September Journal, Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

I’m pleased to say I have finally found a few hours to return to my manuscript, the first draft of my eighth novel. I have found that as I age, I move more slowly with more aches and more pains and greater care not to trip and fall. And as this natural progression occurs, one that pulls me toward my final, eternal, and glorious destination, I am also caretaker for two others, my mother (103) and my husband (88, but I didn’t tell you). So oddly, there is less and less time for… playing around with words.

I’m beginning to think writing a novel is rather like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. This may have been said already (another loss, memory) in these pages, but it struck me this week that I can create the pieces to the puzzle, one at a time, and then fit it all together with plot and character. So I created a file of “bits and pieces”), paragraphs my characters are not yet ready for, to be used sometime in the future chapters and pages of the book. I may not use them at all. I have learned to part with 75% of what I write, when I give the finals a good scrubbing. Tests must be passed to achieve clarity and pacing. Chapters must be short to attract the general reader who, they say, reads at a fifth grade level. It’s probably 3rd grade now, with all the “graphic novels.” I used to think graphic novels were porn, but no, they are comic books. How did this happen to our people?

But those tests will be much later, after readers have read drafts and editors have weighed in. And at the end of the day, I won’t be woke enough to appeal to today’s publishers. But I’m happy to slip under the radar, in exchange for telling the truth as I see it, nothing but the truth, so help me God.

And I do need God to help me. He gave me some good ideas this morning in our little Berkeley chapel. I jotted things down as we sang and prayed and listened to our good vicar preach on healing of body and soul (hint: the Gospel was about the healing of the ten lepers). And the Epistle before that was the amazing St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians (5:16+). He likes lists, and so do I, since they are easy to understand, and even memorize. He gave us two lists today, the Works of the Flesh and the Works of the Spirit. He speaks of misuse of the flesh, against God’s law, and the rewards of the Spirit:

Works of the Flesh, those against God’s law: Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like… they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

(Christians revere the flesh, the body, for we were created by God, but we understand we must observe those boundaries ordained by our Creator. These laws, when kept, help us experience the second list, the fruits of the Holy Spirit.)

Fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.

This instruction was helpful, given my novel-in-progress involves a Professor of Ethics who assigns memory work. But she is not a believer. Where does she find her moral compass, the law? Is there a natural law some speak of? And so I look to the Moral Theology class I’m auditing on Zoom, taught by Bp. Hansen. While I’m not keeping up with the reading, I pray I will absorb some of the ideas in the class. I have always found the moral law fascinating, ever since I read Mere Christianity the first time, and followed Lewis’ argument that right and wrong were clues to the universe. At the time, at the young age of twenty, he offered enough logical proof for me to begin a faith journey that I am still enjoying, fifty-six years later. 

And today, in an increasingly secular world, many are concerned with moral law. If there is no outside arbiter or author of said law, can it govern a society? I’m not sure it can.

But I digress. I have found these readings to be good reminders of how the universe is, indeed, set up. Mankind is its own universe in a sense, and Christians have the magnificent means of understanding who they are and are meant to be. We do this through our sacred texts and rituals, words and song that form their own informed work of art.

Looking back to this morning, the experience of singing and saying and listening and learning together with others, where many voices become one voice, and many prayers become one prayer, I see a sculpted hour that is indeed its own work of art. It was an hour of our time, mine and other faithful, that became a creation of love, a song or symphony of praise, an offering of men and women to their Creator. And in return, Christ gave us himself. Pretty good exchange.

I can’t think of anything quite like it. Somehow this morning and many other Sunday mornings will work their way into my novel, for how else can you describe the indescribable? I think I shall have my Father Adams reminisce about the glory days when the chapel was open, before the pandemic, before the lockdowns, before the closures and the riots and the lootings. When he does, maybe reminiscing to Professor Norton, he shall describe what I saw and said and sang this morning.

And it is curious, that our liturgy developed when an illiterate people took part, many centuries ago. You don’t have to be able to read in order to hear and say and sing and see. If you go regularly you learn by heart, engrafted on your heart. It may be that this is the liturgy of the future, as we turn the clocks back to an illiterate time, a time of graphic novels, pictures, apps, and screens.

And this too may find its way into Music of the Mountain, set on Angel Mountain, a story of how we saved Western Civilization, one book at a time, one song at a time, one prayer at a time, one chapel kept open at a time of closures.