His Majesty's Sacred Service - Christianity Today

Some years ago, friends of ours introduced us to the British spy stories of Len Deighton. When they returned recently from their sabbatical in England, they offered us a new novelist with equal enthusiasm. “She’s a University of London graduate in law,” they gushed, “formerly a best-selling author of mysteries and sagas who converted to Christianity. Since then she has written a string of best-selling novels with openly Christian themes.”

With visions of Inklings dancing in my head, I could hardly wait to read her. “What does she write about?” I asked.

“Anglican clergymen!” they replied with broad smiles.

At least since Chaucer’s “The Parson’s Tale,” Christian writers have found fascinating material in that most unlikely of places, the lives of English clergy. In our century, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries and Charles Williams’s supernatural thrillers have found wide audiences. Now in our time, Susan Howatch has produced a popular series of novels set in the semifictional town of Starbridge (doubling for Salisbury) that explores the lives of several Church of England clergy and their families over the middle half of this century.

Glittering Images (1987) began this series, and Absolute Truths (1994) concluded it. Her new book, The Wonder Worker, takes up the tale of a generation who have roots in Starbridge but whose location and era are different: London of the 1980s.

The Starbridge series has sold very well, and it is likely that The Wonder Worker will carry on this success. Nicholas Darrow, the striking figure at the heart of the new story (and of number five, Mystical Paths, in the old series), is a remarkable priest. (All of Howatch’s protagonists are remarkable: Jonathan Darrow, Nicholas’s father, is a monk and spiritual director with psychic abilities—detailed in the second Starbridge novel, Glamorous Powers; Neville Aysgarth is a politically savvy archdeacon whose ambition is fixed on the Ultimate Prizes of novel three; and Dr. Charles Ashworth is a church historian-cum-bishop whose career bookends the series in the first and last novels.)

Nicholas Darrow has an increasingly popular and apparently effective healing ministry in a downtown church not far from Westminster. He keeps secret the psychic powers he inherited but seems blessed with far more: the ability to heal both souls and bodies. Darrow presides over the church of Saint Benet’s-by-the-Wall and its associated healing center, staffed by a psychiatrist, psychologist, social workers, other clergy, and volunteers. Everything seems as plausible, even decorous, as such an extraordinary ministry can be. Darrow exercises his gifts during the week and then retires to a beautiful home in the Surrey countryside to enjoy the company of his beautiful and financially successful wife and their two athletic sons. (The church is an oddity of English history, a Guild church opened after World War II to serve downtown workers and thus closed on weekends.)

The novel begins, however, in the voice of a decidedly unremarkable, even homely, young woman who stumbles into one of Darrow’s noontime services to avoid a downpour. Alice Fletcher is amazed that the church is packed—what Anglican church is, nowadays, and especially in the middle of a weekday? She is astonished by the charismatic priest (Darrow) leading the service. He is not stunningly handsome, but he impresses her as so direct, honest, and compassionate that she cannot turn away. And she is overwhelmed by the kindness of a volunteer “befriender,” Francie, who knows just what to say and do to help her divulge her difficulties.

As in the Starbridge novels—and in real life—no one is what he or she seems at first. Alice, Nicholas, Francie, and several others become enmeshed in a complicated network of loves and hates, lies and insights, breakthroughs and breakdowns, violent death and resurrection life that eventually brings their innermost thoughts and affections to light. The interlocking crises press open each person: some for redemption, others for destruction.

Nicholas Darrow in particular can heal many, but he cannot heal himself, nor can he fix people’s problems by dint of sincerity and effort. He can be a good priest, but he is no wonder worker.

Howatch is fascinated with the possibility of understanding and articulating the Christian faith in the language of contemporary secular thought. (She has donated a large sum to Cambridge University to endow a lectureship in Christianity and science; the physicist John Polkinghorne was its first incumbent.) As the church previously used the philosophical concepts of the day, Howatch draws upon psychology. Carl Jung is her favorite, and several of her central characters are quick to translate back and forth between traditional Christian terminology and what they think are Jungian equivalents. Whether one is interested in apologetics, counseling, or preaching, one can appreciate Howatch’s attempt to show the organic links between psychology and spirituality and to demonstrate how psychotherapy and spiritual direction can be usefully fused.

