It’s Spiritual, My Dear Watson

“We reach, we grasp, and what is left in our hands in the end? A shadow!” Sherlock Holmes once said to Dr. Watson in the classic mystery series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “You see, but you do not observe.”

To Stephen Kendrick, a parish minister of the Universalist Church and author of “Holy Clues,” the musings of the mythic private detective sound as if they had been uttered by “some Eastern guru, or maybe a mystical priest.” So he set himself the task of applying the techniques of biblical exegesis to what aficionados of Sherlock Holmes call “the canon,” and the result is a surprising and sometimes endearing sermon on how to find spiritual wisdom in unexpected places.

“These are very deep waters,” as Holmes himself put it.

A certain playful irony is at work in “Holy Clues.” After all, the celebrated master sleuth was famous for his “coldblooded” approach to his craft: “The most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen,” as Dr. Watson, his fictive biographer and companion, described Holmes. Yet Kendrick detects “a man of faith” and “a powerful moral grandeur” in Sherlock Holmes, and he invites us to ponder “the spiritual fingerprints found within these entertainments.”

From his close reading of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, Kendrick teases out five “instructions from the Master”--”Nothing Is Little,” “Notice What You See,” “The Deceptiveness of the Ordinary,” “The Bizarre Is Not Necessarily Mysterious” and “Presume Nothing.” As extracted from the fiction of Conan Doyle and applied to the experiences of real life, each one of these principles becomes a tool for spiritual self-improvement.

Thus, for example, Kendrick invokes Holmes when he admonishes us to “beware the allure of the bizarre,” a quality that may attract but, according to Kendrick, ultimately fails to satisfy the spiritual seeker. “For strange effects and extraordinary combinations, we must go to life itself” is how Holmes expressed the idea, and Kendrick compares his insight to the teachings of the Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa. “When you see ordinary situations with extraordinary insight,” Trungpa once said, “it is like discovering a jewel in rubbish.”

Kendrick is honest enough to admit that Holmes, as depicted by Conan Doyle, is “religiously dour and unsettled,” and he concedes: “We cannot parade Holmes as a great mystic.” Yet Kendrick insists that his “spiritual bleakness is exactly what makes Holmes all the more trustworthy as a spiritual guide.” When Holmes mutters “God help us!” at a particularly vexing moment in an investigation, Kendrick hears an earnest appeal to a shadowy but undeniably real divinity.

“For a man who seems so much above all common pieties and religious rituals . . . Holmes sees enough pain and heartache in his line of work to sense that there is a presence hovering within that shadow,” says Kendrick. “It is in those times of darkness and despair that he talks to God.”

Conan Doyle, as Kendrick points out, was famous in his own lifetime for his public advocacy of spiritualism in the form of seances and other communication with the spirit world. “What a strange irony that Doyle’s long and deeply controversial campaign,” writes Kendrick, “was principally financed by the sales of none other than that utterly rational and thoroughly skeptical Sherlock Holmes.”

“Holy Clues” makes a convincing case for the proposition that a mystery story is always and inevitably a kind of morality tale. After all, as Kendrick points out, the world’s first murder mystery can be found in the pages of Genesis, in which Cain slays Abel and then God plays the role of detective: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” As refracted through the lens of Kendrick’s book, the same spiritual power can be detected in virtually every mystery.

“Detective stories of all kinds may be seen as subtly humble religious parables,” explains Kendrick. “After all, if the sleuth can discover the darkest and most guarded and protected secrets within the human heart, can that of God’s inscrutable will be far behind? Perhaps, at least, they are the same mystery.”

At one point in his book, Kendrick pauses to ponder W.H. Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage,” an essay about detective fiction that Kendrick praises as “a model of graceful (and shrewd) literary insight and theological depth.” The very same words, it seems to me, apply with equal force to Kendrick’s “Holy Clues.”

Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “Moses: A Life” (Ballantine).