Summary: Jon Darrow, Spiritual Director and mystic, feels called to leave his role as an Anglican monk and return to the world.
I am revisiting the Starbridge series ten years after I first read it. I have some notes about the series in the review of Glittering Images (the first book) that are relevant to Glamorous Powers. However, I am trying to avoid too much of the story as I revisit the series so that anyone that has not read the series can read these posts without significant spoilers.
Jon Darrow is present throughout the series, but it is Glamorous Powers, where he is the narrator and focus of the story. Darrow is the oldest reoccurring character in the series. He was born in 1880. He married fairly young as a Navy chaplain, but as happens throughout the series, his wife dies young. His mother-in-law helps raise the two children, and after WWI, Darrow becomes a prison chaplain, mostly on death row (he is opposed to the death penalty) until his children are raised. Once the children are out of the house, he becomes an Anglican Monk (there are celibate Anglican monks and nuns, many of Darrow’s age were inspired by the Oxford movement’s return to Anglo-Catholicism). Eventually, Darrow rose to become Abbot of the Granchester Abbey, which primarily offers spiritual direction and retreats for clergy and theology students from Cambridge.
From his role as abbot, Darrow has a vision, which he believes is calling him to leave the cloister and return to the world. This book breaks the pattern of crisis and then spiritual direction and instead starts early with spiritual direction. Part of what I appreciate about the series is that there are a variety of spiritual directors. In this case, the spiritual director is the Abbot General of the order, Francis Ingram. He is, in many ways, the opposite of Darrow. Darrow is mystical, aesthetic, and from a lower-class background. Ingram is upper-class, very rational, and enjoys the finer things in life. Ingram helps Darrow explore the vision and whether it is a call from God. It is not ever discussed in these terms, but this is a spiritual direction of discernment.
Darrow does leave the order, and following the path of the series, he gets himself into a mess because of his pride, his background and the false sense of trying to bring about God’s will in the way that Darrow wants it to happen. God redeems his sin and graciously works all things together for good. But Darrow is broken, which allows him to confront his past, upbringing, early marriage, and children in ways he has been unable to do previously.
Each book in the series uses quotes from real theology books as epigraphs for the chapters as it explores a different theological topic. Glamorous Powers explores mysticism. Darrow is roughly based on a real person, just as Alex Jardine in the previous book was based on a real Bishop. While I am interested in the discussion of mysticism in Glamorous Powers, there is some unhelpful mixing of mysticism and miracles. It wasn’t until I was into the fifth book of the series, about Jon Darrow’s son Nicholas that I realized that the psychic gifting that both Darrows have in the book is a type of Continuationism. There are different senses of continuationism and cessationism, and terms need to be defined before I want to discuss them with people in real life. But at least some cessationists do not argue that all miracles have ceased, but that God no longer gifts people to perform miracles apart from the Holy Spirit. I think this understanding of cessationism is problematic and part of why I think the whole discussion is more about modernism than miracles, theology, or ecclesiology. But Darrow’s use of psychic powers is a type of gifting that cessationists do not believe continues to exist.
Again, Darrow needs to seek healing for his past before living into the calling God has gifted him to serve. Again, there is an embrace of pop psychology and family systems theory with some value in spiritual direction. But it can go too far. In his memoir The Pastor, Eugene Peterson discusses his pastoral care training by a psychologist that tempted him to move out of his pastoral role into a counseling role. In the end, Peterson viewed his role as pastor as one that primarily calls people to worship, although he thought there was real value in using the tools of psychology as one aspect of pastoral counseling. (Thomas Oden also explores a similar idea in his memoir, but for the role of theologian.)
There is also value in the book in showing the characters as being healed enough to serve but not becoming unrealistically perfect. For example, in the later books, Darrow still has significant issues with pride. Even though confronted with the ways that his father has attempted to create Jon into his own image, and Jon did the same with his own son Martin, book five explores how Jon still did the same with his much younger son Nicholas.
There is also real value in the role of forgiveness in the series. For example, spouses are frequently shown to be oriented toward forgiveness, even if they do not fundamentally change their personalities.
Glamorous Powers by Susan Howatch (Starbridge #2) Purchase Links: Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook (there is not a current print edition, but it is widely available as a used book)