At the same time, Christian readers suspicious of psychology’s imperialism can be grateful that some of Howatch’s strongest characters are dubious that the one can be entirely reduced to the other. The worldly-wise priest Lewis Hall, Darrow’s mentor and partner at Saint Benet’s, cautions that “there is no translation” of certain spiritual realities—notably the demonic and the redemptive—into psychological categories.

There are also certain plot elements that challenge Howatch’s putative science-and-religion nexus, as some critics have observed with alarm. Bruce Bawer writes in the Hudson Review that he has “criticized Howatch in the past for her overly sensational plots and her gratuitous interjection of absurd superstitious elements (her [fifth Starbridge] novel featured teleportation; Absolute Truths includes an exorcism).” And the psychic powers of several characters in The Wonder Worker are described with a surprising matter-of-factness. Locating such spiritual realities in stories of otherwise ordinary people, however, apparently grants them plausibility to many readers, if not to all critics.

Still, it’s not clear that something is not lost in the translation between science and religion—at least on the side of Christian belief. This is particularly true in the question of Christianity versus other religions, and the role and status of Jesus Christ vis-a-vis other purported ways to God. The mysticism of Darrow pere et fils sounds like the mystical theme of most religions (and of Jung and certain other psychologists), the theme that there is a reality beneath all particularities of this or that religion, and that one ought to focus upon the union of the soul with this reality, the God who is in All—and perhaps is All.

In The Wonder Worker, Nicholas Darrow offers this bit of controversial Christology: “Jesus is by tradition the Light that drives back the Dark, but there’s more to it than that. Today we would say Christ is a symbol of integration—that he was one human being who was so totally integrated, so totally at one with his Creator, that he was divine.”

Howatch does maintain other, different Christian voices in each novel, however, so that the reader is left to sort through various forms of contemporary Anglicanism for oneself. Indeed, the Starbridge novels feature a troika of Christian options: liberal, mystical, and the tradition of the via media. Absolute Truths, the concluding novel, inaccurately terms the first two “Protestant” and “Catholic,” which is surprising on a couple of counts. Howatch has described herself as Protestant, while Neville Aysgarth, the liberal archdeacon, is her least winsome character—and precisely because he’s liberal, Howatch seems to suggest, not because he is Protestant per se. Charles Ashworth, representing the via media, instead seems to get pride of place, both literally (he narrates the first and last novels) and literarily (he becomes the widely respected bishop of Starbridge, the only character with a national reputation).

In an interview with the evangelical British journal Third Way, Howatch admitted that her own sympathies lie with a kind of traditional Protestant Anglicanism and that she has difficulties with the Eucharist (see also the interview that accompanies this review). This admission fits with the generally positive way Ashworth is portrayed, but it is impressive given her sympathetic treatment of Jonathan Darrow, mystic and Anglo-Catholic. (Note: “mystic” is not the same as “Anglo-Catholic,” pace Howatch’s shorthand designations.) The sixth novel, and the series, ends with a reconciliation of these three representative individuals that yet underlines the ongoing tensions within the Church of England at large.

In The Wonder Worker, however, things are simplified into Nicholas’s theological liberalism-cum-psychology versus Lewis Hall’s theological conservatism-cum-psychology. It is worth noting that late in the Starbridge series the “evangelical” wing, despised all round by the other characters, is coming up fast in the person of Charles Ashworth’s son Charley, a successful young cleric. Those novels portray Howatch’s characters against the macrocosm of Church of England struggles (although The Wonder Worker does not). So a reader might wonder when Howatch will write a similar novel from Charley’s point of view that would culminate, perhaps, in the appointment of evangelical George Carey to the see of Canterbury—a development that would leave all of her previous protagonists equally amazed.

