[In the following essay, Wymward comments that the stories of Temporary Shelter are infused with the author's religious sensibilities.]

Mary Gordon's comments on the liaison between her religious beliefs and creativity have never equalled the boldness of Flannery O'Connor's revelation:

I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means for me the meaning of life is centered on our Redemption by Christ and what I see in its relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction.

(32)

Nonetheless, Gordon willingly provides insight into the context of her religious values. To the question, “Are you still a believing Catholic?”, Mary Gordon answered in a New York Times interview:

I consider myself a Catholic. I have a real religious life in a framework which I think of as Catholic. But I don't think John Paul II would be pleased with it. … I think one of the things that helped me in life is Flannery O'Connor's statement that you must remember that in this day and age one must suffer because of the church and not for the church.

(Schreiber, 26)

In her first two novels, Final Payments (1978) and The Company of Women (1980), Gordon is distinctly Catholic, revealing an identifiable Catholic culture and theology. She laments the inability of the church to respond to a person's deepest spiritual needs, and satirizes priests who are unable to relate scripture to contemporary life. Consequently, Gordon's characters are left largely on their own to confront the terms of their personal salvation. Although the familiar Catholic landscape of Final Payments and The Company of Women is absent in Men and Angels (1985), Gordon's third novel, her theme regarding the neglect of the truth of scripture evolves with complexity and ambiguity. Ultimately, the characters in the three novels do find their center by confronting, through their own efforts, the mysteries of Christianity long obscured for them by rubrics and fossilized tradition. But in Gordon's first collection of short stories, Temporary Shelter (1987), formal religion is ostensibly absent, or, at best, useless when individuals are helpless. Gordon treats religion seriously and one feels her regret, though not necessarily her suffering, when it proves deficient. Her religious sense is basic to her vision of life.

Final Payments, Gordon's first novel, is the story of Isabel Moore, who has sacrificed eleven years of her young adulthood to care for her invalid father, a retired professor of medieval literature from St. Aloysius College. Fiercely conservative, he believed that the “refusal of anyone in the twentieth century to become part of the Catholic Church was not pitiable; it was malicious and willful” (2). In the meantime, Isabel, without his knowledge, has for years substituted long walks for Sunday mass. During her father's funeral, the Moores' home is “full of priests” (1), “faceless priests,” Isabel later sees, who “blessed my father's coffin, who had sat at my table, who had never remembered my name” (299). Gordon's priests live to be served, not to serve.

As a child, Isabel is her father's spiritual prodigy:

My father had once looked at me and said, “I love you more than I love God. I love you more than God. I love you more than God loves you. …” I had studied [my catechism] with pure, delectable absorption. … That absorption gave me the right, at six, to turn to my father and say, “You mustn't say that. It's a sin.” I had been right; it was wrong, what he had said, loving me more than God. I could not love with God's intensity. But I would choose His mode: the impartial, the invulnerable, removed from loss.

(260-61)

This confused concept of love and sacrifice haunts Isabel into adulthood, causing her to experience an intense emotional crisis. After her father's death, Isabel reenters life at age thirty to have some sexual encounters, but her breakdown occurs when she runs from a successful love relationship because of guilt. Always having felt responsible for her father's first stroke because he found her in bed with a young lover, Isabel identifies sexual pleasure with extravagant selfishness. To atone for her sins, Isabel embraces her “father's equation, the Church's equation, between suffering and value” (138) and moves from her apartment to care for the mean-spirited Margaret Casey, who had been the Moores' housekeeper for seventeen terrible years.

In an early review of Final Payments, Maureen Howard comments that “the reader will be tempted to hiss when Margaret comes on the scene, to cheer when Isabel, grown fat, idle and ugly, is saved by her own good sense” (32). More than good sense, Isabel experiences a religious crisis that jolts her out of her confused notion of sainthood:

I had wanted to give up all I loved so that I would never lose it. I had tried to kill all that had brought me pleasure so that I could not be susceptible. Why had I done it? For safety, certainly, for the priests, the faceless priests. … For them I would give up all I had most savored, those I had most treasured … so that those faceless priests could say, when they thought of me, “She is a saint”.

