When a group of women decorates St. Mary's for Whitsunday, Mildred Lathbury, the heroine of Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, remarks, "There was a good deal of chatter, and I was reminded of Trollope's description of Lily Dale and Grace Crawley, who were both accustomed to churches and 'almost as irreverent as though they were two curates.'" Pym herself is accustomed to churches, and writes her comic novels with an affectionate irreverence that is reminiscent of the Barchester novels at their best. Of her ten novels, only The Sweet Dove Died does not center on the Church and the Anglican clergy, or on people closely associated with them.

The novels of the English author, who died in 1980, have been reissued in this country and have received much favorable attention in the press. Pym is an incisive social observer whose frequent allusions to Trollope and Jane Austen invite the comparisons. Her satirical touch seems light, yet its exposure of the ridiculous posturings and laughable concerns that mark social intercourse at every level is merciless. It would be surprising if so keen an observer did not scrutinize the church she treats so frequently, with entertaining and illuminating results. Writing in 1971, when only six of Pym's ten novels had been published, Robert Smith remarked that "no hint of doctrinal or emotional problems is intruded upon the reader. Religion, for Miss Pym's characters, involves no anguish of conscience ('social' or personal), no dark night of the soul, but discussions about what vestments should be worn on Mid-Lent Sunday, what shall be served for luncheon on Fridays in the clergy-house," and like subjects.

Pym does not write, it is true, of doctrinal matters. But just as Trollope, amid the high comedy of Barchester Towers, calls our attention to some of the abuses within the Church (in the person of the Reverend Vesey Stanhope, for example), so Pym, in the context of her comic vision, calls our attention to the contemporary situation of the Church.

The detailed picture of modern-day Christianity that emerges from Pym's books suggests that religion was one of her most important artistic concerns. From Some Tame Gazelle (1950) to A Few Green Leaves (1980), several topics recur and coalesce to define the state of organized religion, as Pym saw it: the pious cliché, religious phrases, hymns, prayer, and the clerical voice (especially in sermons). These, together with the themes of the Church as social organization and of the embarrassment of religious commitment, outline a coherent vision. Pym presents a church hampered by three language-related problems: a stock of pious words that has been devitalized, outmoded devotional forms that often do not appeal to the modern sensibility, and a clergy that has difficulty communicating the ancient faith to its contemporary flock. Christianity in her novels is the vital faith of a relatively small number, a faith that the established Church cannot foster at large so long as its language is inadequate. Pym's manner of weaving, most unobtrusively, serious insights into the texture of comedy might be misleading, but her recurrence to the same themes, topics, and vision of the Church indicates her estimation of their significance. To demonstrate the consistency of perspective that I propose, I shall introduce the topics and themes with reference to the earlier novels before turning to A Few Green Leaves, Pym's last novel and most optimistic depiction of the Church.

"God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform," says a sheep-like bishop when a middle-aged lady rejects his marriage proposal. She is annoyed that he quotes her favorite hymn, fearing, perhaps, that it will henceforth have unpleasant associations for her. "God does move in a mysterious way," insists a vicar whose hope that a housekeeper will materialize in answer to his prayers is temporarily frustrated. The pious cliché, like any other, retains little of its original impact. Any residual majesty that might cling to Cowper's words is undercut by our reflection that among God's wonders we are to number a bishop's marriage and a vicar's household arrangements.

The glib platitude is current in a pleasant little world in which religious words or phrases are felt to be inapplicable, or are thoroughly secularized and meaningless in their original sense. "We are supposed not to take heed of what we shall wear," Belinda Bede chides the Archdeacon with whom she has been in unrequited and irreproachable love for over thirty years. "My dear Belinda," he retorts, "we are not in the Garden of Eden. There is no solution to the problem. We may as well face the facts. Agatha ought not to have let the moth get into that suit." The faithful Belinda is reassured by her sister that her love for the Archdeacon, who is married to the careless Agatha, is quite right since "Clergymen are always saying that we should love one another." A lady in Excellent Women is shocked to think that the commandment to "love thy neighbor" should be taken literally, to include the people surrounding her in a cheap restaurant. The "precious blood" for whose lack "somebody might be dying" in Pym's world is R-Negative and salvation is a transfusion. Thus casually, Pym's characters frequently test pious language against the texture of reality only to misinterpret it or reject it as irrelevant. Altogether in these novels, the words of faith have either lost their vigor and spiritual significance, or they are not taken seriously as referring to daily life.

