Moving on to the Christian references I find most moving in Pynchon

[Robin Landseadel]

So, Friend Tom isn't OBA. My dreams are shattered. Guess I'll hang my tears out to dry:

https://youtu.be/22xGxIiFsz8?si=rae0pXFSXW4FgY7v

MB: "Maybe Christianity is the secret sauce in the Pynchon oeuvre -
one of those very intellectual developments around an enlivening
faith which reach out to the world instead of curling up around a
finite, limiting credo."

I was looking at the initial P-List group reading of Against the Day and find your post
from late 2006 relevant to recent discussions here:

Michael Bailey: Moving on to the Christian references I
find most moving in Pynchon's work: . . .
 
. . . e) I haven't read The Crying of Lot 49 in so long that I can't
recall Christian references in it. But Pynchon seems to
spend a lot of thought on the "preterite-elect" theme here
and in Gravity's Rainbow. . .

Tactful thoughts about Christian ideas in Pynchon https://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/2006-December/093189.html

(raises hand at the back of the class, waving wildly)

(Ahem) The Calvinist doctrine of the preterite and the elect points back to William
Pynchon, founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, a fur-trader and later a Judge:

. . . He disagreed with the church leaders of the day on a
crucial pillar of Puritan belief. Pynchon argued Jesus did
not suffer the torments of Hell to absolve mankind of its
past sins. Rather, he won a state of grace through his
obedience to God.
 
This interpretation left open the idea that the way one
behaved on earth could dictate whether one would go to
heaven rather than a selected few reaching heaven by
virtue of predestination.
In 1650, William Pynchon Tweaks the Puritans - New England Historical Society https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/in-1650-william-pynchon-tweaks-the-puritans/

I’m going to offer up the suggestion that Thomas Pynchon, fully conscious of his ancestor’s
profound act of civil disobedience, is following in his footsteps, claiming that God is not
wrathful but loving—Christ didn’t die for our sins but died in perfect obedience to his
Father. This concept undermines the social hierarchy of the Calvinists, making William
Pynchon a heretic in their eyes. But William Pynchon saw the Life of Jesus as a moral
roadmap, where the lowly are judged by God on the basis of their good work in this
world instead of damned and not worth saving thanks to predestination. And Pynchon
sees a lot of what is unjust in the world depends on maintaining the Elect/Preterite
social order, in rendering the lives of brown-skinned people, by way of example, spiritually
beside the point, helping Calvinists to justify slavery and exploitation of “the other”.

There's a funny allusion to William Pynchon in Shadow Ticket:

. . . Vito does a lot of his own felting, dealing direct with Indians who
are apt to show up here at all hours with a rumble seat full of beaver
hides, come in, drink some home brew, clown around, Vito buys in
volume, gets a discount, all is copasetic. . . 
ST pg. 99

CoL49 has Christian, and especially Catholic, references peppered throughout.
A reference one is likely to pass over on account of it initially seeming to be a
non-sequitur: Jesus Arrabal points to the Mexican playwright Fernando Arrabal Terán,
who published some of his works simply as Arrabal. It also points to the CIA at the
same time in a way that seems like some kind of a joke, but we can save that detail
for later.

One of Arrabal’s best known works is “The Automobile Graveyard” which presents the
Passion of Jesus Christ as performed in an automobile wrecking yard by those who now
live in the otherwise abandoned cars. There is a later reference to this Mise-en scène 
towards the very end of the book, where the author speaks of those living on societies’
fringes:

If only she'd looked. She remembered now old Pullman cars,
left where the moneyed run out or the customers vanished,
amid green farm flatnesses where clothes hung, smoke
lazed out of jointed pipes. Were the squatters there in touch
with others, through Tristero; were they helping carry forward
that 300 years of the house's disinheritance? Surely they'd
forgotten by now what it was the Tristero were to have
inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day might have. What was
left to inherit? That America coded in Inverarity’s testament,
whose was that? She thought of other, immobilized freight
cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back,
happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio;
of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind
smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards
in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring,
spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars,
swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper
rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the
dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the
thousands of unheard messages. . .
CoL49 pgs. 159/160
 
It also points back to Mucho Maas’ nightmare at the used car lot.
 
Arrabal means the suburbs in Spanish, with a further definition noting that Arrabal
can also mean zones beyond the fringes, towards wilder country.

Jesus Arrabal, ardent leftist, has some interesting things to say about miracles:
 
“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said.
But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of
the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch
there’s cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists
also believe in another world. Where revolutions break
out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent
for consensus allows the masses to work together
without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet,
sena, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly,
I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle.
Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the
thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to
a finite percentage, redeemed one of the people.
Unmiraculous. But your friend, unless he's joking,
is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian."” 
CoL49 pg. 105

Later, Oedipa encounters a wrecked sailor, living on the fringes and near death,
with a muted posthorn tattooed the back of his left hand:

 . . . Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she
came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her
arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes
down the stairs, back into the morning. She felt wetness
against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He
hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. "I
can't help," she whispered, rocking him, "I can't help." It
was already too many miles to Fresno. . .
CoL49 pg. 110

I’ve always visualized this scene as Oedipa becoming Mary to the old man’s crucified
Jesus in the manner of Michelangelo’s Pietà, just before passing his letter on to Fresno
via the trashcan under the freeway near the Transbay Terminal.
 
Very soon after first reading (and re-reading) CoL49 I got a temp position at the Union 76
building, short walking distance from the Transbay Terminal, where the bus I took from
Berkeley arrived. I know that stretch of San Francisco well.

The Crying of Lot 49 has many pointers to Christian/Catholic doctrines, saints, place names,
heretically inverted Christian/Catholic references in “The Courier’s Tragedy” and so on.
There are lots of these sorts of references slipped in throughout the book, like references
to Saint Narcissus and the myth of Narcissus. San Narcisco = St. Narcissus. Also, multiple
references to Pentecost, particularly the very last words in the book:

. . . Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed
to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture;
perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared
his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.
CoL49 pg. 163

And there are all those times Oedipa attempts to find out about the Tristero, but she
encounters “ritual reluctance”, with everybody dummy-ing up, or the fates themselves
intervening to prevent her from getting to “the truth”, for us be presented some noir-mystery
styled denouement that we’re anticipating but never arrives.

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in
one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound
like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where
they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to
them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled
with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as
the Spirit gave them utterance.
 
Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from
every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude
came together, and they were bewildered, because each one
was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were
amazed and astonished, saying, "Are not all these who are
speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in
his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites
and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia,
Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts
of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both
Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians--we hear them
telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." And all
 were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What
does this mean?" But others mocking said, "They are filled
with new wine." (Acts 2:1-13)

Pentecost
 
. . . Old English Pentecosten "Christian festival on seventh Sunday
after Easter," from Late Latin pentecoste, from Greek pentekostē
(hēmera) "fiftieth (day)," fem. of pentekostos, from pentekonta 
"fifty," from pente "five" (from PIE root penkwe-"five"). The Hellenic
name for the Old Testament Feast of Weeks, a Jewish harvest
festival observed on 50th day of the Omer (see Leviticus xxiii.16).

Pentecost - Etymology, Origin & Meaning of the Name https://www.etymonline.com/word/Pentecost
 

50 is the Number for Pentecost so 49 would be just before the unveiling.