Author Archives: Christine Sunderland

Armistice Day

Posted on November 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

The leaves have turned in our valley. Splotches of russets, golds, burgundies burst from yards and hillsides, lining lanes, dotting the landscape. On a day like today, when the dome of blue seems to shelter our land and the sun is still warm in spite of the crisp air, it nearly seems magical. Days are shorter as darkness falls early, making the time between the later sunrise and the earlier sunset more precious.

So when we drove to church through this autumn world of oranges and yellows and reds, the piercing sun upon the leaves outlining each one in my memory, I was thankful. 

I had a quiet week, forced quiet, once my back went out after reaching for something at an odd angle, once I hobbled home from the chiropractor, once I arranged my ice packs and wound tight my elastic brace. I sat gingerly in an armchair before a blazing fire and read Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve. Also in my stack was Girls on the Edge (Leonard Sax), and Paul Among the People (Sarah Ruden), among others. The first two books were for research purposes, homework for my next novel. From time to time I scanned my Kindle’s collection of poems and prose by Christina Rossetti, for I wish to include her work in my work as well. Sarah Ruden reminds us in her book on St. Paul to read Holy Scripture in the context of the cultural setting, something not often done, especially in the feminist world. 

I cancelled appointments and lived with my pain, hour to hour, pain which subsided gradually. I was given renewed admiration for those who live with pain day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. I was also forced to bracket a few days and create a mini-retreat. It made me more dependent on God. 

We are fragile creatures in a fragile world, yet live as though both (creatures and world) were stable and strong and predictable. Perhaps this delusion is a form of self-protection, for how else could we arrange our human affairs? I believe this overabundance of confidence is also a reflection of the real world to come – God’s eternity – a vision, sometimes hidden, sometimes not, that colors our imagination and longing and deep desire for beauty, truth, goodness, love. 

And so, in church today I was glad to recall Armistice Day which we celebrate officially tomorrow, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the truce was signed on the eleventh hour that ended the First World War, the “war to end all wars,” the “great war.” I was glad to give thanks for the brave men and women who fought then and who defend our country today, who protect its fragility, who shore up the shores of our land. I gave thanks for peace in our time, relative peace, having lived through Vietnam and listened to the tales of my chaplain father who served in the South Pacific in World War II. Those other wars weren’t supposed to happen after the “war to end all wars,” but happen they did. And wars continue to scar the land, the people, the world. 

My father couldn’t talk much about his wartime experiences, but we have large glossy black-and-white photos of his ship, the Phoenix, and he described once the terror of the kamikaze raids, the planes diving into the sea on either side the ship. I have his Bible, signed by General MacArthur, tucked away in my glassed-in portion of my bookcases. 

War continues, for the seed is planted deep in our hearts. Our preacher today spoke of the necessity of prayer to end wars, that only through prayer can hearts be changed, can nations’ hearts be changed, can laws that govern our land be true and just, laws passed by such renewed hearts. So today I prayed especially for humility and penitence and then, perhaps when my own heart is scrubbed clean of all ill feeling, all grudges, all resentments, all, all, all… only then can my heart be filled with wisdom to choose, only then can it be filled with God, only then can I pray for my country and its leaders, and only then pray for the world’s leaders. 

I am so thankful for the men and women who protect our beautiful country and our fragile people, our delicate democracy. I am thankful too for St. Martin of Tours who shares this feast day, November 11. Did the generals who set the date for the armistice choose St. Martin’s on purpose? I think so. They would have had a choice, and in 1918 they would have known this day was St. Martin’s Day, one of the more widely known and celebrated saints days in Europe, one said to be even trans-European. 

Martin (316-397) was a Roman soldier, a Christian, who gave half his cloak to a poor beggar who had none. He then had a dream in which Christ appeared to him saying that when he gave the cloak to the beggar he gave it to Christ himself. When Martin left military service, he took holy orders. He established a Benedictine monastery, traveled the land preaching, and became Bishop of Tours, France. 

His cloak was soon a relic housed by a cappella, a covering for the cape, and from this came our word chapel. Such a cloak came to be worn by clergy in the military, those who ministered on the battlefield and at sea, and these clergy came to be known as chaplains. Our own priest wears a cope when he celebrates the Holy Mass. My father, being a chaplain, was in this sense a descendant of St. Martin. 

The sun is setting now, the dome of blue no longer cloaking our world with its bright beauty. The darkness approaches. But we have memory and we have the saints and we have the brave men and women who protect us today. God provides these shelters, these human chapels, and I am thankful, thankful to be covered by the cloak of his incarnate love.

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On Saints and Souls and the Breath of Life

Posted on November 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

I’m working on my next novel.

