It was a misguided understanding that led my wife and me to go and see jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear in the 1998 film As Good as It Gets. Each of us had heard from different friends, our gender matches, that we simply must go and see it. It was said to be "uproariously funny" and "thoroughly delightful." One said, "I haven't laughed so hard in years." So when the young handsome gay artist was violently beaten to a pulp and left with face scars distorting him for life, and when the frantic single-parent waitress broke down in anguished, uncontrollable sobs, confessing that she longed once again just "to be held and fucked" by a man -- well, we were totally unprepared. That sort of emotional assault on our expectations for some images from life's lighter side was not what we went to the movie for. We wanted relief from the world of violence, anguish, and dread.

But, of course, we did laugh uproariously, and a lot. And in deeply satisfying ways the film was thoroughly delightful. It even had a happy ending -- young woman gets old man, young man gets darling dog, and dog gets bacon. What more could one want!? It was a movie we cried over -- cried in laughter and cried in sorrow. It was a moving human story that powerfully intermingled the two faces of narrative art, comedy and tragedy, and there was insightful moral gain in the narrative. It raised and attempted to answer the deeply moral and religious question, "What is goodness?"

"One thing that's given me courage in writing," says Updike, "has been this belief that the truth, what is actual, must be faced and is somehow holy."

The next day as I sat down to write this essay, it dawned on me that the film was a genuinely Updikean tale. It was the truth. Life is a maddeningly turbulent and obscure mixture of laughter and weeping, pleasure and pain, hope and despair, carnival and labor, tenderness and violence, purity and lust, confidence and despair, faith and doubt. "One thing that's given me courage in writing," says Updike, "has been this belief that the truth, what is actual, must be faced and is somehow holy. That is, what exists is holy and God knows what exists; He can't be shocked, and he can't be surprised" (Plath, ed., 203). He says, "My books are all meant to be moral debates with the reader" in which the fundamental concern is to get the reader to ask the question, "What is goodness?" (Picked Up Pieces, 502). Moreover, and more important for the context of this essay, he also plainly states, "The sense of the sacred of the religious, let's call it, certainly does play into one's art" (Plath, ed., 252)

The religious consciousness in Updike may best be characterized as our sense of an unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable Sacred Presence.

Here is the definition: the religious consciousness in Updike may best be characterized as our sense of an unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable Sacred Presence. I will argue that in his understanding of religion a dialectically alternating value must be assigned to each of those adjectives: the Sacred Presence, God, in manner strikingly reminiscent of Rudolph Otto's characterization of "the Numinous," always and at once both troubles and inspires human self-consciousness. To be more specific, the Sacred Presence is unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable in both a negative and a positive sense. The film title, as I understand it, is meant to suggest this same perspectival ambiguity in our consciousness, and it fits Updike here as well. His view of the religious consciousness is "as good as it gets" -- our awareness of the Sacred Presence in life is, by wrenchingly unpredictable turns, both astonishingly positive as an enabling gift and also frighteningly negative as a destructive threat. And there is no relief from the terrible uncertainty that this dialectically layered awareness thrusts upon us qua human. Even qua committed Christian believer, which Updike claims to be, this tension is never fully of finally resolved. Personal faith, for Updike and his mentor Kierkegaard here, is a stance of the will taken in the face of this unrelieved ambiguity, not as an escape from it. Faith of this transformative kind is a whole-soul response, not a descriptive observation. This essay has set itself only the descriptive task in addressing this unrelieved ambiguity.

If you tell the truth about us, as Updike sees it, you have to record the religious dimension of human existence.

If we are to assume, then, that "the sense of the sacred or the religious . . . certainly does play into one's art," how does Updike understand it to do so? First, from the standpoint of the writer, and in a Kantian manner, one feels unconditionally obligated to tell the truth. Truth-telling is the absolute credential for a fiction writer. A writer must deal unflinchingly with the good, the bad, and the ugly, with the unavoidable, the unbearable, and the unbelievable, as they actually appear in lived experience. "The first item of morality for a writer is to try to be accurate, to tell the truth as you know it . . . my overall theory, if I have one, is that the life of a piece of fictional prose comes from its relationship to reality, to truth, to what actually happens . . . A writer's job is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live" (Plath, ed., 120-21, 216). Second, in the process of such truth-telling, Updike believes that one in fact comes upon the awareness of Sacred Presence in human experience. For Updike, human self-consciousness, synchronized with its parallel world-consciousness, finds itself confronted willy-nilly with an awareness of the Sacred, with God. If you tell the truth about us, as Updike sees it, you have to record the religious dimension of human existence. That is the truth, and truth is holy, is sacred. Writers, he says, are "servants of reality" (182).

So, my definition of religious consciousness in Updike emerges only when one first recognizes how to understand the shape and movement of ordinary human consciousness. Humans are religious because in their self-consciousness they are driven by profoundly existential concerns - concerns about the meaning and purpose of their existence. Religion as an institution makes no sense at all unless it functions to address helpfully the fundamental questions that drive human consciousness: How did I get here? What am I to do here? What is my final destiny -- if any -- after here? Religion in the sense of personal and deeply self-conscious experience is the sense of an unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable sacrality that presents itself as the all-embracing context for that existential consciousness. "Like the inner of the two bonded strips of metal in a thermostat, the self curls against Him and presses . . . God is a dark sphere enclosing the pinpoint of our selves" (Self-Consciousness, 229). Religion in the institutional sense consists of the human traditions, symbols, liturgies, and communities that help interpret, celebrate, and propitiate this personal sense of Sacred Presence. Humanity's personal religious experiences have given rise to the institutional forms, and not the other way around.

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