Laurence’s books often use scriptural allusions and present characters who converse with God. Yet, as Boughton shows, Laurence betrays her Christian religious framework on an even more profound level by the way she treats the downtrodden, outcasts and sinners — an approach rooted, says Boughton, in Laurence’s appreciation for the social gospel promoted at United College during her days there.

{sa 0889614598}Ultimately, most of Laurence’s characters (although less true of the privileged ones) are treated sympathetically. More importantly, they are treated in a manner that is fundamentally optimistic. Despite their moral upheaval, their success as human beings is often greater than those who conform to conventional ideals. Rachel’s willingness in A Jest of God to bear a child out of wedlock despite what people will say contrasts favourably with the pious respectability of her mother whose control over Rachel masquerades as solicitousness. In The Fire-Dwellers, Rachel’s sister Stacey falls short of her ideal as wife and mother, and yet, after acting out her feelings of failure and insecurity by having an affair, she rekindles her love for her husband, evokes his forgiveness and keeps her family together. In The Diviners, the generosity of Christy and Prin Logan — looked down upon by the rest of Manawaka because of their poverty, Christy’s job as garbage collector and Prin’s shapeless profile — is finally appreciated by their adopted daughter, Morag Gunn, after they have died. But the reader can see their mettle long before then. And the reader can also perceive that there is more to Jules Tonnerre, the Métis father of Morag’s daughter, than society, or Morag’s very successful ex-husband, Brooke, could ever notice.

One can recognize in these writings echoes of dominical injunctions to love others as God has loved us, to refrain from judging and to see each sinner as a valuable sheep of the flock. Laurence’s work, despite her personal reservations about institutional religion or about various points of doctrine, seems, ultimately, to speak accurately of divine sovereignty and mercy. She conveys a sense, although certainly not in any naive way, that good will triumph over evil and, from a Christian perspective, that positive attitude is fundamentally right.

In this connection, Boughton points out that Laurence’s favourite hymn was “Old Hundred.” Laurence’s autobiography, Dance on the Earth, represents life as a dance. Laurence, who confesses to having loved to dance as a young woman, sees life as something to be enjoyed and valued despite its ups and downs, something to be lived in community with others, and something for which one should be grateful.

As Boughton tells us, the United Church of Canada was the church in which Laurence was baptized, which she attended as a child, in which she was married and to which she returned later in life after a time among the Unitarians and then away from institutional religion altogether. This was the religious context in which she learned the hymns she loved and was introduced to the Bible and the social gospel.

I was somewhat concerned as I read Boughton’s work that the spiritual influence of the United Church was being a little too narrowly conceived. The United Church did inherit much wonderful music from both its Presbyterian and the Methodist streams. And the Methodists also bequeathed the twin notions that accepting the Gospel makes a practical difference in the lives of people and that making a difference in the lives of people will help them to perceive Gospel truth. Yet there is more to the United Church than hymn-singing and the social gospel.

The Basis of Union which brought three Canadian ecclesial traditions — the Congregational Union, the Methodist Church and about 60 per cent of the Presbyterian Church in Canada — into one community in 1925 accepted the basic beliefs of Christianity as these were articulated in the early ecumenical councils and affirmed in the confessional statements of the constituent churches, all of which stressed justification by faith and emphasized that a generous God does for us far more than we do by and for ourselves. The United Church context in which Laurence first learned how to view the world — mediated first by the courage and generosity of her beloved grandmother and the aunt who became her “Mum” — most likely helped her to develop her characteristic hopefulness and gratitude for life.

No spiritual journey is easy to capture. Who can grasp with any degree of assurance one’s own spiritual states, let alone those of someone else? Who, then, could presume to trace the trajectory marked by the succession of states which constitute another’s spiritual journey, especially when one’s knowledge of them is mostly second-hand? That being said, a reader can discern in Boughton’s attractively compact book fleeting glimpses of the developing spiritual perspective of Laurence and, as a result, will come away better prepared to understand the author and her writings.

(Brown teaches in the department of philosophy and religious studies at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont.)