In developing my three major characters, I want to hear them speak to me. So I’m having them write their life stories up to the moment of the first page of my newly created plot. I’ve collected over the last year aspects of their personalities and the crises that have formed them, and these lists of attributes and events will hopefully mold a character that rings true. 

This early stage often stuns me with its necessary intricacy (and intimacy), as I also look around me to observe friends and family more closely (watch out). For each one of us is deeply complex with infinite layers of experience, feeling, thought. I often wonder at creation itself, God forming Adam from the dust of the earth, then breathing life into him. It is, of course, the breath of life that makes Adam live, transforming the clay figure with transcendence. It is the breath of God.

No wonder developing my characters’ characters is a complex undertaking, for in this way it is holy, nearly unreachable, untouchable. At times I move through a foggy darkness, reaching out to touch the next detail, character-istic. I pray. I ask for guidance. And I listen to what the characters say to me. And what better way to listen than by reading (and writing) their own biographies? It is a fascinating exercise. 

Icons – colorful saints’ images painted against a golden background – lean against the crowded books on the shelves in my home office, shimmering in the shuttered half-light. They are a pleasant company, glowing, seeming interested in my doings, full of beauty, truth, and I know from their own biographies, full of goodness, Godliness, God.

As we celebrated All Hallows Eve (Halloween), All Saints Day, and All Souls Day this last week, I have been thinking about the layers of saints’ lives, the “Acts” recorded in the many hagiographies handed down to us through the centuries. The lives of the saints are often written with carefully chosen (or recalled) details that become enshrined, but what about the other fragments of their choices, their loves and their hates, their struggles with the everyday challenges of living with one another in a fallen world, a world not very hallowed, holy.

And I wonder about the rest of those departed, those remembered on All Souls Day, thinking perhaps the two groups merge together, that many of the Souls are Saints and the line between the two isn’t clear. I’ve known men and women who I consider to be saintly, definitely inhabiting that borderland. I spoke with several this morning as I sipped tea in the parish under-croft (no names) after church. What has brought them to this moment in their lives when they are so full of God, so full of love for all those around them? So sacrificial, so humble too. And most of all, so joyful. I simply bask in their love; I breathe it in. 

That breath of God that gave life to Adam continues to breathe life into each of us. We take it for granted. We breathe the air around us, into our bodies from outside, and we are told that it enters our lungs and provides crucial oxygen to our blood that then streams through our flesh and muscle, circulating in a tempo we call our pulse. I try and remember to pause and breathe deeply, to appreciate this simple miracle. And in this same way we breathe in God through prayer, sacrament, worship, so that He may circulate through our souls, our lives. And I must pause and remember to breathe Him in deeply too, for both are life itself.

And both kinds of breathing form us, move us towards and away, direct us, influence our choices. Body and soul, air and spirit, we are complex unions of these things. Complex and beautiful, true human beings of the created order.

We live and breathe and have our being in something of our choosing. The saints we honored on All Saints Day chose God. The souls we prayed for on All Souls Day sometimes chose God or never chose Him.

We are characters in the greatest story ever told, the story of our lives. We live and we love. We choose. We act. We move from soul-hood to saint-hood with each breath, if we remember to breathe. 

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A Stay Against Confusion

Posted on October 27, 2013 | Leave a comment

In A Stay Against Confusion, Essays on Faith and Fiction, the novelist Ron Hansen, Arts and Humanities professor at Santa Clara University, quotes the poet Robert Frost (1874-1963): 

(A poem) begins in delight and ends in wisdom, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and depends in a clarification of life – not necessarily in a great clarification… but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Our world is chaotic and confusing, and seemingly more so as we travel through time at an ever-quickening pace. Electronics have exploded our hours, shattering our days into bursts of activity, as we point and click, tap and swipe, answer and respond, text and email, moving on to the next message and messaging the next move. Rather than making our world more meaningful or organized or satisfying or even beautiful, we feel like hamsters racing on a wheel. Are we there yet? And where are we going?

Not only are we barraged by information and time demands, but our lack of common cultural assumptions with no governing philosophy has encouraged fragmented thought, opinion, and propaganda veiled as ideas. How do we choose what or who to believe?

So when words strike a chord in our hearts as true, we have a momentary stay against the confusion. A poem, or poetic language, provides this epiphany, this moment of clarity. I would add it helps that the image is beautiful as well as true, that it answers despair with hope and suffering with redemption.  We want answers to questions deep within us.

Ron Hansen describes good fiction as beginning in the natural world and flying into the supernatural, super-natural in the sense that goodness, truth, and beauty claim our hearts in this stay against confusion. We must write about the real world, with real senses, real passions, real loves and real hates. But at some point grace descends upon the battlefield of our lives and those lives we are creating. Grace is this poetic action of light in the darkness. As Christians we call this God’s grace. Others might simply call it art.

