By Bill Smith, The Christian Curmudgeon
This post is a follow-up to “This Minister Lost His Faith” which you can read here. With both I am reflecting on the first chapter of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies which portrays a Princeton educated Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot. The historical setting is the early years of the 20th century. In the first post, I focused on Mr. Wilmot’s loss of faith and its consequences theological and practical. There is a section in the first chapter of the novel and which describes a pastoral hospital visit with a member, a Mr. Orr.
Mr. Orr was was a patient in Barnert Memorial, a hospital that served the poor and immigrants. He was dying. He was alone. He had been a laborer who never saw his way clear to marry.
Mr. Orr was a professing Christian, a Presbyterian church member, faithful in attendance at services where he always sat in the same place underneath the memorial window to Protestant martyrs and heroes. He listened intently to Mr. Wilmot’s sermons. He had been brought up by “pious folk”:
…good people, lost their pig farm to the banks in the Panic of (18)’73, never got their heads above water since. Every night, before supper, we used to sing a hymn. Even nothing on the table, we used to sing a hymn. ‘Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh.’ That sort of thing.