Monthly Archives: March 2022

I’m pleased to announce that my recent written interview with Francis Etheredge has now been published online at Profiles in Catholicism. It was a joy to speak of my fifty-four years as an Anglo-Catholic in the Anglican Province of Christ the King (APCK) and my love of liturgy and the Eucharist, the sacramental life that feeds us with God’s word and Christ’s Real Presence.

My reviews of Francis Etheredge’s books, A Prayerful Kiss and Honest Rust and Gold, collections of prose and poetry published by En Route Books and Media, can be found also on this site. I hope to review more of his titles in the weeks to come.

Francis Etheredge’s reviews of Angel Mountain and The Fire Trail have also been published on Profiles in Catholicism.

Thank you, Profiles in Catholicism. In browsing the site I came across a wealth of interesting reviews and interviews and news, even poems and intercessory prayers for the world, but a particular video caught my attention, one celebrating the Paulist Fathers 100 year anniversary in Rome this year, 2022. This coincided nicely with the recent contract with En Route Publishing to reissue my fifth novel, The Magdalene Mystery, originally published by OakTara, which features a Paulist church in Rome.

         Santa Susanna, Rome

The Magdalene Mystery, a search for the real Mary Magdalene of history through the churches of Rome, begins at the Church of Santa Susanna, Rome, one of the Paulist parishes for Americans with English-language Masses. It is a stunning church and a perfect start of the quest that my characters, Kelly and Daniel, embark upon. So I was thrilled to see the video, with some lovely clips of Santa Susanna. The Paulists were most gracious when we have visited on numerous occasions (Fr. Greg and Fr. Tom, as I recall) and their parish library next-door is home to a number of my novels.

And so, this Fourth Sunday in Lent, as I scrutinize The Magdalene Mystery manuscript, I am thinking of the pilgrimage we are making through this Lenten season of preparation for Easter. We are walking a path through the mists of Lent, a time of not only fasting but of reflection and prayer, a time preparing us for the great promise of Christ, our own resurrections.

In our pilgrimage to God with God, we rejoice in each step through time, each minute, hour, day, and year that pulls us toward our own moment of seeing God face to face. This pilgrimage is ours to own as Christians, as witnesses to the daily revelations that unfold before us, as witnesses to the revelations that unfolded over two thousand years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem and in the empty tomb discovered by Mary Magdalene in the early dawn of the first Easter. We are, as Christians, witnesses to life itself, the source, the Creator himself.

We reach to touch him just as the Magdalene did in the garden. Today, he reaches to touch us if we so desire. It is in that touch that we are made whole, reborn, resurrected. It is in that touch that we live and breathe and have our being.

It is a curious thing that there is a sense in which my novels have become my children who have left home for the wide world, traveling to distant readers, into various hearts and minds, with varying welcomes. Authors can’t see their work objectively, and must steer around blind emotional attachments as self-extensions, rather like one’s own progeny. And so I was thrilled this week to sign a contract for the re-issue of one of my earlier novels, The Magdalene Mystery, with En Route Books and Media in St. Louis, Missouri. I was thrilled that one of my novels had been reborn, resurrected, given new and hopeful life.

The novel’s original publisher, OakTara, no longer in business, returned my rights in 2018, along with rights to four earlier novels: The Western Civilization Trilogy – Pilgrimage (2007), Offerings (2009), and Inheritance (2009); and my novel set on Maui, Hawaii, Hana-lani (2010) about the definition of love.

I’m most grateful to British author Francis Etheredge for making introductions and furthering this effort. En Route has published a number of Francis’s titles and is releasing three more this year. He is a gifted writer, tackling vital issues of today through poetry and prose, highly recommended! Be sure and visit him on Amazon and En Route.

The Magdalene Mystery, as readers may recall, is about a search for the true, historical Mary Magdalene through clues in Rome’s basilicas and a Provencal grotto, La Sainte-Baume, where legend says she spent her last years. Having been to the area and the grotto, as well as Rome, on many trips, the novel was a joy for me to write. Photos of the Provencal sanctuary can be seen on this site.

As a correction to the historical Jesus movement (that claims Jesus was not divine and merely a good man, or even a myth) the research for The Magdalene Mystery fascinated and reassured me that the true historical evidence points to Christ’s divinity (plot spoiler). The way in which such New Testament scholarship is approached – methodology – is a theme of the novel, considering the many streams of knowledge that inform the scholar’s conclusions.

Two endorsements were from scholars in their own right who were kind enough to read my drafts and make valuable suggestions:

“A gripping tale surprisingly easy to read. So much Gnostic and sub-Gnostic nonsense has been written about Mary Magdalene that it comes as a relief, as well as a pleasure, to read The Magdalene Mystery. Truth is often stranger than fiction—and much more fascinating.”

           —Michael Donley, Ph.D., author of St Mary Magdalene in Provence, The Coffin and the Cave.

“The Magdalene Mystery has history, intrigue, romance, and predatory Internet behavior. Where else can you see a single parent and a theology professor compete with a cyber-predator to find a manuscript revealing the real St. Mary Magdalene? It made me yearn to visit Rome again!”

