[In the following essay, Higgins discusses the theme of Catholicism in the novellas of The Rest of Life.]

Although my wife plays Mozart with considerable grace, she prefers Chopin, Debussy and Kunz. As a consequence, in order to get my Mozart fix, I spend a few days at New York's annual Lincoln Centre Mostly Mozart Festival. It may not be the Beatific Vision but it comes awfully close.

One of the additional pleasures of being in the Big Apple is the simple, although often expensive, exercise of book browsing. I picked up my usual bundle of arcane and obscure trophies and was satisfied that my plunder was a modest one when the contemporary reared its head with the publication of a new work by novelist Mary Gordon.

Not only that, but the papers were filled with reviews, commentaries, interviews and so forth concerning the author and her new work, The Rest of Life. Some critics argued that this collection of three novellas was a bit difficult to stomach coming from an avowed feminist. Others—always ready to acknowledge Gordon's undoubted skill—appeared troubled by the work's moral ambivalence.

But what I found particularly puzzling—at least in the reviews I read—was the absence of any considered discussion of Gordon's Catholicism.

In all three novellas, her Roman Catholic sensibility and sacramental imagination are evident to all eyes, even to the most undiscerning of critics. Why then the silence?

Although the first novella, “Immaculate Man,” has an explicitly Catholic content, this is not so with the remaining two.

In “Immaculate Man” Gordon explores the complex—both emotionally and spiritually—entanglements that attend an affair between a non-Catholic divorced social worker and a priest of the fictitious order known as the Paracletists. The potential for a soap opera derivative is considerable. But not at the hands of Gordon.

Subtle, suggestive, playfully ambiguous and morally earnest, the portrait she paints of the affair between the inexperienced and strangely noble priest and the self-knowing and non-condemning woman is expertly drawn.

The narrative is in the first person, as it is in all three novellas, all by women recollecting, women discovering their dignity as free agents and yet victims all of their respective pasts.

Such Catholic concepts and themes as grace, kenosis (self-emptying), atonement, fallen humanity redeemed and the myriad forms of forgiveness and penance are to be found deftly woven into the rich canvas that is the life of each narrator.

The reluctance of most critics to explore the Catholicism of Mary Gordon, with the striking exception of CBC's Eleanor Wachtel, betrays that persistent prejudice that you find in not a few media and scholarly circles.

Can writers be genuinely religious? Is a religious writer, or a writer of religious commitment, handicapped by faith, his or her work diminished by the employment of religious themes?

When you pose these questions in such a bold fashion it all seems rather absurd. After all, no right-thinking critic or reader would attempt to rip the Anglicanism out of T. S. Eliot or the Judaism out of Chaim Potok or the Orthodoxy out of Feodor Dostoyevski.

Such knowledge as we have of their religious convictions and the surfacing of such convictions in their creative work helps us to appreciate all the more the richness of their craft.

It doesn't mean the reduction of art to the status of a religious tract.

On a recent visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see that splendid exhibition on William Morris and his associates, “The Earthly Paradise,” I overheard one viewer comment to his friend apropos the stained glass exhibit: “Do you think these guys (Morris and fellow artist Edward Burne-Jones) were serious about religion?”

Certainly, in the case of Morris, his views regarding religion underwent several, sometimes dramatic mutations.

But the point surely is to be found in the incredulous tone of the viewer who could not conceive of an artist, any artist, being both sophisticated and interested in religion in any way other than culturally.

Now what would happen if I were to raise the prospect of Mozart's being devout?