To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris: funny and serious

From the blurb on the back cover:

"Introducing Paul O'Rourke: New Yorker, dentist and reluctant non-believer. Modern life disappoints him and love never solves any of his problems."

He is 38 years old, he has come to terms with himself and he is doing well, professionally, but he wants more. From the first chapter:

"When the Prozac stopped working and my Spanish stalled, I started going to the gym. My friend McGowan had encouraged it. Together we would lift things and put them down again. That was something that was almost everything for about a month and a half, the gym's racks of shiny weights and promises of sexual prowess, until the dismal lighting got to me and I took up indoor lacrosse."

The dismal lighting! Yes!

"Betsy Convoy was my head hygienist and a devout Roman Catholic. If ever I was tempted to become a Christian, which I never was, but if I was, I thought I would do well to become a Roman Catholic like Mrs Convoy. She attended Mass at Saint Joan of Arc Church in Jackson Heights where she expressed her faith with hand gestures, genuflections, recitations, liturgies, donations, confessions, lit candles, saints' days, and several different call-and-responses. Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother."

Here you get the general tone of the piece. Paul is flippant (the writing is very funny), gets very angry sometimes, and yet he is serious. He wants to believe but he doesn't and doesn't want to be the sort of person who does believe. He is envious of those who believe, and when he has a Jewish girlfriend, he longs to be part of her family. He longs to be an atheist Jew.

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God - no small things - but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them. I had to borrow those words from an old dead order....

So there's the plot, he wants a religion that has all the benefits of religion but he doesn't want to believe. The book is a bit sprawling and many people who write it up on Amazon find the ending very unsatisfactory but in these serious matters of belief, a happy ending is not possible.

Sandham Memorial Chapel: paintings by Stanley Spencer

Sandham Memorial Chapel. Although I am a big Stanley Spencer fan I haven’t seen this before. It is a long way to drive and quite small but the pictures are full of love. They must have been Spencer’s way of coping with his memories of WWI. Although it is ostensibly a memorial to a chap called Sandham who died of disease after fighting in the Macedonian campaign, it doesn't show Sandham's experiences as Spencer could really show only his own memories: he had been a medical orderly in the UK (in Beaufort hospital near Bristol) and then? in Macedonia.

In this picture the orderlies are washing the wooden lockers (open shelves) in the baths and Spencer shows himself finding a moment of peace and calm between the baths, which were magenta in colour, and he liked them.

 He shows views of orderlies making beds, fetching tea urns, sorting the laundry, tending to frostbitten feet – and he shows the soldiers resting on the ground, getting water from a stream and filling their bottles, putting up tents, shaving under mosquito nets. And this being Spencer, there’s also a big picture of the Resurrection of the Soldiers. The soldiers get up and see their plain white crosses and some of them hand them back to Jesus, some just heap them up, the mules (that did all the heavy work) come back to life too, and the soldiers start to roll up their puttees (canvas bandages around their lower legs). For some people, the Great War destroyed their faith (how could a good God allow it to happen?) and for Spencer it was the other way (God must have more in store for us than this mess!)

The pictures of his hospital orderly experiences seem the most calming and organized. He had tried to see his menial daily tasks as a devotion to God and his faith was such that he remembered the time as very spiritual, mentioning “the progress of my soul” in these surroundings. It was very hard work and the shifts were long, between 10 and 14 hours, and he was at the hospital (in Bristol) for three years and was not able to paint in all that time. Obviously, he was unhappy, frustrated and lonely, but he was helped by his religious desire to please God by performing these menial tasks with love.  With Spencer the compositions are very complicated. Individual figures are simplified into curves and straight lines, but the design as a whole is difficult to see, with the eye being led all about the picture.

Stanley Spencer: Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there was no war, the feeling of that corridor, the sergeant-major and his dog - anything so long as it gave me the feeling and the circumstance gave me! If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn't know there is a war on, I could do it. I envied him the mental agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in the corridor now. And I will paint it, with all the conviction I feel now, in a belief in peace being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that whether war is on or not is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul.

This picture is called Ablutions. It shows the patients washing themselves and in the middle there's an orderly (prob a self-portrait), with an apron that ties up at the back, painting a man's wounds with iodine. It looks a little like a scene from Christ's life in renaissance painting - the man with the towel could be wearing a toga. The man at the back is pulling up his braces - something most men today have never done. 

In his Beaufort days Stanley had not yet formulated his ideas on the meaning of what he came to know as love, nor were the inspiring mental transformations he later experienced possible in his circumstances then. His current inability to master the significance of the atmospheres he was meeting or to discern the connections in them so vital to his creativity not only alarmed him but turned eventually into a source of desperation for him.
He was so disconnected that he became convinced in later life that the war had damaged beyond repair the cherished pre-war Cookham-feelings which had sourced the pristine glory of his early work. 

the above quotation is from a well-researched website with plenty of interesting thoughts about Stanley Spencer.

In this picture Spencer is on the right front, scraping dead skin off the feet of the man who is suffering from frostbitten feet. Another orderly has round slop pails over his shoulders making him look a little like an angel. There are eggs in nests all over the wallpaper, and this is probably something Spencer remembered as he liked to be precise about details.It is unlikely to be a conscious allusion to sex as this was something Spencer tried not to think about. There is a rare female presence in this picture: the sister right at the back through the doorway.

Stanley Spencer: I would like to explain what was at the back of my mind when I began to want to do these pictures. Well, when I first enlisted I began to feel I was dying of starvation, spiritual starvation, and this feeling intensified my desire for spiritual life, and then suddenly I began to see and catch hold of little particles of this life in the scrubbing of a floor or the making of a bed; and so everything I did meant a spiritual revelation to me. Everything at the hospital became a key to my conception of spiritual life, and so it came about at last that tea urns, bathrooms, beds etc all became symbols of my spiritual thoughts, things sacred to me by association.

when I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.