Just as the words with religious denotations and connotations that Pym's characters speak are often empty, the words of hymns are often meaningless or, worse, offensive to them. Dulcie, the appealing heroine of No Fond Return of Love, waits while singing a hymn for the following words: "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, / God made them high or lowly and ordered their estate." When they are omitted, she feels "cheated of her indignation." Hymns "are the great stumbling block" to faith, a man tells a group of friends; "the only thing is to abandon oneself to the words uncritically and let them flow over one." Ironically, the very forms meant to encourage and guide devotion have become positive impediments to it by being couched in language suited to a different era. Nor have other aspects of worship been updated to accommodate the modern tongue. A troubled young woman thinks that to learn to pray, perhaps she should return to the church she only visits. She sits alone "making up prayers in the rather stilted language she remembered from childhood. Was it necessary always to address God as 'Thou' and to use such archaic grammatical forms?" For Pym's characters, devotion is often vitiated by its lack of a comfortable and significant idiom. It is approached consistently with reservations and with a consciousness that it is, for some reason, not quite right.

The clerical voice the characters hear frequently fails to strike the right note. Sometimes it is garbled: a parishioner observes that Father Thames's letter in the parish magazine was, "as so often, troubled and confused. Spiritual and material matters jostled each other in a most inartistic manner, so that the effect was almost comic." Sometimes sermons are too "intelligent" for their auditors, other times too "literary." For sermons, Archdeacon Hoccleve often reads to his parishioners long excerpts of seventeenth-century authors which they do not understand. When he abandons this comfortable habit, striving to preach a lucid sermon, his congregation suspects he is deteriorating into second childhood. In one of the funniest episodes in Pym, he preaches on the Dies Irae to a congregation at first uneasy, then disbelieving and, finally, angry at his zestful references to their sinfulness. Even Belinda, his greatest admirer, is shocked and insulted, though she does not retaliate, as others do, by withholding her offering. Whether Pym's clerics are incoherent, incomprehensible because they ignore their auditors' limitations or take refuge in the past, or simply tactless, they consistently fail to communicate the faith to the people they serve.

Pym's novels suggest that the Church has become a primarily social institution to most of its members. Examples of this abound in An Unsuitable Attachment. Mark, the vicar, comes "of a good clerical family" though he is "without private means." Edwin Pettigrew "was not a believer, though he sometimes went to church out of politeness to Mark and Sophia," as if the service were a dull party hosted by dull but nice people. Ianthe's mother "had been deeply conscious of her position as a canon's widow," and a match between Rupert and Ianthe would be proper: "Archdeacon's son and canon's daughter—what could be more suitable when one came to think of it." Membership in the Church or close association with the clergy is a convenient and reliable way of "placing" people socially. A church affiliation is akin to belonging to a club; it is a guarantee of a certain social standard and common background that is reassuring to everyone concerned. The French anthropologist who visits English churches to observe the rituals that include "afterwards … the traditional English Sunday dinner with joint" knows this.

Given the uncomplicatedly social implications of church membership that all assume, religious fervor or a noticeable commitment are an embarrassment to Pym's characters. In Excellent Women, Everard Bone's conversion seems "rather an awkward thing" to his acquaintances. Father Greatorex's middle-aged decision to take Orders cannot be accepted at face value, or he as a "saintly" man—a parishioner snorts at the thought, guessing that "He was no good in business so he went into the Church." When Mary Beamish goes to test her vocation, her brother is ashamed "about this nunnery business." A man who regains his childhood faith is uncomfortable when he is asked about it. Disturbed by noise coming from a neighboring flat, a lady is mortified to learn that its source is the singing of some Nigerian Christians. "Christianity is disturbing," she is told when she complains. "How was she to explain to this vital, ebullient black man her own blend of Christianity: a grey, formal, respectable thing of measured observances and mild general undemanding kindness to all?"

