WITH THE RECENT DEATH of John Updike, I found myself taking stock of my own life. This sounds more than a little self-important, I know, but for the past five decades, with each novel, short story, collection of poetry and anthology of essays, Updike has been my invaluable mentor. For he not only described the WASPish culture that gave me birth and nurtured me, he did so with such drypoint precision that over time he came to define it.

In fact, Updike’s death has made me realize that the autumn of 1964 was the conjunction of the two planets that were to determine my adult life. There was of course the dazzling planet of Updike’s early novels set in Pennsylvania, The Poorhouse Fair, The Centaur, On the Farm and, of course, Rabbit Run. (I’ve always been ambivalent about his migration to the tonier suburbs of New England.)

But there was a second planet to be discerned at first only dimly in the epigraph to The Centaur. There on the title page this quote, “Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him. He himself is the creature on the boundary between heaven and earth.” And printed beneath it in small block caps the name Karl Barth. The name meant nothing.

In that autumn of 1964, we moved to the countryside of Berks County, Pa., and into a colonial stone farmhouse, whence my father sallied forth to join battle in the canyons of Manhattan. I found myself in Updike’s native land. It seemed right therefore to glance at the books of a local boy made good. What I discovered was an author who had captured my new world with a brilliant, almost tactile particularity.

The manicured landscape of the Pennsylvania Dutch farms, the soft wooded hills suggestive of the downy human form, those houses of warm red brick that give Reading, Bethlehem and Allentown their almost preternatural permanence. Updike’s works made me see what I had come to inhabit.

But there was another and mysterious terrain captured by Updike that proved seductive to a 15-year-old boy. This world that Updike rendered with such exactitude was also a fine veil through which I saw for the first time the contours of sex, life and death. And in his rendering of the erotic dance between man and woman, with all its moist and sticky heat, Updike seemed to me to brush up against God himself. Even in a sad and desperate act of adultery — the prostitute Ruth arching her naked body above an astonished and grateful Rabbit Angstrom — I felt as if I was somehow witnessing even in this disorder the divine order of things.

Years later, once I escaped the pruderies of art appreciation, I came to think of Updike’s mysterious terrain as emblemized by 19th Century artist Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du mond, where the torso and legs of his model are rendered anatomically — almost too anatomically — precise, and yet at the center of the canvas is the dark gaze of what is “other.” That is what the poet John Donne so splendidly designated the “hairy diadem” — the cynosure that forever summons man, the inveterate narcissist, to the task of going beyond himself.

Many boys are introduced (or used to be) to eros by pawing at the pages of Henry Miller. I will be forever grateful that Updike introduced me to the mystery of eros by etching its surfaces in such astonishing details that he rendered the mystery all the more mysterious. Over the years, I was to learn from Updike that what makes something pornographic is not the explicitness of the subject matter, nor even the subject matter itself. What makes for pornography is when our imaginations strip reality of its mystery. When prurience pretends to be reverence.

It was my astonishment at these early novels that led me to search out Assorted Prose, Updike’s first anthology of essays and reviews.(By the end of his life, Updike had come to compete with Edmund Wilson for the distinction of the American Century’s most accomplished man of letters.) How was it that in Updike’s vision God and sex conspired to make middle America glisten with a perilous beauty? In so far that Updike provided me an answer, it was in his brief review of an obscure book by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968).

Updike opened the review with a quote from Barth that has remained in my memory for 40 years, “There is no way from us to God. The god who stood at the human way would not be God.” Or as Updike paraphrased the Swiss, “The real God, the God men do not invent, is Wholly Other. We cannot reach Him; only he can reach us.” I had no interest in theology, much less in Karl Barth, whoever he was. But standing in the stacks of my local library and reading Updike’s review, I found in his words an elective affinity. In an instant the god of my youth dissolved. And the death-of-God movement, which was then in vogue, seemed academic and silly.

I don’t remember how I clapped my hands on the volume of Barth’s Dogmatics that dealt with men and women. (There are 13 volumes in all!) But I do remember discovering in this volume that Barth had not only rendered Updike’s world theologically, he had done so in a prose every bit as sensuous and coruscating as Updike’s. I found working through a page of Barth a downright erotic exercise. If all theologians wrote like this, I reasoned, there was nothing for it but to study theology.

For Barth, even though we can never reach out to God, we come ineluctably to conform to God’s covenant with creation in spite of ourselves — even in the encounter between men and women. Like Updike, Barth was no romantic. Both men knew their Freud. Both would agree that our sexuality is deeply rooted in polymorphic perversity. And that in the erotic dance between a man and woman, love is forever joined with shame, self-giving with dominance and even monogamy with the lineaments of betrayal. But for both men, it was God himself who had rooted our sexuality in such compound soil. And it was precisely in the God-determined dance of eros that we begin to trace the abiding structure of grace.

For Updike and Barth, it is in the awkwardness of courtship and fumbling foreplay, the frantic wrestling towards climax and the inevitable sadness that follows, the children who invade our lives only to lead us in directions we never planned — it is in all these motions of the flesh that we are led into a knowledge of a grace that is neither of our own making, nor to be bought on the cheap.

Barth has remained my passion for four decades. We’ve had our ups and downs, and I have flirted with other theologians. Nothing cools an affair more than writing a dissertation about it! And I blame Barth entirely for finding myself amongst a guild of tyros who call ourselves, pretentiously enough, theologians. Most of us, even the brilliant ones, write only for one another, and then in a prose so turgid that Christian thought has become largely irrelevant to our culture. Most of what we “theologians” do — our endless round of conferences and papers — is ephemeral, taken up with the latest fad and soon remaindered. And so I continue to return into those 13 hefty black volumes and their sensuous witness to the ultimate triumph of grace.

As for John Updike, who introduced me to Barth and a life’s work, I’d agree that some of his later novels are uneven, and one or two are just downright bad. As his reputation grew, it seems to me that he was occasionally tempted to be more than a little bit arch. And yet even in these works there shines his customary attention to detail and generosity of spirit.

Updike is dead. His prolific output will now become the raw material for the dark satanic mills of English departments and grad schools. So be it. If I mourn him, it is not because he was a great man of letters, but because he was my guide for so many years. The faithful one who reminded me in book after book that veiled by the surface of this earth, there abides a grace more solid and enduring than those stone farmhouses of Berks County.

The Rev. David Lewis Stokes, an occasional contributor, is an associate professor of theology at Providence College. He is a Catholic priest.