Monthly Archives: October 2023

There are times when I sense we are entering a new Dark Age, for the signs speak for themselves – the rise of tyranny, lies, and prosecutions of the innocent, terror attacks instilling fear and horror, demanding war as self-defense. Evil masquerades as good, lies are said to be true, and children are maimed by school authorities. These are dark times.

Hope seems to spiral into despair.

And then there is God, as my good Bishop Morse of blessed memory often said. In the deepest darkest places God finds us, takes our hand, lifts us up to see the light, His light. He made it. He made us.

And then there is today, the Feast of Christ the King, a celebration of the victory of life over death, light over darkness. We celebrate the Lamb of God who becomes Christ the King on his throne in glory. We celebrate this victory that outshines all defeats, all darkness. We look to Him to quell the demons of fear that maim and butcher the innocent. We look to Him to pull us from the precipice and bring us home on His shoulders, to cure our blindness and heal our deafness and give voice to the humble and meek. Only Christ the King can redeem our world of death and darkness.

We are entering a season of long nights and lessening light, approaching the end of October. It is a time that masquerades, costumed as something it is not, on All Hallows Eve, Halloween. Once a children’s time to dress in costumes and play pretend and knock on friendly doors and collect candy, this ritual has become grisly and morbid, one often not suited for young children. I noticed the change in the ‘fifties, when local boys decided it would be fun to stream toilet paper over our neighbor’s tree. Normally we would call this vandalism and trespassing, but on Halloween it was allowed. At age ten, I considered it rather scary and was leery after that about trick-or-treating in the dark in our neighborhood. The tricks didn’t seem worth the treats. 

Christians, of course, celebrate The Feast of All Saints the following day. The day after All Saints, we remember in prayer All Souls, giving our pastors lists of family and friends who have entered Heaven, to be remembered in the Church’s prayers. And so the darkness of Halloween is enlightened with the hope of Heaven, the promise of Eternity with our God of Love. In a sense, and certainly true historically, All Hallows Eve, meaning the evening before All Saints, was a corruption of the true holy-day, as if Lucifer needed to muddy the joy of the saints with death and darkness the night before.

When my son was young, in the ‘eighties, this strange cult of death was even more obvious. Fairy tale costumes portraying virtuous heroes of the past had been replaced with goblins and ghouls, skeletons and werewolves, monsters of hell rising from the earth, that portrayed vices and viciousness, maiming and cruelty. I was grateful that my son went out as a baker one year, and a ghost another year, and a robot when he was seven, R2-D2 from Star Wars. I was a single parent at the time with little to spend on costumes so we manufactured one out of grocery bags and tin foil, but when I heard someone say from the doorway as he offered candy to my son, “Ah, how clever, a Safeway bag!” I worried about my son’s reaction. But he was mainly interested in the candy and was eager to visit as many houses as possible (supervised from the street by his mother).

Today, our Anglican Province of Christ the King celebrates their patronal festival. In this world, we hold on to our King, grateful to have preserved the Episcopate, the line of bishops going back to St. John the Evangelist in the first century, the apostle of love. Some of us were in Denver on January 28, 1978 (our good Dean Napier carried the Christ the King banner) and witnessed the consecration of Robert Sherwood Morse to preserve this episcopacy through the centuries. From there our band of truth-tellers welcomed others, so that matters of faith and practice could continue unbroken. These matters were credal ones, issues of belief in key doctrines, or truths, but the one that cannot be denied is the Resurrection of Our Lord, for all else depends on this. Once you believe in the resurrection (and there is plenty of evidence to believe), you have to ask, what does this mean to me, that the Son of God came to earth to love me so? You have to ask, how will I live my life now that I have come to see so clearly? The Resurrection changes everything.

And so in our little chapel in Berkeley, I gave thanks for the love and light of Christ the King, and when the Gospel was sung by our good priest, sunlight shafted through the high windows, enshrining the chancel. It was a vision of love, of knowing, of seeing the truth of Christ, that goodness conquers evil, love conquers hate, and the victory is ours in the precious name of Our Lord Jesus.

All we need to do is believe. It changes everything.

It’s raining!

Need I say more? Our thirsty hillsides are happy.

It’s a light rain, but for California in October, it’s a welcome respite and a protection against fire in the midst of our fire season.

Changes in weather still startle me after all these years. They remind me we are mere visitors on this earth, granted we are caretakers of a sort, but we see the world around us as separate from ourselves. We are conscious beings, seeking meaning in life, yearning for connection, all the while single and alone, sometimes lonely, creatures standing outside the world and looking in.