As reference to these embarrassing and sometimes noisy converts indicates, Christianity in Pym's world is not dead, not by any means. The Church Pym depicts may not flourish, but it is kept alive by those new believers, and by a small group of women whose unobtrusive acts of charity and hours of service are an impressive testimony—that goes unnoticed. Two novels particularly focus on "churchwomen," Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings. Though they are not primarily about the women's faith or their spiritual lives, these books give us an indication of what devotion and the Church can mean to the faithful. Because Pym writes about what life is "like … for most of us—the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction"—the novels do not present the upheavals or ecstasies of spiritual struggle. Instead, they show the small daily efforts that it takes to live as a Christian and, especially, to love one another. Seeing a roomful of strangers, Mildred Lathbury remarks, "One wouldn't believe there are so many people … and one must love them all," but her faith is expressed concretely by inviting people to church, helping her friends in need, trying not to judge them, and seeking "an infinitesimal amount of virtue" in overcoming her initial dislike of someone. Wilmet, the heroine of A Glass of Blessings, is a likeable snob who feels that many of the people in her church do not belong to her own world. But, learning from the example of a devout friend, she also tries to assist and accept others in a Christian spirit. Small, unspectacular efforts mark Wilmet's development, and she eventually comes to feel that "the Church should be the place where all worlds could meet, and looking around me I saw that in a sense this was so. If people remained outside it was our—even my—duty to try to bring them in."

However, these characters and others like them act not from any impetus originating in the Church, but in accordance with their own needs to worship, to live purposefully, to do good, to find solace when it's needed, and—above all—to love: "Some tame gazelle or some gentle dove or even a poodle dog: something to love, that was the point." Since even the small body of the faithful is not especially inspired by the traditional devotional forms or the clergy, it is no wonder that only a few unbelievers are drawn to discover or recover the faith. Lacking a vital language and voice to disseminate the faith, the Church in Pym's novels fails to influence most of its members or to attract a substantial number of new believers.

A Few Green Leaves repeats the topics found in the earlier novels, but is different chiefly as Pym's most detailed and optimistic view of the Church. Unusual, also, is her inclusion of two related spiritual crises. Tom, the widowed rector and one of the novel's central characters, is plagued by a sense of failure through a large part of the novel. Thinking that he is of no use to anyone, he even avoids visiting his parishioners. Here, as in the rest of Pym's novels, there are doubts that the language of Christianity applies to everyday, practical life and evidence of its secularization. When Tom preaches a sermon on helping one's neighbor, a woman wonders if he would "really" help: "Would he, for example, be capable of cleaning her top windows, which was what she really needed?" After a power failure, "'The light has been restored, thank God!' said Father Byrne in his rich Abbey Theatre tones, giving the announcement an almost religious significance." Hymns fare no better here than elsewhere. Tom rejects one as "morbid"; another is offensive: "'Choose Thou for me my friends'—the very idea of it!"

Tom's church is primarily a social institution whose most important event is its flower festival. Two anthropologists and a sociologist discuss the meaning of the festival. It never occurs to them that worship or thanksgiving might be its point, which is understandable, since it never occurs to any of the parishioners involved. The lady who arranges the altar flowers every third Sunday never attends church, and a bereaved family attends only on the Sunday following their relative's funeral because that is the local custom. This, then, is Pym's typical Christian world, with one important exception. There is no convert or fervent believer to embarrass anyone. The only source of mild uneasiness to the characters on religious grounds is Adam Prince, ex-Anglican priest and convert to Roman Catholicism turned restaurant-critic: does he expect his Friday evening hostess to serve fish? Prince continually offers Tom unsolicited advice about the management of his parish, but never discusses religion.

Tom's sense of uselessness is one of the main concerns of the novel because he is not alone in perceiving that a shift in values has taken place. Pym presents a Church surrounded by the "helping professions," which have taken over some of its functions. The focal point of village life has changed:

Monday was always a busy day at the surgery, a rather stark new building next to the village hall. "They"—the patients—had not on the whole been to church the previous day, but they atoned for this by a devout attendance at the place where they expected not so much to worship, though this did come into it for a few, as to receive advice and consolation. You might talk to the rector, some would admit doubtfully, but he couldn't give you a prescription. There was nothing in churchgoing to equal that triumphant moment when you came out of the surgery clutching the ritual scrap of paper.

Although the doctors tend to bodies rather than souls, the villagers see them for "advice and consolation." Unlike Tom, they have the authority to prescribe, and the efficacy of their tangible remedies is seen as far more certain then anything he might offer. No wonder, then, that people in the waiting room maintain a respectful quiet. Even Daphne, Tom's sister, refuses to divulge her conversation with Dr. Shrubsole: "Consultation between doctor and patient is a confidential matter. Like the confessional." Daphne's remark is intended to annoy Tom "who had wanted to introduce that kind of thing—most unsuitably—into the village." People who bare their souls happily in the examining room are offended at the suggestions of a similar exposure in the confessional. As confidence and devotion have been largely displaced from one profession and location to another, Shrubsole and Avice, his social-worker wife, want literally to supplant Tom in the spacious rectory they covet for their large family.