(299)

Isabel is shocked back into life. She rescues herself in a moment where Gordon reveals the action of grace without sacrificing psychological credibility or dramatic technique. After a visit from Father Mulcahy, her father's lifetime friend, Isabel, enraged at Margaret's question—“What were you doing out there with him all that time?”—rightfully calls her a “wicked, wicked woman.” When Margaret counters that she is simply a “poor woman,” Isabel shouts, “‘The poor you have always with you’” (298). Suddenly finding profound personal meaning in the gospel words she has blurted out, Isabel escapes from the ghosts of her past to pursue a new life in spiritual freedom. For the first time, Isabel understands:

What Christ was saying, what he meant, was that the pleasure of that hair, that ointment, must be taken. … We must not deprive ourselves, our loved ones, of the luxury of extravagant affections. … And it came to me, fumbling in the hallway for the light, that I had been a thief. Like Judas, I had wanted to hide gold. … I knew now I must open the jar of ointment. I must open my life.

(299)

Isabel achieves this liberating insight from within herself, as she draws upon her deepest spiritual resources where the message of Jesus has taken root. The faceless priests who filled her father's home—metaphors for a church which never tries to reach her—routinely “argued about baptism of desire, knocking dishes of pickles onto the carpet in their ardor. They determined the precise nature of the Transubstantiation, fumbling for my name as I freshened their drinks” (1). Their talk ignores the intrinsic connection between the life of Jesus and the individual person. Theirs is a church consistently quarreling with form, instead of renewing itself through spreading the hope of the incarnation. Preparing for the sacraments as a child, Isabel is concerned “for the perfection of the outward forms. Standing on line for Confession, for Communion, we were careful to keep our spines straight, to fold our hands so that they were Gothic steeples, not a mess of immigrant knuckles” (74). Twenty-five years later, the priest who hears Isabel's confession after she moves in with Margaret Casey, also is obsessed with form:

“Bless Me, Father, for I have sinned.”

I could see the priest's mouth tighten in exasperation.

“Do you mind not interrupting me during the blessing?” he said.

His boredom is pierced only by Isabel's version of the Act of Contrition. “‘Wait,’ he interrupted. ‘That's not it. You'll have to read it from the card in front of you’” (276).

Ironically, the Sacrament of Reconciliation offers little promise for Isabel's reconciling herself to living. Isabel is left on her own resources to hear the “good news” which frees her to pursue a new life. After her encounter with Margaret, she builds her strength further by reading the prayers of Holy Week while alone in her room. Refreshed by the Word, Isabel is, nonetheless, distanced from the Good Friday liturgy by having to kiss the giant crucifix: “That was vulgar. I regretted the priests doing that, wiping the feet of Christ with a tissue after the brush of every mouth. I wished they wouldn't do that; it made me wish I hadn't come today” (303). For Gordon, the Vatican II church offers little promise of revitalization because it sentimentalizes the rich tradition which Isabel draws upon for her cure. Early in Final Payments when Father Mulcahy complains that he cannot adjust to the new church because it feels as if “someone's broken in [to] the house and stolen all the furniture,” Isabel refrains from agreeing only because she does not want to “encourage his regret by making him appear to have allies in another generation” (103). As her father's spiritual protégé, Isabel prides herself on her reconcilement of the secular and the sanctified, as well as her scorn for pietism and religiosity. She had always despised, for example, Margaret's perpetual novenas and devotions: “I used the missal my father had given me for confirmation. I, like him, followed the Latin of the Mass. … He wrote scornful letters to The Tablet about pastors who encouraged the faithful to say the Rosary during Mass” (31). But the church of the sixties also neglects the cultivation of aesthetic and intellectual excellence, for St. Stanislaus', the scene of Isabel's confession, looks like a “firehouse, impromptu, unconsidered, American. … I imagined how my father would have stormed through this church” (273-74).

