Separation Of Church and Dreck WHEAT THAT SPRINGETH GREEN by J.F. Powers; Knopf; 352 pages; $18.95

By Christopher Porterfield

Twenty-five years ago, J.F. Powers reached a summit in his literary career and chose that moment to make a surprising announcement. After building a quietly distinguished reputation with two collections of stories, Prince of Darkness (1947) and The Presence of Grace (1956), he had just won the National Book Award for his 1962 novel Morte D'Urban. In the hubbub after his prize, Powers dropped his revelation. His next novel, he told reporters, would not have a priest in it.

No priest? Why, virtually everything Powers had written till then had been about Roman Catholic clergymen in out-of-the-way Midwestern parishes. He had established himself as an uncannily intimate chronicler of their workaday / lives away from the altar: their immersions in church politics and fund raising, their intramural feuds and poker-table cronyism, their struggles with vinegary housekeepers, booze and loneliness. Not that Powers by any means fell into the cozy category of "Catholic writer"; his vision, though compassionate, was too unsparing for that. Still, a Powers book without a priest would be like -- well, a John Cheever book without a commuter.

Years passed, and it began to look as if there might not be any novel at all. Powers published another story collection in 1975, Look How the Fish Live, but after that came only silence. Now, at 71, he has produced Wheat That Springeth Green, and, praise be, he has made a liar of himself. There is a priest in the book. Wheat, in fact, is devoted entirely to Father Joe Hackett, who in the late 1960s arrives as the rector of the comfortable suburban parish of SS. Francis and Clare. And once again, the central dilemma is that however much a priest may try to look to the next world, he remains hopelessly, haplessly entangled in this one.

Father Joe is short, overweight, too fond of food and especially of drink; he is no crowd pleaser but no fool either, a traditionalist, competent and at the same time numbed by routine. Like many a middle-age professional man, he has problems with the home office (obstructive tactics by the chancery, presided over by Monsignor "Catfish" Toohey, a despised rival of Joe's since childhood), with his clients (an overbearing parishioner who wants to buy his child's way into the church school) and with his territory (blatant boosterism for the suburb's tacky shopping mall, dominated by the "40-foot idol" of the Great Badger, complete with waving paw and an exposed, red neon heart). Even his assistant lets him down at first. When Joe gets a curate assigned to him, he turns out to be a child of the '60s, in jeans and T shirt, who plays folk guitar and cannot type.

Joe has few illusions about imperfection, his own or the church's. Yet, although he is far removed from his days as a literal hair-shirt mystic at the seminary, he still believes the church is the one sure way to salvation. This, compounded by a moral disgust at his surroundings, leads to his most fundamental conviction: "The separation of Church and Dreck was a matter of life and death for the world."

How Joe tries to make that separation, and how he stumbles into his own path to sanctity, is Powers' story. He tells it in prose that is like his hero: unspectacular but full of impressive resources. Powers commands a variety of comic voices, from the wild, imaginary conversations with the Archbishop, or Arch, as Joe calls him, to the non sequiturs of sweet, dim Father Felix, the monk who helps Joe out on weekends when he is not chuckling over TV shows. The scenes in which Joe falls woefully short of his ideal of priestly fellowship are wicked social comedy. For days after his curate's arrival, Joe goes through an ordeal of embarrassed detective work in search of the key fact he had failed to learn about the young priest: his name. When the curate's trendy seminary pals come to the rectory for a meal, they grate on Joe by questioning the rule of celibacy and saying they wish they could celebrate Mass with a beer mug or a coffee cup. Joe snaps at them: "Life's not a cookout by Brueghel the Elder."

Wheat has a few vivid set pieces, like Joe's precocious sexual initiation at 15, but no dramatic confrontations or full-orchestra effects. Instead, Powers works through a series of small, sharply observed moments. Joe gradually opens up to his curate, forging a paternal relationship that is a form of love. But as his emotions soften, his principles harden. Implicitly, he encourages an antiwar draft dodger, the son of a jingoistic local columnist. "I have to follow my conscience, informed or not, and you do," Joe tells the boy. "That, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is the mind of the Church."

Joe, drinking less, is now ready for a radical choice of his own. When the Dreck really closes in on him, abetted by the p.r. machinations of the Arch himself, Joe makes a brave, ambiguous move. Powers describes it in a terse diminuendo that may puzzle some readers, but its implications are moving nonetheless. Prompted by despair as well as hope, resignation as well as renewal, it can be seen as either a spiritual triumph or a practical failure: not for nothing does the novel end with the word cross.

If Joe's journey to that final word is long and arduous, Powers' was no less so. "Ridiculous," says the author, shaking his head over his protracted effort to finish the book. There were the distractions of raising five children, of moving to Ireland and back to the U.S., and of coping with the long illness of his wife, Writer Betty Wahl, who died in May. But mostly Powers blames his own temperament ("Basically, I'm lazy") and age: "When you're a young writer, you think you can do anything, and therefore sometimes , you can. But an old writer is like an old boxer: he's cut up, he's been knocked out, he knows all the ways you can get killed. So he's careful -- too careful."

Professorships in creative writing helped to support him. Since 1976 he has taught one term a year at the Catholic St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and lived in a small, plain stucco house on campus. This gives Powers a good vantage point on the church, about which he has views that sound much like Joe's. He believes in maintaining the celibacy rule "for reasons of comedy -- we've got enough comedy without married priests." The curse of the church's success, he says, has been "selling out to the powers that be. Now it's in the situation of NBC, CBS and ABC -- trying to raise the ratings, screwing up Scripture by trying to make it easier for everybody to understand."

Powers has no apologies for returning once more to the narrow subject of priests, partly because he does not see it as a narrow subject. "From my point of view it's the big play," he says. "Good and evil, God and man, life and death -- that's where it is." He expects his new book to be no more appealing to a broad Catholic readership than his earlier ones. "They don't like what I have to say -- don't want to believe it. I don't want to believe it." He can take comfort from one thing, however. Another revelation he made to the press back in 1963 was that, unprolific as he was, he wished he could turn out five excellent, memorable books. Coming after his previous four, Wheat amply fulfills that ambition.