Glittering Images

Third Reading Summary: A promising young theology professor is sent to investigate a bishop, leading to a romance, a breakdown, and a recovery. 

A few months short of a decade ago, I brought this book on vacation. It was my 40th birthday, and we had publicly announced that my wife was pregnant with our first child. So we went on our first cruise, and I devoured the first several books in the series. (I bought the following several books on kindle when in port.)

Before reading the series, I had not understood the concept of Spiritual Direction. I may have heard of the words (although, at this point, I am not sure), but it took the fictional portrayal in Glittering Images for the concept to sink in. Glittering Images is melodramatic fiction. There are fundamental weaknesses to this book and the series that are more visible to me now with some distance, but it was transformational. When I came home, I asked around for a spiritual director. I did not find anyone around me to give me a recommendation. So I looked up the directory on Spiritual Direction International (which has changed its name to Spiritual Companions International) and contacted the closest one to me geographically, just a few minutes from my home. (I would recommend this directory at this point.) I am still meeting with him nearly ten years later, although he has moved twice, and for the past five years, we have been doing video conference meetings. I started training to be a spiritual director about four years ago, and I have been working as a spiritual director for several years (very part-time.)

Back to the book, broadly, the series is historical fiction based on the 1930s to the 1960s focusing on Church of England clergy. Most books have a clergyperson in a spiritual and personal crisis, leading to some breakdown. And then the second part of the book is focused on a spiritual director helping to explore the roots of the crisis and work together toward healing. In this book, Charles Ashworth, a theology professor and Cathedral Canon, is sent on a secret investigative mission to preemptively avoid what might become a public disaster.

I am less of a fan of the first part of these books. I don't like watching people make bad decisions that cause problems for those around them. However, part two draws me to the series, where people explore the psychological and spiritual causes of their problems and seek to heal the relational connections that have been harmed through sin.

Over the past several years, I have investigated trauma and spiritual abuse more intentionally. Unfortunately, the series, written from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, are not as cognizant of trauma and spiritual abuse as I would like. That isn't to say there is no awareness, but there are problems.

I want to acknowledge some of the problems before moving on. Most of the books center around the sexual sin of the clergy. I think sexual sin, as described in the series, should be disqualifying, not just temporarily (as the books suggest), but permanently because of the harm it causes and the power abuses involved. The books, even as they often complain about too much Freudian pop psychology, have quite a bit of Freudian pop psychology. Third, most of the books have one of three different spiritual directors that have what is termed in the book as “psychic gifts.” These psychic gifts operate as near magic that distracts from how spiritual direction works outside the books in the real world. I think that Howatch is trying to take seriously charismatic and mystical gifts. But while it provides interest for the books, and I appreciate the mystical aspects, the near magic, which is usually presented as a power of the Holy Spirit, is separate from the role of traditional spiritual direction.

Howatch uses unreliable narrators to tell the story from their perspective throughout the series, often with many flashbacks to give context. This makes sense both from a literary and spiritual perspective because people always have limited perspectives on what is going on inside of others. But also, many people have a level of self-delusion about their own lives. Especially for people on the verge of a breakdown, self-delusion is common as they try to keep their lives together.

There are many positive aspects of the series, despite some frustrations. The series takes seriously generational sin, either the ways we as children rebel against our parents but move into different types of sin as a reaction, or the ways children (both knowingly and unknowingly) replicate the sin of their parents. It also takes seriously the ways that breaking generational patterns can benefit children. The series also promotes a holistic look at healing while showing how slowly that healing may come.

The series forms an arc with overlapping characters. Charles Ashworth is the main character in the first book. And then his spiritual director (Jon Darrow) is the main character in the second book. The third book is about an Archdeacon (Neville Aysgarth) that works in the diocese and was introduced in the second book. The following three books work backward. The fourth book is told from the perspective of a young woman but is mainly about the lack of healing in Aysgarth's life. And then the fifth book is about Jon Darrow's son Nicholas (again a psychic) before returning to Charles Ashworth at the end of his career in the final book. An offshoot trilogy about Nicholas' work in London in the 1980s as a spiritual director is separate from the main series.

Another strength of the series is that it accurately shows that God can use broken people. People in the series routinely give good advice to others, which they do not take themselves. The series also shows a diversity of theology, a fundamental feature of the Church of England as a denomination. Each of the facets of the denomination is presented as helpful, although I think the modernist liberal is given the least grace. Finally, the series arc that revisits each character helps keep the reader from idealizing short-term healing and focuses on longer-term spiritual formation throughout the characters' lives.

I will revisit this later with later books in the series, but I wish the spiritual and personal fallout as a result of sin was more present, even as it isn't absent. This is historical fiction; there is an actual distance between some of the conventions and attitudes around theology and social mores from today. The series' progress over time emphasizes those changes, but still, it can be hard to understand decisions appropriate to different eras in light of the reader's current era.

I will grapple with the ideas of the series without giving away too much of the storyline as I continue to write about future books. As I publish this post, I am in the series' fifth book. I keep delaying my writing because I want to give credit to Howatch, who handles some of my early objections in later books, but I also know that not everyone will read nearly 3000 pages and make it through the whole series.

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Short Review: This is a second reading and review of Glittering Images. I read it first about 2 years ago and it gave me a new concept of what it means to live a Christian life. Since then I found a spiritual director and have been meeting with him for about 18 months and my theology has shifted a bit too to become more sacramental (and Anglican). The book itself can be a bit melodramatic at times and there may be a bit too much going on. The first half is about an Anglican priest and professor (Charles Ashworth) that is sent to investigate a bishop covertly. But Ashworth, has his own issues and in the midst of his investigation he falls for a woman that works for the Bishop and then has a full spiritual breakdown. The second half of the book is about Ashworth's recovery at the hands of Jon Darrow a spiritual director. The spiritual direction is highly fictionalized and really like actual spiritual direction, but it gave me a view of what spiritual direction could be.

I had actually asked for some referrals of counselors before I read this because I was in a stuck place in life. But this book gave me a new concept of what I was looking for. It was not depression or midlife crisis, but need for an older Christian to formally come alongside me and help me concentrate on my spiritual life. I have a review next week of Eugene Peterson's Practice Resurrection which i re-read along with Glittering Images to help give some non-fiction context. Both books focus on the Christian life as a work in progress and I at least have found that important.

My first blog review of Glittering Images http://bookwi.se/glittering-images/

My second reading review of Glittering Images http://bookwi.se/glittering-images-2/