  —Paul S. Russell, Ph.D., author of Looking Through the World to See What’s Really There.

And so I give thanks this third Sunday in Lent for my resurrection novel, to be soon resurrected, which asks the question, “What did Mary Magdalene see when she arrived at the tomb of her Lord early that Easter Sunday morning, when it was still dark?”

Isola Tiberina from the river path, Rome

Deo Gratias.

Honest Rust and Gold, a Second Collection of Prose and Poetry (St. Louis, MO: En Route Books and Media, 2020, 233 pp) by Francis Etheredge

Reviewed by Christine Sunderland

Francis Etheredge has gifted us with a second volume of prose and poetry in Honest Rust and Gold, a collection that flows easily between pieces, between chapters, and between sections: “Before,” “Awareness,” “Technological Leaping,” “Grace,” “The Sacraments,” “Writing,” and “After.”

To be honest, we are rusty creatures, you and I, and we need polishing. We want to shine like gold, and we cannot do this on our own. But if we enter these pages of grace, we will leave awakened and changed, polished by our Creator.

Honest Rust and Gold journeys into the action of God upon us and within us, seeing all of life – of creation itself – as sacramental, the holiness of matter and meaning and the union of the two, for “matter is itself meaningful – if for no other reason than it bears the trace of its Maker” (30). It is in our lackings, our emptiness, our failures in living and being as we are meant to live and be, our rustiness and wretchedness, our sufferings – it is here, in this space – that God meets us. These things, our imperfections and failures, open the door to His action of grace. He is able to enter and reside in our rooms of meaningful matter, recreating us in His own image of Love, for “Love loves begetting/ new beginnings or it is not love;/…and Love would not/ Love in us/ if Love did not first love us.” (105)

But in order for God to recreate us, we must be honest and take stock of our sins and sufferings, honest about where we have gone astray, honest about the rust. We do this sacramentally through Confession (“like the excavation of a well”) (131) and Baptism and Eucharist, allowing our immersion in the love of God. We must also ask for help, for the Creator created “creatures of choice/ instead of being cast/ into an irrevocable mould/ of being unable to invoke/ His limitless help” (32). For we are immersed in our “sufferings, disappointments, failures, griefs and the everyday pressures…” (127). We must redirect our immersions into the mercy of God:

“Are we immersed in the mystery of the mercy of God who looks at what we have done with our lives and makes a work of art from it; indeed, are we able or not to glorify God as the Great Recycler – Who takes the rubbish of sin and transforms our life into a blessing greater than the regret of rubbishing it?” (127)

And so we are baptized in sacred waters and words, “dying and rising of Jesus Christ:/ a bath in which bathing is a descent into the cross’ crucifixion of sin.” (italics mine) (128)

There are times when we must be brought into awareness of our emptiness, our insufficiencies. There are times when we need “the sting of the serpent (Numbers 21:4-9) to wake up to the gratuitousness of what we are given.” (69)

Etheredge is doing his part, thankfully, to wake us up to the reality of our own existence, the reality of our fallen nature, the reality of our need for God, the reality of God’s love for us and his desire to enter our hearts and recreate us. But we must see, and we must ask. We must be “beggars before the Lord.”

Honest Rust and Gold richly weaves prose and poetry to give us phrases to ponder: “scrolling down the/ screen is treading time” (82); “God meets us where we are, loves us as we are, and takes us where we cannot go without Him” (italics mine) (97); “difficulties are there to develop us… because our weakness is the opportunity God needs to make His strength’s home in us” (101).

And so much more: “Although Christmas seems to be for the children, the reality of life frequently helps me to see that I need a savior.” (113)

Indeed, we need a savior, as so vividly seen in the world today, with death surrounding us. It is a time for renewal, Etheredge urges, for the Good Shepherd is working among us, “supplanting the ugliness of a disfigured humanity with the beauty of beholding through grace the transformation of it.” (143)

Grace is here to be seen and heard, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Etheredge wonders if his words will reach readers, if all his efforts are in vain. Writers often think this, especially those of us who may espouse unpopular beliefs. And we often don’t know how many readers are reading our words, or buying our books, or touched in any way by our writings. Christian writers, however, know it isn’t why we are called to write. For if one reader is touched and changed, if one reader opens his or her heart to God, that one reader will seed the future. The seed will root and flower and produce fruit. God will recreate our world with this one seed. 

And so, the sufferings of all are offered to the glory of the Creator as “Words Torn from Tears/ wrought and wrung from sufferings/ and pierced, in places,/ admixed with lightning gifts/ of jeweled graces.” (156) 

I, for one, have been touched and changed, to be sure, by these golden, jeweled words. I hope and pray that these poems and meditations reach a wide audience and awaken our world to the love and grace of God among us, for “no one is beyond the reach of God.”

