Key to the Mysteries
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Who better than a Unitarian clergyman to explore the spiritual values embedded in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes, the archetype of the coolly detached and relentlessly rational detective? Taking as his premise that detective stories should be read as modern mystery plays, the Reverend Stephen Kendrick argues that the sixty Holmes stories and novels are rooted in medieval fabliau, dealing with taboo subjects in a more human way than Scripture and liturgy with their overtly sacred subjects and explicit demarcation of good and evil. Drawing on the rationalistic and eclectic methods of his own religious tradition, Kendrick attempts to delineate the roots of Holmes' spirituality and finds them in Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, especially in its Zen expression.
His conclusions are threefold: First, he argues that Holmes' attention to detail, a key component of his character, is linked both to the Christian spiritual practice of attentiveness and the Zen practice of bare attention - seeing things as they exactly are. And both of these are inexorably linked to the pursuit of truth, the ultimate concern of all religion. Second, although to Holmes the skeptic God may often be comprehended only as a shadow, central to the stories is one clear and unambiguous aspect of the divine reality, a God of justice who rules a creation where right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness are understood in all clarity and truth. And third, Holmes the scientist proves himself again and again to be a person of vision, able to see "all united" in much the same way Christian mystics from Julian of Norwich to Matthew Fox have discerned the interconnectivity of all things and all people.
While no one would ever mistake Holmes the "thinking machine" as a man of religious sentiment, Kendrick proves quite satisfactorily that in Sherlock Holmes we can find a man with a great heart for whom religion was found in the details; for whom science taught that the more we know, the more we appreciate the mystery of creation; and for whom mercy and forgiveness were part and parcel of judgment and justice. After all, it was Sherlock Holmes who observed to Watson that "our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.... [a] rose is extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."
