"It was a morning," announces P. G. Wodehouse in one of his Bertie Wooster stories,

when all nature shouted "Fore! … The fairway, as yet unscarred by the irons of a hundred dubs, smiled greenly up at the azure sky; and the sun, peeping above the trees, looked like a giant golf-ball perfectly lofted by the mashie of some unseen god and about to drop dead by the pin of the eighteenth.

Not Psalm 19 exactly, but in the golfer's world of scaled-back expectations a declaration glorious enough. And now, to remind us afresh of the theological illuminations to be gotten from the game, we have a new assemblage of golf pieces by John Updike (Golf Dreams, Knopf, 201 pp.; $23), who in one of his essays lovingly quotes the passage above. Updike is among the most theologically robust and athletic of American writers—Karl Barth, especially, figures in his work; he is also, having taken up the sport at the age of 25, a devout golfer. "In the fullness of manhood I took up golf, figuring that, now that I was a free-lance writer, I should do something with my afternoons."

Much of the theology available to us on the tee or off by ourselves in the woods pondering our half-buried ball and the demands of private rectitude comes, of course, as moral instruction. At that settled middle age, says Updike, when all the company we keep conspires acquiescently to flatter us, "only golf trusts us with a cruelly honest report on our performance." And the report typically is not good, with respect either to our golf or to our moral life—from the slippery-slope evasions of the gimme putt ("a mentally adroit golfer in obliging company can go eighteen holes without actually sinking a single one of those shortish white-knuckle character-builders that the pros … miss more than occasionally") to the tergiversations of reassigning responsibility (that character who just caromed a drive off the tee marker wasn't your true capable self, you reason, but "instead an imposter, a demon, an alien from outer space who momentarily breezed into your body"). The game abounds in moral paradoxes ("He who hits down sees the ball soar") and in other metaphorical counsels of perfection, as in the warning against the half-hearted Laodicean shoulder turn ("lukewarm I spit thee out").

But not all theology is ethics, and Updike explores golf's other religious contours as well. "Like a religion," he notes, "games seek to codify and lighten life." No sport, surely, is more codified than golf, with its elaborate rules and sacrosanct etiquette (one might as well drive a golf cart down a church nave as up on the apron of a green); with its ritual discipline of the long trek, each hole a mini-pilgrimage and each green reenacting a symbolic interment and resurrection; and with its vast library of catechisms instructing us in the beauties of the straight left arm, the low backswing, and the perfectly pronated wrist.

As to lightening life, "I have asked myself," says Updike, "what the peculiar bliss of this demanding game is." Part of it, doubtless, is the sheer expanse in which the game is played, exalting to our senses and souls alike. Closer by, there is bliss even in the proper equipment, from the "dainty little gauntlet the left hand gets to wear" to the array of clubs in the bag, glistening, in their graduated lengths, like a rank of organ pipes. There is the eternal hope proffered by the game: "What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or woman over fifty?" And there is, lest we forget, the heroic potential for comedy every time we set hand to grip:

The duck hook, the banana slice, the topped dribble, the no-explode explosion shot, the arboreal ricochet, the sky ball, the majestic OB, the pondside scuff-and-splash, the deep-grass squirt, the cart-path shank, the skull, the fat hit, the thin hit, the stubbed putt—what a wealth of mirth is to be had in an afternoon's witnessing of such varied miseries, all produced in the twinkling of an eye by the infallible laws of physics!

But golf is also a game that can with stunning unpredictability leap from the ridiculous to the sublime, five holes of "humiliation and misdirected adrenaline" issuing suddenly in inexplicable contact and a Tiger Woods-like drive of transcendent beauty. "It is of games," says Updike, "the most mysterious, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed the thinnest." At these moments all nature itself seems radiant with the light of the Promised Land. On the links, rhapsodizes Arnold Haultain, a nearly forgotten writer Updike quotes with relish,

are delights which to me, a duffer, are like Pisgah sights: hills, valleys, trees, a gleaming lake in the distance . . . the great breeze that greets you on the hill, the whiffs of air—pungent, penetrating—that come through green things growing, the hot smell of pines at noon, the wet smell of fallen leaves in autumn, the damp and heavy air of the valleys at eve, the lungs full of oxygen, the sense of freedom on a great expanse, the exhilaration, the vastness, the buoyancy, the exaltation.

But before the Pisgah sights come the rigors of the wilderness, where with "wild and self-punishing imperfection" we thrash out our salvation and subdue the earth—or at least gouge out nasty little chunks of it. No vistas here: "the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes." Our Kuyperian notion of sphere sovereignty takes on a ferocious specificity, we swing mightily again, and continue on our journey home.

Jon Pott is vice president and editor-in-chief at Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

B&C July/August 1997 p. 6