We look to art – words, music, paintings, sculpture – to interpret our world for us, give us vision into how it all fits together. We want to understand the mystery and miracle we see in time past, present, and future. Not understanding why leaves us vulnerable, scared.

And so today in a time of ugly art, dissonant art, angry art, I find the Church to be a welcome feast for the mind, the senses, the heart, and the soul. At least I find this in the Anglican liturgy, if you can find a church that celebrates the traditional Eucharist. For here, with a few other seekers, we are treated to soaring song, rising incense, poetic diction, and Holy Scripture that unravels the mysteries and miracles of our lives in our time. Our preacher helps with this, speaking for God, condensing and concentrating God’s Word into a fine wine we sip and enjoy. We nod and we smile with recognition. Yes, that’s the way it is! I experienced it just like that, and now I understand what it is that I experienced.

Our preacher is not interpreting these answers on his own, thankfully. He has over two thousand years of Church teaching, Church debate, Church conclusions. He has his own life-time on earth so far, his learning from others in this time, his humility in terms of that learning. But the good news is that there are answers to our many questions. There are answers to who we are, what we are, where we are, where we are going, why and how. And we too, pray for humility as we listen to others and join in their song of God, join in their dance of beauty, as bread and wine welcome the Real Presence of Christ.

Our years and our months and our days are gifts given to each of us, time to find the answers to these questions. And not only find answers in our time on earth, but to rejoice in the beauty and goodness of those answers.

There are those who turn away from God and from his answers for them. For there are consequences to asking and receiving and knowing. There are responsibilities, once we carry the cross of Christ’s redemption. As said in our Gospel lesson this morning, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:1+) These words, spoken by Christ, are difficult ones. He tells the story of the wedding guest with unsuitable garments who is thrown into outer darkness. But today I understood those words. Today I realized, listening to our good preacher, that when we accept the invitation to the feast, we accept the responsibilities of being present at the table. We put on our garments of virtues, not vices. We honor the Master of the Feast properly. For we have been called, to be sure, but we also want to be chosen.

And so, like so much of Holy Scripture, we learn it is about our hearts, our deepest desires, how we decide to live our lives. It is about what we do when we are invited. And as we choose to attend the feast on a Sunday morning in a chapel in Berkeley, we take part as we should – singing, confessing, praying, opening our hearts to mystery and miracle at the Eucharistic table.

When we do this, bit by bit, song by song, prayer by prayer, we are given answers we did not expect. We are shown magnificence we did not see. Our parched hearts are watered by the rain of love.

And we turn to our neighbor and see them in a new way. We see our family members in new ways. With each turning and seeing, doors are opened in our souls, doors we didn’t even know were there.

And we leave grinning like a child, full of joy, mysterious and miraculous joy.

I have been reading Joseph Epstein’s curious book, The Novel, Who Needs It? I have often asked the same question, given my fascination with writing novels with ideas, and have hopes of learning from this most distinguished man of letters.

My question takes a slightly different form, that is, is there a place today for novels of ideas? Is there a place for novels that incorporate serious themes, questions, even political and social ideas (horrors), so very unfashionable, into character and plot. Epstein admires the nineteenth-century era of long dense novels, as do I. My concentration in my BA Literature was Charles Dickens and I appreciate the long sentences and paragraphs and character development so at war with the twenty-first century mind. I particularly appreciated Dickens’ ideas, writing at a time of child labor and poor houses, experiences he endured as a child.

Who writes novels of ideas today, or in the last fifty years? Who writes these and still is published? They may make one think, and that is challenging for many, especially if the thoughts “trigger” negative feelings.

I find the discussion particularly curious, given many are bemoaning the current culture of death and propaganda, saying, the truth tellers, the Jews and the Christians (who are required to try not to lie) have ceded the ground to nihilism, socialism, communism, and may other isms that prop up a culture of tyranny and death. We are told by these astute observers of our culture that we should have been writing novels with ideas, films with ideas, for art, don’t we all agree, informs culture.

And yet, as a present-day novelist, I am told not to preach, not to teach, but to embrace passion, particularly illicit passion, hedonistic characters, and demonic deeds. I am told to check the boxes if I want a publisher, and the boxes are many and illicit. Can’t go there.

