students of jesus

In some ways John Updike is the embodiment of C.S. Lewis’ vision for a Christian artist. Lewis held that the idea of Christian Literature made no more sense than Christian Engineering. This is from Lewis' excellent essay, Christianity and Literature:

The rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general: success in sacred literature depends on the same qualities of structure, suspense, variety, diction, and the like which secures success in secular literature.

Updike may well be the best American novelist of the 20^th century. He was a believer. But you will search in vain for his work at any Christian Bookstore—which is why I rarely visit them. His work deals with the most-human themes (ambition, pride, sexual desire, alienation, and disillusionment) in ways considered unmarketable by Christian Publishers.

Updike also wrote poetry. I don’t know if his poems ever appeared in Guideposts, but he did manage to gain the attention of The New Yorker and other pagan publications. The result is a writer virtually unknown among Evangelicals, but revered among the lost. In this instance, please number me among the lost.

Earthworm

We pattern our Heaven

On bright butterflies,

But it must be that even

In earth heaven lies.

The worm we uproot

In turning a spade

Returns, careful brute,

To the peace he has made.

God blesses him; he

He gives praise with his toil,

Lends comfort to me,

And aërates the soil.

Immersed in the facts,

one must worship there;

claustrophobia attacks

us even in air.