Church politics, though, is incidental to Howatch’s main concern in this most recent novel. Indeed, each of her church novels places spiritual growth at the center, and each story tells a tale of personal crisis and resolution. Here is the drama, and here the edification. Spiritual growth in these stories is both a gift and the product of a regimen. Howatch never once quotes the following Bible verses, but they could well function as the polestar of both the Starbridge novels and The Wonder Worker: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13; NRSV).

Spiritual disciplines are good—whether taking Communion, reading the daily offices, or submitting to a spiritual director—and yet they are not enough to deal with the deepest problems of the heart. The trials of Howatch’s main characters show that salvation depends upon genuine openness to God’s Spirit of truth and love, not mere motions of duty. No human willpower and good intentions will suffice against the grip of evil on our souls, especially given our enormous capacity for both rationalization and outright deceit. There has to be thorough confession, repentance, and amendment of life.

Yet, in the right spirit, those external motions can truly be sacraments, means of receiving cleansing and empowering grace. In his reflections on the Starbridge series, pastor Lawrence Farris lists a number of “absolute truths” about clergy that impress him, truths that Howatch reinforces in the present novel: She shows us

that we are often tempted and do our greatest harm through our gifts and strengths, rather than through our weaknesses;
that much of the good we do is done despite our shortcomings;
that evil is real and cannot facilely be explained away;
that the communion of saints includes and sometimes confounds us;
that the spiritual disciplines offer us safety and comfort and restrain our egos;
that we can make an idol of almost anything and deny that we have done so;
that we need people with whom we can be utterly honest if we are to be honest with ourselves;
that we can take an interest in our families’ spiritual welfare, but we cannot minister to them;
that separating the psychological and the spiritual imperils the self;
that our God encompasses everything, seeking to align our wills and lives with that Love which longs to unfold itself in all it has created.

How Howatch reveals these absolute truths is also worth noting. First, she shifts perspectives from one character to another to show the outer person versus the inner, the persona evident to others versus the consciousness of the individual—and how both demonstrate something, but not all, of the actual heart of the individual: “I think I’m fine, but my behaviour shows … “; “My behaviour says I’m fine, but I know … “; the reader sees both action and reflection and comes to yet another conclusion. In the Starbridge series, Howatch usually relates an entire novel through a single individual’s perspective, and the benefits of seeing characters from new angles come only from reading the several novels. In The Wonder Worker, the five parts come from four different viewpoints. Human beings are better and worse than they appear and certainly are not simply what they appear to be.

Second, Howatch makes plain how people can help others with their problems while making a mess of their own. Each of the protagonists provides strength and wisdom to someone else while yet, as we see when the curtain is raised on his or her own life, struggling with severe and sometimes life-threatening challenges. The healer is shown to be, at best, a wounded healer in need of others’ ministrations. The Wonder Worker places this theme front and center as it is Nicholas Darrow, the priest who has everything and seems capable of doing everything, who is shown to need healing as much as anyone.

The novels also present the complementary idea that people can harm even when they appear to be admirably Christian and competent: spiritual authorities, after all, cannot help but offer advice shaped to some extent by their own interests and weaknesses. Howatch avoids a God’s-eye view, although her novels frequently intimate God’s providence (“all things work together for good” is an explicit motif in Absolute Truths).

What draws in so many readers is that the novels present just the views of people, only some of them unusually intelligent and sophisticated, with ordinary problems and drives as they muddle along, collapse at times, and help or hurt each other. Yet divine grace shines above and around and through.

Howatch’s determination to deal with real life shows particularly in her unblushing references to sex. Sex is important to her characters, as it is to most people (although you’d never know that from some Christian fiction). In Howatch’s church novels, though, sex curiously is graphically portrayed only when a character is sinning and in serious psychospiritual trouble. Her depictions are hardly erotic and never titillating. Howatch offers little praise, and even less description, of good sex. Even the hints of it in the sixth novel between Bishop Charles Ashworth and his apparently perfect and contented wife, Lyle, are undone to some extent by revelations from Lyle’s diary.