I suppose Aesop’s fables were of the preaching variety too. And fairy tales that warned one of witches in forests that gobble children. And morality narratives of all kinds, reflecting a cosmos of good and evil, virtue and vice, the stock and trade of Judaism and Christianity.

And now we have wars and rumors of wars, serious threats to our democracy, challenges to America, the one country in the world, or should I say on the planet, that can defend the innocent against the guilty, the peasant against the tyrant, and truth against lies.

Many are speaking of the rise of evil in our world. Evil lives in all of us, as Solzhenitsyn said, in every heart. The question is, how do we root out evil in our own hearts? We define it so that we can recognize it so that we can destroy it within ourselves. Again, Judaism and Christianity point the way with lists and laws and confession and repentance and forgiveness. With virtues and moral theology classes (highly recommended).

It turns out that Joseph Epstein, whose writing I greatly enjoy, as essayist and culture defender (not warrior), while he has written numerous short stories but has never written a novel, and I wish he would write one so I can learn from him. But critics often don’t write in the genre they criticize.

There are other writers whom I greatly admire who comment on the arts culture of today and bemoan its materialism and self-centered creeds, immediate gratification, lack of responsibility, denial of the work ethic, and many more. But then without the God of the Jews and the Christians, this is what we get – we become our own gods.

I will continue writing my novels of ideas, characters placed in today’s culture, for good or ill, who must grapple with virtue and vice. There is so much to say, so many characters to fill the pages, so many challenges to life in this third decade of the twenty-first century.

The wars and rumors of wars are a constant that humanity must face, just as each of us must face our own inevitable death. But considering the nature of humankind, who he is, why he is what he is, where he has been and where he is going, is no small thing. And today, it is vital that each of us think again, ponder good and evil again, consider virtues and vices and how to live with one another. How to love one another.

And so we are back to the loving and demanding God of Abraham, the God of the Jews and the Christians. We need to listen to him so that we can make sense of this world in which we find ourselves. We need to listen to the law and be held accountable, for one day we will face judgment whether we believe in judgment or not.

In the meantime I’m sticking with my characters who debate some of these questions, question some of these debates, and in the end, I, along with my characters, will be accused of preaching and teaching. So be it.

And also in the meantime I’m hoping someone else will write a novel of ideas we can all learn from, to see how it is done, and how to live our lives the best way possible.

Victor Davis Hanson recently wisely observed that working on his farm balanced mental work with physical work to leave him more whole, or words to that effect. There is truth to this, that all mind or all body makes for a lopsided individual. We have been created with both, and perhaps it is also true that one influences the other, even corrects or directs the other, in some miraculous complementarity.

As I type these words, I am combining, to a degree, both faculties, the physical fingers placing my thoughts onto the keyboard and onto the screen and then, with the tap of a tab, with the touch of “Publish,” my intellectual fingerings fly into a cloud, our word for something some of us can’t visualize, involving wave lengths or something that abbreviates to WIFI or Internet.

And so as I worked in the back yard the last few days, I thought of VDH’s words and appreciated the ache of my back, the movement of the hose as I unwound and rewound the coils, allowing the water through the long yellow snake of plastic. I really must get one of those trolleys, I thought, realizing the hose had become a workout on its own. But it was good to be outside (in the shade), good to breathe the air deeply, good to clean things up a bit, good to see such direct result of my labor.

I felt grounded by the ground, by the dirt, by the soil, by the plant in the pot drinking up the water from the hose. My thoughts reminded me of Francis Etheredge, probably the most brilliant and under-appreciated Catholic poet of the century, and his garden in back and how he created a book of poems and essays from his relationship to the earth and his relationship to God the creator through the earth. An Unlikely Gardener is soon to be released, and I was honored to write the Foreword, my son Tom contributing an endorsement.

My thoughts then drifted to Tom’s love of the earth and landscaping. He too is grounded, balanced by his work, sculpting God’s garden as he once called it. The vast intricacies of life can be seen in the outdoors, whether sculpted or not, tamed or wild. We are a part of creation, and our bodies respond to the world into which we are born. In some sense we are wild creatures, or part of us remains wild, and we yearn for the conversation we have when we step outside. It is a conversation with an old friend, nature, sunlight, clouds, rain, and a conversation with the creator of all this splendor.

Perhaps it was St. Francis of Assisi (feast day last Wednesday) who tapped my shoulder this week, pointing out the birds of the air, the scuttling jack rabbit, the formal-stepping quail that cross the patio from one side to the other as if it were a great dry route across a desert, from greenery to greenery. Curious things, quail. They can fly but choose not to most of the time; instead they prance prettily in order, scuttling to keep up, groups of ten to twelve, sometimes babies, sometimes older teens ready to leave and start their own family. And so it goes. Life.