The music, the art, and the books that sing to me do just this. In a novel, the story, and above all the diction, invites me into the heart of a rose, calls me to fly with angels. I laugh and I cry from a place deep within, a place that knows these notes, recognizes a heavenly chorus. In a sense I am in love.

I have recently fallen in love with a collection of songs sung by an order of Dominican nuns. The music soars and dives and circles my ears with words and melody that enraptures, captures. It has surprised me that I could be so in love. The tunes haunt me at night and I wake mouthing the phrases; I am so very thankful for this bit of heavenly beauty. They are the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist: https://www.sistersofmary.org/ and the CD is called “Mater Eucharistiae.” You can hear a bit of the music by scrolling down to the video: https://www.sistersofmary.org/our-news/news.html. The order appears to be growing, and many of the nuns are young, part of a new Catholic renaissance. Visit them on Facebook.

The CD provides a “stay against confusion.” It corrals the chaos and conflicting demands upon my mind with its beauty. Father Malachy’s Miracle by Bruce Marshall did this too, as I tried to say in my review (http://catholicfiction.net/book-review/father-malachys-miracle/ ). Mr. Marshall, through his language and homely humor, brought me to a similar place of sanity. Also, Meriol Trevor’s Shadows and Images  (review online at http://catholicfiction.net/book-review/shadows-and-images-a-novel/) brought me into the mind and heart of John Henry Newman, an Anglo-Catholic who made the journey to Roman Catholicism. Ms. Trevor writes with this same poetic diction. I also found this kind of sanity in Susan Prudhomme’s novels, The Forest and The Wisdom of Ambrose, also reviewed on CatholicFiction.net.

I pray that my own words are painted by such grace, pulling readers into a land of truth and beauty. The reviews of my just released novel, The Magdalene Mystery, have been encouraging, the most recent by novelist Bruce Judisch (the giveaway is still on): http://brucejudisch.blogspot.com/.

Today our parish celebrated the Feast of Christ the King. It is a time when we consider the kingdom over which Christ reigns. And I have found, through faithful prayer and worship, that the kingdom is all around us. Every moment of grace, God’s action upon us, opens our eyes, invites us through the doors of his kingdom, calls us with a poetry of goodness, truth, and beauty. There are times when I feel as though I straddle the border between two kingdoms, one of earth and one of heaven, but more and more I am integrating them. More and more the kingdoms weave together to form a garment of glory, a cloak of sanity in our world of confusion. We call this cloak, incarnation. We call this garment, the sacramental life. We call this the action of grace. And we thank God for every stay against confusion.

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Coats of Many Colors

Posted on October 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

The Feast of St. Luke, October 18, often catches me by surprise. In some ways it marks the prelude to the great festival of Christmas. After St. Luke’s Day, it seems but a short journey to All Hallows Eve (Halloween) and All Saints on November 1. Once I am in November, I think of Thanksgiving which slips into the advent of Christmas, the feast of Incarnation. 

St. Luke was both evangelist and physician, and it is believed that he painted portraits of the Virgin Mary, one to be found in the basilica of Maria Maggiore in Rome.  But he will always be, to me, primarily the writer of the nativity story in the second chapter of his Gospel. We act out these words each year, or we hear them read to us, taking us from the Annunciation to Bethlehem and the stable, angels, shepherds, and kings. Children memorize these passages; they dress in colorful robes; they wear sparkle wings and golden crowns. They tell the story by wearing it. 

So when three-nearly-four-year-old Natalie bounced into the Sunday School this morning in her princess tiers of purple satin, her Halloween costume, I grinned. The color and the bounce was a bit of Christmas teasing me. The dress was a bit too big for her, and she reached for the back neckline to pull it up again and again, and then reached for the flounces to keep from tripping. When we gathered around the circle and sang I Sing a Song of the Saints of God, she joined in happily. She twirled and clapped. She growled like a fierce wild beast. The angels hovering in the doorway smiled. 

Our lesson this morning was about Joseph and his coat of many colors. The preschool version emphasizes God’s presence with Joseph as he receives his beautiful coat, loses his coat, loses his family, and regains his family, how God makes everything right as the children of Jacob (Israel) settle in Egypt. We colored and cut out a paper figure of Joseph. We colored and cut out Joseph’s coat. Joseph wore the coat when the tabs were folded neatly over his shoulders. The coats were colorful. They were beautiful. They covered Joseph’s brown sacking with a rainbow. 