The loss of some of his duties to the doctors and social workers contributes to Tom's feeling of uselessness. Because his role and the role of the Church are unclear to him, he spends a good deal of time trying to find something to do with himself. Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that much of his attention is focused on the mausoleum standing by the church, or that his great passion is local history, especially the deserted medieval village that he longs to find. Like Archdeacon Hoccleve in Some Tame Gazelle, Tom takes refuge in the past. Even as he puts his volunteers to work reading inscriptions on old tombstones, he looks back to a time that he believes was more receptive to the faith—to a time when the scope and the appreciation of his work were broader. His personal hero is Anthony à Wood, the seventeenth-century diarist, antiquarian, biographer, and recluse who made detached observation his lifetime work. Tom's helpless idea of his diminished role makes him use the pious cliché to reassure himself: suspecting that his whole day has been wasted, he "was prepared to believe that it might not have been. God did still move in a mysterious way, even in this day and age or at this 'moment in time,' as some of his parishioners might have said."

Typically, Pym keeps a reserved distance from her clergymen. The quality or even existence of their faith is most frequently, and ominously, not remarked. The reader is left to draw his own conclusions; but, whatever those are, the men share a common problem which makes them practically useless as spiritual guides: along with the rest, Tom finds it difficult to verbalize his devotion and faith. One of his prayers is inarticulate, a matter of thinking of certain people while he walks about the church. Several of his sermons are unsatisfactory. The topic of one is heaven, "a bold and imaginative, perhaps even appropriate, subject" but, finally, it misses the mark since no one thinks "about heaven all that much now"; another is judged as "an unsuccessful mingling of past and present." Later, when he considers a sermon on the loaves and the fishes, the reader understands that his task necessarily involves the significant relation of the past to this "moment in time": what can he say about the miracle of feeding the multitude in a society where such a problem is the mundane province of government and social workers like Avice?

As the representative of the Church, Tom's problem is to translate the faith into terms comprehensible and relevant to the present day; before he can do this, however, he must himself acknowledge the present and stop focusing so exclusively on local history. Though he doubts it throughout the greater part of the novel, his ministrations are needed, and his interest in the purely historical past interferes with them. When two of his congregation see him driving by, one of them remarks that he is probably visiting parishioners, but the other disagrees: "'All this history he's always going on about' said Mrs. Furst with unexpected bitterness. 'That's more likely what he's doing.'" His backward-looking inclinations keep him from seeing the situation and the people around him clearly. There are indications, too, of the awareness that medicine cannot address spiritual needs. When Shrubsole tells an elderly patient that she is close to death, she responds by asking if he believes in life after death. The young doctor is "stunned into silence, indignant at such a question. Then of course he realized that he couldn't be expected to answer things like that—it was the rector's business." Though times have changed, Tom's diffidence about his function is unjustified. There are some needs, after all, that only a clergyman can address. With the actual death of a parishioner, Tom realizes this and feels that he comes "into his own." But the event only confirms the quiet upswing of all his affairs, which points to his greater involvement in the present.

The change in Tom's perspective follows the first spiritual crisis in the novel. Though "crisis" seems heavy-handed for a situation that unfolds in Pym's typically comical manner, crisis it is. Terry Skate is the florist who tends the mausoleum by the church. One day he tells the rector that, having lost his faith (by watching a television talk-show), he can no longer do this job. Tom reminds Terry that "much greater men" than they have doubted and eventually overcome their spiritual difficulties. "'Oh, but that was in the old days, wasn't it? Darwin and those old Victorians.' Terry laughed, dismissing them." Thus carelessly the young man implies that faith is expendable in the modern world, indicating the apprehension underlying Tom's diffidence and informing his timorous attitude toward his parishioners. Tom cannot help because Terry does not really wish it, but he feels more than usually dispirited and ineffectual.

