentive that day—what a complicated and tedious affair resigning from the ministry would be.”

  “ ‘Our vines have tender grapes,’ Mr. Wilmot,” said the young man. “Not every hand can pick them. And what did Calvin himself say—‘It would be a very serious accusation against us to have rejected God’s call’?” Dreaver picked up a small flexible black-bound book, the edges of its pages gilded. “Here. Let me read you the section, section fifty-one, from the Book of Discipline. ‘If a minister, otherwise in good standing, shall make application to be released from the office of the ministry, he may, at the discretion of the presbytery, be put on probation, for one year at least, in such a manner as the presbytery may direct, in order to ascertain his motives and reasons for such a relinquishment.’ ”

  Clarence interrupted. “I could hardly bear another year of going through the motions. Giving communion, preaching, trying to console the sick and dying—it would be, I can’t say blasphemy, but a travesty. And the parishioners would know it. Already, they sense how hollow I am.”

  “With all respect, I wonder if they do. You are not the source of what they seek. You are God’s conduit, merely, and hollowness is no fault in a conduit, is it?” Dreaver held up a finger and read smoothly on. “ ‘And if, at the end of this period, the presbytery be satisfied that he cannot be useful and happy in the exercise of his ministry, they may allow him to demit the office, and return to the condition of a private member in the Church, ordering his name to be stricken from the roll of the presbytery, and giving him a letter to any church with which he may desire to connect himself.’ ”

  Clarence suppressed a smile; the mass of leaden guilt with which he woke in the morning and lay down at night almost seemed manageable, caught up and segmented in such strict language. “The word ‘demit’ is new to me,” he confessed. “And I doubt I would be presenting a letter to another church; I am not apt to join one when I lack sufficient belief to keep on in the only profession for which I am fitted.”

  “Yes, well fitted. So your ruling elder, Harlan Dearholt, informs me.”

  “Harlan is a model of faith. Had I but a tenth of his portion, I would continue in harness without complaint.”

  With a soft slap Dreaver let the supple black book fall to his desktop and asked, “What has made you imagine in yourself a lack of faith?”

  Having already rehearsed in several other conversations the desolating progress of his thought and reading, he summed it up economically, and concluded, “To put it in mathematical terms: it has been bearing in upon me for some time that God is a non-factor—all the equations work without Him. Science still confesses to mysteries, of course—the ultimate origins of matter, how life came to arise, and so on. But how the forms of life have shaped themselves, how men came to descend from apes, how the Bible came to be written, along with similar accretions of folklore—the Hindoo Gita, the Koran—which Christendom does not happen to recognize as sacred: all this became terribly clear to me. The universe is a pointless, self-running machine, and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without holy fanfare.”

  Dreaver shrugged—the smallest possible stiffening of his shoulders, under his business suit. “It has appeared that way even at moments to our Lord,” he said mildly. “Unfaith is a cohort of faith, as Satan is a cohort of God. It is the shadow that shapes the truth into form, the No that must be said, so that Yea can ring out. I believe your seminary was Princeton, was it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “There could be the trouble. You imbibed conservatism there, and it limits your thinking now. The two Hodges, and Benjamin Warfield—fine men in the old
muscular tradition, but quite helpless when the winds of history blow. They cannot bend, Mr. Wilmot, and those that cannot bend break. If you had gone to Union, as I did, you would not be afraid to let history into your understanding. Into your understanding of the Bible, into the workings of our lives, into the future of the church. Hugh Black and Charles A. Briggs, whom the old guard rode out of the ministry for his embrace of the Higher Criticism, William Brown and Henry Sloane Coffin, Arthur McGiffert and Henry Jackson Van Dyke—the staunch liberal tradition has nothing to fear from the future; no development can upset it. Remember the Epistle to the Hebrews, how Paul begins?—‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past.’ Divers manners, and that includes Darwin and Marx, when the evidence bears out what they say. ‘For the law made nothing perfect,’ Paul told the Hebrews; they were the conservatives of their time, clinging to every shrivelled scrap of the Torah and the law as if their souls depended on it. ‘For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God.’ Whatever brings in a better hope, that draws us nigh to God—that’s what I gleaned at Union, Mr. Wilmot, where we were taught not to be afraid of science, not to fear admitting that the Holy Book is embedded in history—that it contains the best wisdom of its time, but that time is not our time. Relativity is the word we must live by now. Everything is relative, and what matters is how we, we human creatures, relate to one another. Think of how our two seminaries relate to their surroundings—Union in the middle of the nation’s biggest city, and far from the most savory part of Manhattan at that, but drawing vitality and the pulse of reality from it; Princeton sitting down there in fox-hunting country, surrounded by estates and lettuce farms, cut off from the real, urban, industrial world. Its theology took shape in the eighteenth century, when the Deists were the wolves at the door, and hasn’t changed since. Change, Mr. Wilmot—from the nebulae to the microbes change is the way of Creation, and it must be our way, but for God’s sake don’t destroy your essential self. Don’t give up your calling. I promise you, there is nothing in your beliefs or unbeliefs that can’t serve as the basis for an effective and deeply satisfying Christian ministry. You have taken the charge upon you too egoistically: depend upon your parishioners, as well as bidding them depend on you. You are the captain and they are the crew, but the wind in your sails is none of your making.”