Collection Offers Compelling Glimpses of God

Fiction writers are forever in search of compelling characters. Good stories depend on them. Strong narrative demands them. No wonder, then, that writers occasionally turn to God. Among his or her many attributes, God is one of the most alluring characters of all time, a figure of complexity, sophistication and ambiguity whose supreme opacity offers the skilled writer a promising and perilous canvas.

Few writers actually make God an explicit actor in the drama. God is a bit too big for that. Even in the Bible, God is mostly known indirectly, through the reaction of human beings to the mystery and threat of the ineffable. And in this brilliant collection of short stories and excerpts edited by the Atlantic Monthly’s C. Michael Curtis, God almost never appears. But he is present, subliminally or explicitly, existentially or comically, invisible yet inescapable.

Holding these 25 stories together, says Curtis, “is a recognition that God, however conceived, challenges our deepest yearnings, provides our greatest comfort, assures us of our fundamental worth, grants us the only absolution we fully trust, makes possible . . . a loving regard for other characters in the larger narrative of life.” Yet, God in these stories is not always so benign, nor do the individual writers approach God with the same equanimity that the editor does.

For John Hersey, God is reflected through the intolerant rage of a righteous minister, while in Cynthia Ozick’s “Rosa,” God is notable by absence, by the painful dementia of an aging Holocaust survivor. In John Gardner’s “Redemption,” a father rails against God for allowing the death of a young boy. Several of the stories lead us into the psyches of ministers and priests as they try to balance the pettiness of daily life with the grandeur of the task they are supposedly entrusted with. In J.F. Powers’ “Zeal,” a bishop suffers through a multi-day train ride with a zealous priest whose passion is made insufferable by his banality, while the main protagonist in Mary Ward Brown’s “A New Life” only comes to terms with her husband’s death when she realizes how hollow are the promises of the minister and congregants of a born-again movement called Keepers of the Vineyard.

Yet Curtis also includes stories of such transcendent beauty that they do indeed “challenge our deepest yearnings.” In Peggy Payne’s “The Pure of Heart,” a minister hears God speak to him, softly and without many words. The minister debates whether to tell his middle-class professional congregation; he does, the church board censures him, and his job is then saved by the community’s reaction. James Joyce evokes the spirituality of Dublin, its redemption and drunkenness, in “Grace,” and Louise Erdrich conjures an unsettling Montana universe of revivalist preachers, summer heat, lust and visions in “Satan: Hijacker of a Planet.”

Andre Dubus, in meticulous prose, leads us into the heart of a father and the sacrifice he makes for his daughter. A lonely man, a good Catholic, surrounded by his horses on a farm in rural Massachusetts, he lives in the house that his dead wife and children used to fill. One day his grown daughter visits. She goes drinking with friends, and late at night she drives home and kills a man crossing the road. She comes home and whispers, softly, “Daddy,” and he rises and takes her car and moves the body and wrecks her car and goes to his friend the priest and doesn’t confess. She leaves, and he is left alone, with his prayers and his guilt, his soft internal monologue with God. He realizes that if it had been one of his sons, he would have gone with him to the police. He tells God that it is not because he loves his sons less, but he says, “I could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons’ pain, could bear it with pride as they took the whip and the nails. But You never had a daughter, and if You had, You could not have borne her passion.”

This collection offers no one message, no one reading of God, no clear path to religious experience. But for moments, these writers open a window to transcendence. They allow us to see that which we have never seen, to stop thinking, to forget we are reading. Perhaps that should be attributed to the subject matter, to the inspiration of the divine; perhaps these are just very fine writers; perhaps the two explanations are inseparable. At whatever level one reads these stories, they demand to be read.

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Zachary Karabell is the author of several books on American culture and wrote the chapter on religion for “The Columbia History of the 20th Century.”