His dejection leads to a quiet spiritual crisis of his own as he thinks how much of his life as a rector is "wasted in profitless discussion" and wonders if Miss Lee, a staunch parishioner polishing the eagle lectern, has ever doubted Christianity as "an elaborate fiction." The doubts are, of course, Tom's own, and only in part the product of his encounter with Terry Skate. The church brasses gleam with proof of Miss Lee's hard-rubbing industry everywhere he looks, but as he stands before her, Tom realizes that the familiar bird on the lectern is wood and not brass: "He must have been remembering some other lectern, probably the one in the church of his childhood. How could he have been so forgetful and unobservant!" When he asks if she would prefer a brass lectern, Miss Lee answers, "I love that old wooden bird, and I love polishing it. A brass one may look more brilliant, but wood can be very rewarding…." Tom's awareness of his failure to live in the present is promising; even more important is his attention to Miss Lee's work and to the bird, which traditionally symbolizes John, but here Tom's own church. Seen with eyes clear of habit and preconception, it reveals its undeniable difference from the Church of the past, but it is not the less beautiful, rewarding, or responsive to effort. Noting Miss Lee's statement as an idea for a sermon, Tom indicates that he understands its significance.

Moments later, he is given yet more help in his quiet crisis by another insight from Miss Grundy while she arranges some flowers at the altar. They are not fresh roses, having served during the past week, but they are still lovely. Their usefulness can be extended, Miss Grundy tells him, by adding "a few more leaves. A few green leaves can make such a difference." Her words clearly suggest that the revitalization of the Church (which is traditionally the Rose of Sharon) depends upon the infusion of a fresh faith in its beauty and capacity to serve. These ordinary remarks and Miss Lee's are typical of Pym's unobtrusive, almost sly way of embedding major insights in seemingly inconsequential exchanges. The reader might miss the importance of Miss Grundy's statements but for Tom's comical but suggestive reaction to them. He retreats, finding it "somehow depressing the way these elderly women kept giving him ideas for sermons." Though he decides not to use the ideas, they have already reached their best audience: in small ways, Tom begins to focus on improving his church and becomes less preoccupied with the past. He gives his organist a Christmas present of apricot brandy which might "perhaps even induce him to play at Evensong in the winter months" and is rewarded a few days later with an "unusually splendid sound." When Dr. Gellibrand stubbornly sticks to the present in his remarks to the history group, Tom is not particularly concerned: "I think people enjoyed it and I suppose that's the main thing." Such gestures may seem small indeed, hardly worth noticing, but in Pym's temperate world, they are large and promising actions.

Like the rest of Pym's novels, A Few Green Leaves is about love. Along with Tom's point of view, it focuses especially on Emma Howick's. She is a thirtyish anthropologist, modern in every respect, inept at handling her love life. She is not one of Pym's "excellent women," as that quiet breed was defined by Robert Smith: "good aunt, good Churchwoman, informed spinster, conscientious social worker, meticulous housekeeper…. Miss Pym's heroines are redeemed by their modesty and sensitive wit." The amusing Emma sees everything as material for her study. A bring-and-buy-sale, the flower festival, and even some cars abandoned next to the church are potential material: "was there not something significant and appropriate about this particular graveyard being opposite the church—a kind of mingling of two religious faiths, the ancient and the modern? 'A Note on the Significance of the Abandoned Motor-Car in a West Oxfordshire Village' might pin it down, she felt." Emma, no less than the other characters, assumes a largely secularized world, but she has no doubt about Tom's role and status: "If there was no active Lord of the Manor, surely the rector was the most important person rather than the doctor?" During the course of the novel, almost imperceptibly, her interest in Tom (and his in her) grows, assisted by her scheming mother. And Pym indicates, in her characteristically subdued manner, that Emma will help the rector reorient himself. A Few Green Leaves ends with the New Year and Tom's proposal that she give his history society a lecture: "You could relate your talk to things that happened in the past … or even speculate on the future—what might happen in the years to come."

Working consistently under the mask of comedy, Pym achieves a serious analysis of the contemporary English Church which suggests that it was a matter of some importance to her. In nine of her ten novels, she recurs to the same themes and topics to point to the three language-related problems that impede the effectiveness of the modern Church: devitalized religious words, outmoded devotional forms, and a clergy whose ability to communicate the faith is almost entirely inadequate. The terrible irony is that, finally, it makes no practical difference whatever whether or not her clergymen believe: believers or presumed unbelievers alike, none of her chief clerical characters offers articulate guidance to his flock.

Although they are woven into a richly comic texture, her personal analysis and vision of the Church are the serious appraisal of an author who was "accustomed to churches" and concerned with the state of organized religion. While her novels reflect the changing world, Pym emphasizes that there is still a need for the Church to do its unique work. Especially in A Few Green Leaves, she suggests that doctors, social workers, and others in the "helping professions" cannot fulfill the clergy's spiritual task. Through Tom, she asserts her faith in the capacity of the Church to revitalize itself from within, to come into the present day to reclaim its authority and influential voice.