This reticence might be English reserve, although it seems oddly one-sided. The reader is tempted to consider Howatch’s own unhappy history of divorce and promiscuity: one writes what one knows? It is regrettable that so many of her characters show such a range of admirable qualities, and yet a happy romantic life is not generally among them.

Howatch made her first fortune writing sagas (Penmarric is perhaps her best known), and her prose generally is straightforward and easily digested. Indeed, sometimes it is a bit obvious in alerting the reader to a character’s personality trait (Neville Aysgarth tells us he is “ringing down the curtain” on his troubled past in Ultimate Prizes rather too many times: our ribs get sore from all the prodding). Frequently the plotting is too neat. Characters tend to come and go nicely on cue, moving things along and then considerately vanishing until needed again.

The Wonder Worker, however, is the least troubled by these stylistic problems. The characters and conversations seem more real than ever: even the spiritual directors—in the former series customarily verging on the omniscient—here don’t get nearly everything right. And throughout, the narrative remains well focused upon the encounter, confrontation, healing, and restoration of people in spiritual crisis.

These novels pose pointed challenges to those who are ambitious for success as measured in prestigious education, intellectual and ecclesiastical achievement, sophistication and so on. We get glimpses, and sometimes a sustained examination, of ourselves in these books. We can also be blessed by the direction offered out of our false, dead selves and into resurrected realities.

In a Publishers Weekly interview given during the early stages of the Starbridge series, Howatch explains:

“I was so tired of seeing clergymen, priests, portrayed as caricatures. I wanted to write about clergymen with balls. They’re human beings just like anyone else.” Howatch has given us several thousand pages now of clergymen with balls, brains, hearts, and souls. She also has shown us their wives, lovers, children, parents, superiors, rivals, enemies, and victims. She has shown us great patches of real life. And these lives of English clergy are at least as fascinating as Len Deighton’s world of espionage. For Howatch’s novels offer a full dossier on the intrigue of temptation; on the web of deceit we all spin to advantage ourselves; on the struggle of good and evil over matters of eternal—not just geopolitical—import; and on the thrill of victories won in the glorious name of His Majesty’s sacred service.

John G. Stackhouse, Jr., is Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil (Oxford Univ. Press).

Susan Howatch, 57, is author of many novels, including most recently The Wonder Worker.

She spoke with B&C from her home in London.

While you now live in London, for a time you lived in Salisbury, which is the background for the Starbridge novels. The town seems to have had a profound affect on you.

When I was down in Salisbury I had a very small apartment which was about a hundred yards from the west front of the cathedral. So for about three years I lived with that building. It had the most extraordinary effect on me. I was hypnotized by seeing it in all weathers and times of day and night. Gradually it got to me.

I wasn’t a churchgoer. I wasn’t particularly religious when I went down to Salisbury, but I became interested. Various things happened in my professional and personal life that were quite upsetting, and I began to wonder what life was really all about. I wouldn’t call it a midlife crisis. I always think a midlife crisis is when you cling to your youth. I would say instead it was the beginning of what they call a “second journey.” This is when you reach a crossroads in life and you’re keen to move on. I began to read about Christianity and the church, and I was living with this enormous architectural monster outside my window, so there were many things that fused together and produced the Starbridge books.

It was quite a change from your previous writing.

My personal life was a wreck at the time, and I’d come to the end of the kind of books I used to write. When I wrote the last of my long sagas and it was just treated like another airport book, I was discouraged. I felt I was just beginning to say something interesting, but nobody wanted to know. So when I wrote the first of the Starbridge books, I didn’t submit it to publishers. I put it away in a drawer because I wasn’t actually sure whether I wanted to publish it. I wasn’t sure whether God wanted me to publish it. Should I go on writing novels or should I go back to college and do a degree in theology and teach, or what was I supposed to do? So I wrote this one just for my own personal pleasure.