If Gordon does not support changes in the post-Vatican II church, neither is she simply nostalgic for the rigor of traditional Catholicism. The Company of Women, her second novel, focuses on Father Cyprian Leonard, an ideological traditionalist, who isolates himself from his religious community to escape the corruption he perceives in the church of the sixties. Instead, Father Cyprian, formerly of the Paracletists, ministers to five single women, three of them widowed, who have remained excessively dependent upon him through various personal crises, since the days when “Father Cyp” conducted popular weekend retreats for working women. Cyprian's milieu is distinct from the world of traditional priest-heroes, for Gordon affirms the importance of women to his spiritual development. Because he has shared so deeply in the lives of the five women who have both comforted and disappointed him, the aging Cyprian gradually acknowledges the “enduring promise of plain human love [and] understand[s] the incarnation for, I believe, the first time: Christ took on flesh for love, because the flesh is lovable …” (285). Through the company of women, Cyprian celebrates the promise of the incarnation for himself.

To achieve this insight, Cyprian has had to struggle against his personal spiritual orientation which over a lifetime has caused him to substitute guilt for love, pursuing human perfection and scorning human frailty. Shaped by the same legacy Isabel Moore inherited from her medievalist father, Cyprian has yearned to live in “unapproachable light, the light of pure spirit,” the impersonal state of Christian charity. But if life is going to have any truly human meaning for Gordon's characters, they must plunge into the ordinary and treasure the holiness of it. Gordon is therefore no iconoclast. She urges a necessary return to the essential Christian truth of incarnation, a mystery clouded by the guilt that accompanies, in the tradition of the church, a celebration of life. Convinced that the classical ideal of the priest requires detached human interactions, Cyprian suffers considerable conflict:

I have had to be struck down by age and sickness to feel the great richness of the ardent, the extraordinary love I live among. … Now every morning is miraculous to me. I wake and see in the thin, early light the faces of my friends. But I fear that in loving as I do now I betray the priestly love I vowed to live by. There is no way in which my love can be objective or impersonal. … I am pulled down by irresistible gravity of affection and regard. These are the people I love: I choose to be with them above all others. These are the countenances that lift my heart.

(284)

Only at the end of his life does Cyprian learn to tolerate his own tender qualities, reconciling his deeply felt tension between the expression of personal and priestly love.

Cyprian renews his capacity for love and faith, especially through Felicitas, the daughter of Charlotte, the only one of the five women who is a mother as well as a widow. All of the women have focused their interests on Felicitas and have great expectations for her, but no more so than Cyprian. Even from her early childhood, Cyprian expects Felicitas to reach exceptional standards of intellectual prowess and spiritual development, just as Professor Moore does for his daughter. Indeed, Felicitas does not disappoint Cyprian, until she becomes a renegade from Catholic higher education. As a student at Columbia, she forsakes her classical studies, is the lover of a sadistic young professor and becomes pregnant. But after years of estrangement, Cyprian blesses Felicitas and grows in love for Linda, her daughter. Finally allowing Felicitas to stand for what she really is, a human being and not a god, Cyprian accepts her imperfection. To accept imperfection is to surrender to the mystery of the incarnation—that God Himself gave new meaning and value to life by living in the imperfect human condition.

Clearly, in his concluding monologue, Cyprian rediscovers the Word of scripture and seeks to participate in the creation of the world by assuming some responsibility for changing the situation of the modern church. Cyprian recognizes, for example, that the meaning of his own life is left finally “in the hands of God, in the hands of a girl,” Felicitas' child, Linda (287). Because of this deep love for Felicitas, and then for her daughter, Cyprian comes into the presence of grace. Furthermore, interrupting Linda playing mass, Cyprian “was shocked, a girl child saying the sacred words of God.” When challenged by Linda as to why she cannot be a priest, Cyprian thinks “of all the foolish, mediocre men who were permitted ordination because of the accident of sex. And I thought of this child, obviously superior to all others of her age in beauty, grace and wisdom. … And so each morning at my masses, I pray for the ordination of women” (288).