What prompted my wild excursion into the backyard? It was the pigeons who had nested on the roof, actually building nests in the chimney, covering the roof tiles with splashes of white. We worried what kind of takeover this was, and while I love to watch them fly, soaring in formation (truly an amazing wonder), we decided to take the matter in hand and hire experts to see what was what on the roof. By the end of the day, they had removed the pigeons and all calling cards, previous homes (alas), and set up some deterrents that have worked so far. I’m glad to say they still soar in our skies, lighting lightly on my patio, for a drink from the planter basin, but not for long.

There was still a necessary cleanup of the patio, and this called me into the sunlight from the shade of my house, pulled me out of my meditative reading and writing, and into the dance with the natural world.

We are curious creatures, you and I, made in the image of God Almighty. Little mortals, made immortal in his image. We sense this from a deep place within, the heart or the soul or the mind. We sense we are made for something else, and our yearning for happiness and beauty and goodness and justice is planted in this place within. Our yearning for something that is fleeting in this earthly world gives us the hints and guesses that grounds T.S. Eliot in his magnificent Four Quartets.

I don’t live on a farm as VDH does, but he’s profoundly correct. We are body and soul, and we are grounded from our flights of fancy by the real world all around us. It is a real world of matter that matters and lives and dies, crumbles to nothing, having bloomed just for us. We have little power to control the climate and its changes, but we can protect ourselves from its sharper elements, its heat and its cold, as we pretend to be groundskeepers here on planet Earth. For as I cleaned up in the backyard, and as I do the same inside keeping a house clean, I know it is a recurring endeavor, that what I have done this week will be undone next week, and certainly will need redoing again and again in the course of a year, a lifetime.

It is a dance with life, I suppose. And I’m glad to be dancing, listening and learning the tune the stars sing, to one day follow the song through the galaxies to the heavenly city of Jerusalem, to dance with our Lord of love, our creator and redeemer.

Friday was the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. I find angels to be special gifts we are given. They are messengers, guardians, and protectors. It is easy to forget that they are all around us. I firmly believe that I have my own guardian angel that prompts me, protects me, and encourages me.

We are told that Michael and his godly angels drove Lucifer and the demonic angels from Heaven, in St. John’s great vision revealed to him on the Island of Patmos:

“THERE was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.” (Revelation 12:7+, Book of Common Prayer, 252)

This is a powerful passage, one that predates Adam and Eve and their fall from grace, one that finds Lucifer in the form of a snake tempting Eve. But Mary becomes the new Eve, grinding the serpent with her foot, giving birth to the one who will overcome Lucifer by his own blood, the “blood of the Lamb.”

For now is come salvation, strength, the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ.

And so in this rich passage, we see the beginnings and the endings, so that we understand our gift of salvation in the endings, either of our earthly life or the end-times of Earth. Either way, we are welcomed by Christ into his Kingdom. We are welcomed to the great feast, the supper of the Lamb, the Heavenly table. We are invited to be a guest, to make merry with many others who have said yes to Christ, yes to his invitation.

In the mean-time, we on Earth watch the creeping and slithering of the dark angels, the demons. We see persecution of believers, persecution of faith, persecution of virtuous living and those who seek to practice the moral law given to our world in time. We see silencing and shunning, redefining truth to embrace lies, filling a vacuum that many Christians have left when they ceded the public square to a secular culture.

For Christ gave humanity entrance to the Garden of Eden and we have chosen to remain in the jungle of death. We have chosen to look the other way, passing by the wounded man on the side of the road, wanting only to be left alone. We must speak the truth, that men are men and women are women, that parents have the right to raise their children and determine their education, that abortion can only be an option when the life (not just the health) of the mother is at stake. We must call genocide by its name, and all holocausts by their deeds. We must defend the defenseless, execute our laws, respect justice meted out equally. We must respect all persons, unite and not divide, for everyone is made in the image of God.

And so I am thankful for Michael and all his Angels. I pray they give us courage and wisdom to fight the good fight, meet hate with love, and speak truth to lies.

We know how the story ends. God wins. We want to be on God’s side, to be sure. We want to be on the side of life not death. There will be an accounting.

For as my bishop of blessed memory reminded me often, all is grace.