“And even if we are tempted to refuse the outstretched hand of the Lord, may His love prevail over the withdrawal of our hand, grasping us firmly on board the boat bound for heaven… through the prayers/still to be prayed./ Amen.” (229)

I’m looking forward to the boat bound for heaven, to reaching for Christ’s outstretched hand, to be touched and healed, to be made whole, to be pulled into the safety of the ark, pulled from the stormy seas.

Thank you, Francis Etheredge, for this volume of grace. I look forward to the third, Within Reach of You (St. Louis, MO: En Route Books and Media, 2021)

Francis Etheredge is a Catholic theologian, writer, and speaker, living in England. He is married, with eight children, plus three in heaven. Mr. Etheredge holds a BA Div, an MA in Catholic Theology, a PGC in Biblical Studies, a PGC in Higher Education, and an MA in Marriage and Family. He is author of 11 books on Amazon:

Amazon UK

Amazon US    Visit Francis Etheredge at Linked-In for book news and blog posts.

Christine Sunderland serves as Managing Editor for American Church Union Publishing. She is the author of seven award-winning novels about faith and family, freedom of speech and religion, and the importance of history and human dignity. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and a white longhair cat named Angel.

Angel Mountain by Christine Sunderland (Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2020, 267 pages)

Reviewed by Francis Etheredge

In many ways, although this is only the second novel I have read of this author, it reads as a climax of many threads that, one imagines, have been gathering momentum through Christine Sunderland’s seventy years of life which, with the twists and turns of an exciting write, she has turned into a spiritual thriller, racing through the tensions of our times and, at the same time, pausing in front of the mystery of God and prayer: that striking contrast between upheaval and turmoil and the still point of being still: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46: 10).

We enter a world rightly worried about the need to remember war, its abuses, the escalation of conflict, the unholy influence of drugs and money, terrorism and its dehumanizing isolation and destructiveness, the experience of refugees, and the many ways that we come to the solid foundations of our lives and of the societies in which we live in discerning the ethical use of reason, science, the great and majestic sweep of culture, civilization and religion. This contemporary scene is embraced, as it were, within the structure of time echoing God’s work of creation and, as the novel develops, so the almost contradictory song of praise rises from one of Sunderland’s most dramatic characters.

We enter this world, then, through a variety of voices who range from the almost deranged terrorist to the prophetic voice of a modern day John the Baptist and a whole range of characters in between, either thinking through their relationship to the Christian Faith or deeply immersed in or connected to it; and, in the course of what unfolds, there is the almost anonymous “hook up” contrasted with the deeply personal engagement and marriage of two of the central characters. In the midst of a volatile situation, whether externally with forest fires and the unpredictable killings of bystanders or the erupting, “internal dialogues”, within her characters, there “enters” an enclave of friendship in the house of a Jewish widow, Elizabeth, who has befriended her housekeeper and husband and the two people who, in time, will meet and be drawn together through a common love of Elizabeth and her brother, Abram.

Abram, who is a late vocation to the Anglican priesthood, and who preaches repentance and baptism before his death in a beautifully colourful Orthodox context of intense iconography, praise, and a radical Christian life. Sunderland’s portrayal of Abram brings out the dramatic nature of conversion and its call to others, drawing out friendships and opening up relationships, literally, between heaven and earth! While, in one sense, one might have objected to such a prayer saturated book, it is so taken up into the life of Abram that it truly shows the “invisible made visible” and a generous embrace of a variety of different expressions of the heart’s awakening to the existence of God who loves us in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. One wonders, too, about the author’s ecumenical embrace of different traditions with an almost “interior” unity between them all; and, as such, it is like reading an account with the sense of Ut Unum Sint, That They May All Be One, by St. John Paul II – but without the explicit mention of the pope.

Sunderland touches, too, on the challenge of harnessing the good of genetic science and repudiating its harmful, historical antecedents which, ominously, touch the present; and, it is good to see a brief but intermittent exchange about the credibility of evolutionary theory. Indeed, the need for explicitly critical thinking is evident as one character speaks of the ‘Cambrian explosion, a fossil record with no found links to earlier fossils, a species that simply appeared.’ In other words, within the scale and dynamic of the whole book, it is clear that the ’chance’ (cf. Proverbs, 2: 2) appearance of human life is as foreign to human existence as the passage between atheism to religious belief is intelligent.

In view, then, of our present times, full of the reality and ongoing tension of war, it is definitely consoling to discover an author who sees, simply, the whole: the detail amidst the grand sweep of history – both challenging us to the good use of our freedom and intelligence and encouraging us, in the context of time from time immemorial, to believe in repentance and prayer for the good of all.

Yes; there are echoes of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength – but a wonderfully exciting drama told wholly on her own terms! Christine Sunderland is both a woman with roots in the living waters (Psalm 1: 3) and a scribe who brings out both the old and the new and shows their harmony in the hands of God (cf. Matthew, 13: 52)!

Francis Etheredge, Catholic husband, father of 11, 3 of whom he hopes are in heaven, author of 11 books on Amazon, and 2 maybe 3 more due in 2022:

Amazon UK      Amazon US