Then I found that I really had to begin a second Starbridge book, and it was only after I was almost finished that that my American agent came over from New York and asked if she could have a little peek at the manuscript.

I showed it to her, and then I had to show the two novels, of course, to my British agent, and both agents advised me to publish. That was like a green light saying, “Okay, go on, continue writing novels, but you will go on in a very different way.”

When beginning the second journey you reach the crossroads, and you can either turn aside and do something quite new or you can go on but in a very different way. It wasn’t as in the old days in which I just wanted to make a lot of money and be famous. This time I felt that it didn’t matter. If this was what God required me to do, then my job was just to write them as well as I could, and then he would use it in whatever way he thought best. It was very liberating.

In your novels, spiritual direction is extremely important. Were there any mature Christians in your life at this time who were giving you any comfort or advice?

No. I was living as a recluse. I was not a churchgoer. I knew no one. I had a religious conversion in about 1983. I didn’t become a regular churchgoer until about 1988 when I left Salisbury and was living in London.

How would you describe your own faith stance today?

I would say I’m a conservative liberal. I believe in holding to the tradition, but I like to experiment outside it, or at least speculate.

I expect one of the things that makes some of your conservative church fellows nervous is your interest in psychology and religion.

I think some parts of the Christian church are wary of fun, whether it’s psychology or physics or whatever. But it is all God’s world. Every facet of knowledge leads to God, and therefore science and religion are two facets of one truth.

The great breakthrough for me came in 1989. I came across the writings of an Anglican monk called Christopher Bryant, whom I quote in the fifth Starbridge book. He was a revelation to me because he made a study of Jung, and he wrote several books on the interface between Jungian psychologies and Christianity. He showed that some of the medieval Christian mystics said the same things as the psychologists. The same thing could be described in two languages: the language of religion and the language of psychology.

Do you find Jung most congenial among psychological theorists?

I think there are various psychologists who have interesting things to say. But I do think Jung is interesting. Jung said that most of the people who came to see him were troubled with spiritual illnesses. I think spiritual illness is the great underrated—even ignored—thing of our time. I think Jung had a lot of religious awareness.

There is no question about that. The question is, “Which religion?”

In some ways he was a gnostic, a quite unconventional Christian. But many pioneers are odd in some way.

Why did you fund a lectureship in Christianity and science at Cambridge University, rather than, say, in Christianity and literature?

I felt very strongly called to do this thing for science and religion. I came across Christopher Bryant’s books. Then I came across the books of John Polkinghorne, who wrote about the interface of physics and cosmology with Christianity and religion in general. I was absolutely staggered by these books, and I saw how important it would be for Christian apologetics to have science reinforcing Christianity. I had met Polkinghorne several times and finally, when I said to him that I would like to endow a lectureship on this subject, he said the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and he had just asked the university authorities to fund the post. It all seemed very “meant.”

So how do you feel about contemporary Christian literature?

When I write my books I don’t sit down and say, “Now I’m going to write a Christian polemic.” I’m going to write a novel. I think the danger with so-called Christian novels is that they are really polemics in disguise and consequently bad novels. Of course the novel should have a message, but it should grow out of the plot and the characters.

How much Romanticism is there in this, in the sense of inspiration just coming to the novelist? How much craft and discipline and intentionality really do lie behind the finished work?

I’ve given the wrong impression! I’m not one of these writers that say, “Oh, I just sit back and let my characters speak.” Of course there’s a craft; of course it must be immensely disciplined. But creation is a very mysterious process. For me the characters always come first and the message will grow out of them. Of course I’m going to write about what interests me and what I believe, so the Christianity will come from me. It will work itself out by the creative process. You’ve got to write about human beings, about the human condition. Unless that rings true, the Christianity won’t emerge because Christianity is about how real human beings respond to God.