Cyprian's prayers for the ordination of women might make it seem that Gordon has a hidden agenda in The Company of Women. Her panacea is not simply feminism, however. For example, when Felicitas “grew older, grew rebellious, [Cyprian] knew the bitterest of Jesus' sorrows: the agony within the Agony of Gethsemene, when Judas kissed and the three faithful slept” (283). Using feminism, then, as her metaphor for change, Gordon asserts that the contemplation of Christian mystery allows the believer to see the world with new eyes. From this perspective, Gordon offers some hope for the future of the institutional church, not consigning traditional Catholicism to the “ash heap of history,” as critic Carol Iannone has concluded. (65) Gordon's quarrel is with a counterfeit church which stretches the dichotomy between the secular and sacred, thus becoming parochial, insular and anachronistic. Repressive policies and practices will change in the Church of Rome, Gordon implies, when the church returns to the gospels themselves as the source of Christian living and inspiration. The final wisdom of Cyprian, for example, is in his insight that belief in the incarnation requires his affirming and renewing the imperfect time in which he lives.

While Gordon's recognizably Catholic scene is not the context for Men and Angels, serious religious conflicts dominate the novel. The message of the title acquired from Paul—“Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal”—is left to an unlovable and fanatic evangelist, Laura Post. Nonetheless, Laura serves as a spiritual catalyst, shocking Anne Foster, the protagonist, to confront a dimension of reality she has previously either ignored or denied. In fact, Anne, who prizes herself as a rational woman responsible for her own acts, does not understand people who live a “religious life.”

From the very first page of the novel, the dichotomy between Laura and Anne is established. Flying home from London after having been fired as a nanny for an American family, Laura is not frightened by having no job prospects, for, as she pores over her Bible, she is certain that the Lord will take care of her. A fellow passenger arranges for Laura to meet Anne, an art historian and an academic wife, who needs a mother's helper while her husband Michael is teaching for the year in France, and she stays at home to finish a monograph on Caroline Watson, a neglected American artist.

Obsessively religious, Laura is determined to save Anne, who is more and more repelled by Laura, but tries to compensate for her lack of personal warmth through gestures and gifts. In Men and Angels, Gordon's religious vision and fictional technique are strikingly close to Flannery O'Connor's. Less concerned with the eccentricities of the church which deter one from contemplating the ultimate Christian mysteries, Gordon uses the grotesque character to point out the need for salvation greater than ourselves. To this end, like Flannery O'Connor, she fears the false comforts of liberal compassion sponsored by respectable churches and a highly secularized urban society. Without implying any conscious emulation of O'Connor, one sees in Men and Angels proof of O'Connor's often quoted insight:

Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. … Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the past few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural, and he may well be forced to take even more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. … To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

(33)

No doubt Laura's religious commitment is compulsive, obsessive, even “mad.” Anne finds Laura increasingly perverse and unacceptable. Through the dynamics of their interrelationship, Gordon gives credence to O'Connor's perception that if the “good person” is ever to confront the abrasive questions posed by Christian beliefs regarding faith in God, then he must be jolted violently. En route from London, before even meeting Anne, Laura ponders the words of Isaiah: “‘Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she would have no compassion on the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.’” The mother/child relationships throughout the novel allow variations on this theme, but Anne's vision is expanded to include the deeper mystery of family and faith, the interconnection between good and evil. At Laura's funeral, Anne ruminates: “Had Caroline not lived, Laura would not be dead. … Each time now that she thought of her work on Caroline, she would have to wonder if Laura had been its sacrifice. Her death would touch even that. Had she not met me, she might not have died” (233). This slow growth of Anne's awareness ends in a mild challenge to God as she listens to the words of the psalm:

“I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help?

My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. …”

It was so beautiful, and it was such a lie. … Yet she was glad the priest had read those words. Perhaps it was true for Laura now … or perhaps not. …

She had never noticed it before, but the way the priest read it made it clear that the words were a question. From whence cometh my help?

(234)

At Laura's funeral, Anne experiences a religious crisis because she confronts the deepest and most conflicting elements of her life. The questions which Anne begins to ask, Gordon does not answer. But in the final paragraph of Men and Angels, Anne embraces the terrible terms of human experience:

She could now say to her children—“This is life. What shall we make of it? For it is terrible, and shining, and our hearts are sore. Something dreadful had happened to us; more will happen; terrible, beautiful, there is no way of telling. And anything might lie and then recoil and strike, in silence, in the darkness”.

