At a pivotal moment in Paul Roche's novel Vessel of Dishonor (1962), Father Martin Haversham, a scrupulous young Catholic priest, tries to ‘blank religion out of his mind’. Lying in bed one night in London during the Second World War, fatigued by pastoral ministry, he reaches over and haphazardly grabs the volume atop a stack of books. Woolf's Mrs Dalloway teaches him a life-altering lesson in spiritual economics:

Thereafter, for Haversham, to live religiously means discovering a new vocation that involves immersion, and the celebration of spiritual fecundity, in the very physicality of life.

The melodramatic romance of a man torn between spirit and flesh, Roche's semi-autobiographical novel represents a powerful testament to the keenness of Woolf's own spiritual insight. Father Martin's formal religious training pressures him to locate spiritual truth hors de combat, among ‘the PRIESTS’, who, notwithstanding their sometimes admirable benevolence, prefer ‘higher things’. Woolf helps him discover truth within the vicissitudes of everyday life. Mrs Dalloway, with what Father Martin sees as its sanctification of the ordinary, inspires him to redefine his understanding of life and religion and of their interdependence. By the end of the novel, Martin has left the priesthood, and feels that ‘he was at last fulfilling his humanity, his natural destiny. He was alive – as he had never been in religion’. Moreover, ‘reaching down into the springs of his creaturehood’, Martin begins to feel ‘something human and divine […] within him’. In good part, Martin's path to an immanently and exclusively human spirituality follows through Woolf's serendipitous intercession. As a contributor to the ‘spiritual’ movement in early twentieth-century British literature, Woolf, Pericles Lewis writes, felt compelled ‘to consider the spiritual possibilities of life outside a church or synagogue, even as the broader culture remained largely – and traditionally – religious, particularly in the Englishspeaking world’.