I was introduced to John Updike by one of my fellow-seminarians at the North American College in Rome in the early 1960s, mostly as the author of short stories in The New Yorker. I was hooked and began to read everything that he published. The six months after I was ordained, when we had more freedom in Rome, I had the habit, on the afternoon we had off, of walking over to the Piazza di Spagna, buying the latest issue of The New Yorker, and spending the next two or three hours drinking tea after teaat Babingtons Tea Room reading Updike et al., before heading back, supercharged with caffeine, along the Tiber to the College. I became hooked on Updike and devoured anything he wrote; the hope that he might have a short story or a poem or a review in The New Yorker by itself justified a subscription.When Rabbit, Run came out, I bought a copy and brought it to lectures at the Gregorian University, where, one day, I was told by one of my classmates that this was perhaps not the sort of book I should be reading while our professor went on in Latin about the theology of the spiritual life.I appreciated it that Updike had religious, and specifically Christian, interests and, it seemed, commitmentsthat has not been at all common among great modern figures in U.S. literature. I loved "Seven Stanzas at Easter," and have quoted it occasionally in homilies. (N.T. Wright quotes it in his recent mammoth book on the resurrection of Jesus.)There is a scene in Rabbit, Run, in which a young Protestant minister named Eccles (a tad obvious, the name, but also rhymes with "feckless"), who is practicing his well-meaning ministry toward Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, including by means of games of golf, goes to visit the much older Lutheran minister in the town, the Angstroms being members of Pastor Kruppenbachs church, Rabbits wife a member of Eccless church. Perhaps, Eccles ventures, the two ministers should cooperate in trying to help the couple save their fraying marriage? He can barely get the words out when Kruppenbach explodes ("even in his undershirt, he somehow wore vestments"):

"Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these peoples lives? I know what they teach you at seminary; this psychology and that. But I dont agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I dont think that. I dont think thats your job." ..."Ive listened to your story but I wasnt listening to what it said about the people. I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf. What do you think now it looks like to God, one childish husband leaving one childish wife? Do you ever think any more what God sees? Or have you grown beyond that? ..."It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our good human nature. Isnt it right? ... Well, I say thats a Devils idea. I say, let the cops be cops and look after their laws that have nothing to do with us." ..."If Gott wants to end misery Hell declare the Kingdom now." ..."How big do you think your little friends look among the billions that God sees? In Bombay now they die in the streets every minute. You say role. I say you dont know what your role is or youd be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith. There is where comfort comes from: faith, not what little finagling a body can do here and there, stirring the bucket. In running back and forth you run from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful, so when the call comes you can go out and tell them, Yes, he is dead, but you will see him again in Heaven. Yes, you suffer, but you must love your pain, because it is Christs pain. When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hothe clenches his hairy fistswith Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. Its all in the Booka thief with faith is worth all the Pharisees. Make no mistake. Now Im serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devils work."

Although, if I remember correctly, Kruppenbach disappears from the novel at this point, Ive always felt that he represented Updikes own view of what Christianity has to offer. Kruppenbach is pure Karl Barth. In his first collection Assorted Prose Updike included a review of Barths book on Anselms proof for the existence of God, a review written, he explained in the preface to the collection, "in acknowledgment of a debt, for Barths theology, at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it (my life)." This review is followed immediately by a single paragraph devoted to Paul Tillichs Morality and Beyond; the reviews last sentence reads: "Terms like grace and Will of God walk through these pages as bloodless ghosts, transparent against the milky background of beyond and being that Tillich, God forbid, would confuse with the Christian faith."But two things led me to become disillusioned with Updike. The first was the preface he wrote when he gathered his short stories about the Maples into a single volume entitled Too Far To Go. I cant find my copy at the moment, but at some point in the preface he says, in explanation, of the erosion of the marriage he has chronicled in these wonderful short stories: "Well, nothing lasts forever". I thought when I read it that this was the sort of thing that the Rev. Eccles might say.The other was the unpleasant sensation left in me by Updikes autobiographical work Self-Consciousness, particularly his unrepentant, almost casual, description of his infidelities in his first marriage. It struck me that by writing and publishing this, he was renewing the pain he had caused. And I really havent read much of his ever since. Still, when I heard yesterday of his death, I felt real sorrow, as at the death of an old friend with whom one had once been close, with whom one had in the meantime lost touch.