(239)

Anne experiences authentic renewal, not wholesale conversion. She is not at peace, but she does make an act of faith, investing in the tremendous risk of love, as did Isabel and Cyprian.

Final Payments and The Company of Women offer strong critiques of the church, but both novels end significantly with liturgical rituals, a Good Friday service and Cyprian's private mass. However much the church fades into the background of Men and Angels, it is during Laura's funeral that Anne hears the compelling Old Testament words which move her to accept the mysterious reality of a divine force. Fact and mystery have a chance to be connected in the world of Mary Gordon when one truly hears and ponders Revelation. Gordon implies that any hope for the survival of the institutional Roman Church will be in its ability to make the word of God startlingly relevant to the realities of peoples' lives. Gordon's fiction is centered not on a narrowly sectarian creed or tradition, but on the essentials of Christian theology: sin, grace, incarnation and redemption.

But in Temporary Shelter, Gordon's collection of short stories, the word of God is neither preached nor heard. The characters in these nineteen stories are simply ordinary men, women and children who make up the world. Human as they are, their suffering is private and their victories are quiet indeed. At the core of Gordon's vision is the radical realism which marks Men and Angels: human beings are essentially alienated and alone, needing both hope and love to cope effectively with situations which are central to their individual existences. Characters who awaken to feelings of love and guilt through their suffering, finally assent to the mystery of being and see new meaning for themselves, gaining, in effect, temporary shelter. But throughout the stories, religion is absent or useless when individuals are adrift, and, once again, one senses Gordon's disappointment.

The last short story in the collection, “Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year,” includes the celebration of two masses, one attended by Mr. Cassidy at his parish church, and the other a television mass watched and spat at by his senile wife at home. But different from Gordon's novels, the liturgies here bring no measure of peace to these disturbed characters.

Loyal to his vow never to institutionalize his wife, Mr. Cassidy suffers deeply from watching her humiliate herself and him with physical and verbal abuse. After days of enduring shame and curses, Mr. Cassidy kneels “before the altar of God” at Sunday mass and probes the guilt of his married life. Mr. Cassidy “knew he couldn't go to communion. He had sinned against charity. He had wanted his wife dead” (197). He judges those who stay back from communion with him as being ersatz sinners because they have sinned “from the heat of their bodies … while he sat back from the coldness of his heart. … He had wished the one dead he had promised he would love forever.” One does not expect much from Gordon's “boy-faced priest” who celebrates the mass, but the tone changes to describe his final gestures: “The boy priest blessed the congregation. Including Mr. Cassidy himself” (200). Mr. Cassidy cannot accept himself, but God does, despite the priest who remains a distant figure.

After leaving mass, Mr. Cassidy spends a violent day at home while Mrs. Cassidy fights off his every attempt to care for her. She finally knocks him to the floor and wanders out onto the street as he writhes with a broken leg. Violence increases when Mr. Cassidy's only means of attracting attention to himself in order to save his wife from “wandering up and down the street in her nightgown,” is to hurl figurines and crockery through the livingroom windows. “In the dark he lay and prayed that someone would come and get her. That was the only thing now to pray for; the one thing he had asked God to keep back” (207). Even the most unswerving dedication to another human being, represented by Mr. Cassidy's commitment to his marriage vows, can provide only “temporary shelter” from the vicissitudes of Gordon's human condition.

“Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year” balances the first story, “Temporary Shelter,” where the main character, Joseph Kaszperkowski, a little boy who grows to adolescence, is actually victimized by two controlling adults. Determining his future are his bitter immigrant mother, Helen, and Dr. Meyers, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a purveyer of pietistic liturgical art, for whom Helen keeps house and where she lives with her son. As a young child, Joseph liked to crawl “on Dr. Meyers' lean, dry lap, a lap of safety. Not like his mother's lap, which he had to share with her stomach” (5). Joseph and Maria, Dr. Meyers' young daughter whose mother died soon after her birth, share every secret of childhood, especially magic moments in Manhattan with Dr. Meyers at Rumpelmayers and St. Patrick's. Joseph's shelter with the Meyers is temporary, however, for as he grows older, he suspects Sister Berchmans, who hopes Maria will be a nun, of suggesting that he leave the Meyers' haven: “What did she see when she looked at him? And what had she told Dr. Meyers? Or did she never dare to speak to Dr. Meyers; had she spoken only in confession to Father Cunningham, who did the nun's bidding like a boy?” (18)

Joseph's mother, seldom a source of solace for him, is never more cruel than when she remarks, “I guess you're okay to be her playmate, but God forbid anything else. And for a husband, let's face it, he's got something better in mind than some dumb Polack whose mother washed his shitty underwear for ten years straight” (20).

Dr. Meyers chooses Sunday after mass at the end of a weekend retreat as the moment to tell Joseph of his decision to separate him from Maria by giving Helen a house of her own. Even while saying “thank you, sir,” Joseph silently charges Meyers for being “guilty of the cruelty of sending me away. Of separating me from everything I love. Of sending me to live alone, in ugliness and hatred with the mother whom I cannot love” (32). But Joseph quickly renews his dream of making Maria “want to marry him before they went to college” (24), by seeing the advantages of accepting Meyers' offer to send him away for high school: “He would write to [Maria]. And his letters would make her think of him in the right way. Make her think of him so she would love him, want to live with him, the body life, and not the life that rose up past the body, not the life of Sister Berchmans and the white-faced nuns” (24).

Gordon's ironic eye for the images, tone and atmosphere of the Catholic scene is sharp in “Temporary Shelter.” Moreover, she draws from theology for her ultimate orientation. Characters in “Temporary Shelter” are identified by creed: Meyers, the Jew converted to Catholicism; Maria, the romantic Catholic, curious about Judaism; and Joseph, Catholic since birth. But Gordon does not create characters simply to fit a given solution; rather she presents them in very human situations which are open to theological interpretation. For example, when Maria and Joseph sneak into temple to observe a Yom Kippur service, Joseph feels at one with the liturgy:

He rode the music, let it carry him. The sadness and the loneliness, the darkness and the hope. The winding music, thick and secret. Like the secrets of his heart. … The music that traveled to a God who listened, distant and invisible, and heard the sins of men and their atonement in darkness … but would give back to men the music they sent up, a thick braid of justice and kept promises and somber hope.

(14-15)

Joseph knows that the music which inspires him to embrace the world is different from the singing of the nuns that Maria loved, which made her want to “leave the body life … leave him and all their life together. The men singing in the temple did not want to rise up and leave. And that was why he liked them better. And why she did not” (16).

This theme is familiar in Gordon's fiction. While her characters, like Maria, yearn to achieve absolute union with God, Gordon simultaneously recognizes that such an ideal can be achieved only by the individual's risking trust in human existence, thus denying faith in the mystery of the incarnation. Although the seventeen stories between “Temporary Shelter” and “Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year” may seem to make Temporary Shelter a book which has less religious concerns than the three novels, they reveal Gordon's versatility in probing the human condition. To achieve scope, she allows ordinary persons to confront the mysteries of their own separate lives. She insists upon the uniqueness of each human being, for the enigmas of existence always relate specifically to the individual character. The narrator in “Billy,” for example, expresses a perception that gives thematic unity to all of the stories. After Billy's death, the sympathetic narrator comments that Veronica, his mother, told “the truth to Billy, but too early, and too much. The world is cruel, she told him, it is frightening, and it will hurt you. She told him this with every caress, with every word of praise and spoon of medicine. And he believed her. Well, of course, he would. She was telling the truth; she was his mother” (168). In each of the stories, characters experience the threat of evil, death and violence. Although life on Gordon's planet is to be embraced, it is lived, at best, in temporary shelters. The young, creative wife in “The Imagination of Disaster,” thinks:

Perhaps I should kill us all now and save us from the degradation of disaster. Perhaps I should kill us while we are whole and dignified and full of our sane beauty. … We live with death, the stone in the belly, the terror on the road alone. People have lived with it always. But we live knowing not only that we will die, that we may suffer, but that all that we hold dear will finish; that there will be no more familiar. That the death we fear we cannot even imagine, it will not be the face of dream, or even nightmare. For we cannot dream the poisoned earth abashed, empty of all we know.

(28)

The goal of the artistic imagination, according to Gordon, is to realize with vivid truth all of the mysteries, paradoxes and ambiguities in the total life of the human situation. Thus when the priest in “Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year” blesses the congregation, Gordon accepts the premise that the world is a holy place. But faith, for Gordon, survives because it is Catholic and personal, not because of the efforts of the institutional church. Most of the characters in Temporary Shelter do not think in theological or religious terms, but throughout these stories one is aware of an unblinking eye revealing the mystery on which the scene is built, and a consistent voice saying that no alternative exists except to love. The young mother in “Safe,” filled with love for her husband and baby, has the chilling insight: “I could not live a moment without terror for myself. I know that I must live my life now knowing it is not my own. I can keep them from so little it must be the shape of my life to keep them at least from the danger I could bring them” (176-177).

To end Temporary Shelter, Gordon adds a concluding essay, “A Writing Lesson,” where she proposes that fairy tales “have within them the content of all fiction. As an exercise, write the same story as a fairy tale, and then as the kind of fiction we are more used to. If you are writing a fairy tale, you can begin by saying that they had built a house in the center of the woods. And they sat in the center of it, as if they were children, huddled, cringing against bears” (208). At the essay's close, Gordon offers further direction: “Once you have decided upon the path of your narrative and have understood its implications, go back to the beginning of the story. Describe the house” (213).

While the essay will probably be valued in college writing classes for Gordon's comments on technique, her essential message is, “You must be sure that your values are clear to the reader” (212). In other words, “Describe the house.” For Gordon, the writer's responsibility is to her craft and to her readers. Gordon's house, then, is no temporary shelter, but one of faith. Faith informs Gordon's artistic vision in a way that Ralph Ellison describes well:

St. Therese says, “I require of you only to look.” Only to look. And this has traditionally been the genius of Incarnational faith when it has been in full possession of its sacramental vision—to empower men to face, without flinching, the arduous welter of nature and historical existence, since, frail though the flesh may be, it was proven by the Incarnation to be stout enough for the tabernacling of that than which nothing is more ultimate—namely, God Himself.

(230)

Gordon affirms the incarnate God of Christianity, but, as her canon develops, she loses confidence in the ability of the institutional church to make the message of the incarnation relevant to the problems of modern living. “Temporary Shelter” and “Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year,” stories strategically placed at the beginning and end of the collection, provide the context for this perspective. Each of the seventeen stories between them implies that individuals bring order and meaning to their lives by adopting ultimate values which will help them live with, and yet transcend, enduring problems. The milieu of the Irish Catholic home in Final Payments and the Catholic culture of the Company of Women provide a frame of reference for Gordon's religious perspective which frees her from contrivance. In Men and Angels and Temporary Shelter, she moves further away from a readily identifiable Catholic tradition, thus muting her theme of religious affirmation. Unless Gordon finds new vitality in the old liturgical rites and symbols, her fiction will become less recognizable as a celebration of the ultimate encounter between time and eternity. Her affirmation of the beauty, terror and mystery of existence will continue, but the feasts will be secular and the unseen world, perhaps, obscured.

Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph. “Society and Self in American Literature.” The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature. Ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.

Gordon, Mary. The Company of Women. New York: Random House, Inc., 1980.

———. Final Payments. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978.

———. Men and Angels. New York: Random House, Inc., 1985.

———. Temporary Shelter. New York: Random House, Inc., 1987.

Howard, Maureen. Review of Men and Angels, by Mary Gordon. New York Times Book Review, 16 April 1978: 1, 31-32.

Iannone, Carol. “The Secret of Mary Gordon's Success.” Commentary, June 1985: 62-66.

Schreiber, Le Anne. “A Talk With Mary Gordon.” New York Times Book Review, 15 Feb. 1981, 26-28.

O'Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” Mystery and Manners. Eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961, 25-35.