I thought how the story, while immensely important as a pivotal event in Old Testament history, the settling of the Israelites in Egypt, was a wonderful metaphor for life with God. God wraps us in just such a colorful coat, cloaking us in seasons and sacraments, bright flowers and flaming candles and aromatic incense and melodic chant. Sometimes we take off our coat, for we are ashamed of its brilliance. Sometimes others (like Joseph’s brothers) are envious of the coat. Sometimes we fear we will stand out from the crowd. We want to blend in. We simply want to be loved. 

And yet the coat of many colors is our rightful inheritance, our blessing, our promise of joy. It is given to us through the Church, through the Bride of Christ, and as I followed Natalie down the south aisle after her blessing and my communion, we marveled at the colored light pouring through the stained glass windows alongside. Natalie stared, stunned by beauty, pulled by glory, her large eyes blinking, drinking it in. 

St. Paul speaks of putting on Christ, donning him like a garment, and so as we round the bend of mid-October and look to All Saints, as we consider December’s promise of Christmas and that burst of eternity in time, we know we are true temples of God, houses of incarnation. We don the coat of many colors, the wedding garment in the parable of the marriage feast. We don Christ himself in the Mass. 

Costumes are curious things. We try being someone else. And yet the garment of Christ, his Church, fits perfectly, making us more into the person we are meant to be. No longer are we left outside in the dark with brown sacking. No longer are we alone, unloved. We are clothed by God, full of his beauty, full of his love, safe from all disquietude. 

I had the honor this week to be interviewed online by the novelist Bruce Judisch (http://www.brucejudisch.blogspot.com/ ) and talk a bit about my recent novel, The Magdalene Mystery, which is, in many respects, about searching for that coat of many colors, the cloak of resurrection. It is about a quest for truth, a quest to learn what happened two thousand years ago that first Easter morning in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. A dead man came to life, donning new flesh. Just so, we know we shall be given new bodies one day, and we trust in that vision because of this historic moment. And our new coats will be glorious and as colorful as Joseph’s, one given to him by his father as well. 

But here and now in earthly time, in the mean-time, we have our wedding garments; we are clothed anew to become who we are meant to be. We enter the pageant of Incarnation described so vividly and poetically by St. Luke. We say, as Mary said to Angel Gabriel, “Be it unto me according to thy word.” We hear the angels sing and we follow the star to Bethlehem. We sing and we dance the liturgy of the Bride of Christ each Sunday in our parish churches. We marvel at the beauty of God as we reach to touch the risen Christ, just as Mary Magdalene did so long ago.

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Passages

Posted on October 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

It has been a season of passages for my ever-widening circle of friends, and since we love one another, I have walked alongside them, mourning and celebrating with them. 

The deaths – those passages from this world to the next – mark time and remind us of time. We don’t have steeple bells in our neighborhoods anymore, but the tolling is heard just the same. And in the Church, these passages are not just mourned, but are framed by births, Baptisms, Confirmations, and weddings. The dry grass of our elders is replaced by new growth, greening the soil of our parish. New life replaces the old; bells ring for the new just as they toll for the old. 

As Christians, we believe that death is a temporary parting. Something greater awaits us, something glorious, and one day we shall see those we love and who love us. Yet we remain here, rooted in time and earth, housed in flesh not yet transformed to glory. 

In this time we have been given, we have one another to cherish, and as I gazed upon the newlyweds in our church undercroft this morning, I shared in their joy. Their eyes were full of one another, as though each had sunk into the other’s heart and desired nothing more. Earlier we had worshiped together as a family. We had sung together, prayed together, and with one voice boldly proclaimed our beliefs together. We had taken part in the Eucharistic supper of the Lamb.

Baptism, our preacher explained, was our invitation to this holy supper, this wedding feast of the Christ and his bride, the Church. We are baptized near the entrance, for this is the beginning of our path. We enter the Church through Baptism and are invited to journey in time to the altar table. We reply to this invitation in Holy Confirmation. We say yes, and now we don our wedding garment – our spirit of penitence and worship – to take a seat at the festival table, to take part in the great celebration, the Eucharistic feast. 

So the Bride of Christ becomes the Family of God, as God enters each of us, and we are linked with one another in a deeply satisfying and sacramental way. We cherish one another and we partake, take part, in one another’s joys and sorrows. The newlyweds I congratulated this morning hopefully will be blessed with children, the incarnation of their love. So too, our Family of God shall share this blessing with them; we shall welcome each child through the open doors of our parish church. We shall baptize them and through water and spirit shall invite them on the journey to the altar, to their Confirmation, to their taking part in the wedding feast of the Lamb at the Eucharistic table.

We live in a dark and nihilistic age. And so, it seems to me, that the light within the Church shines even brighter, in contrast. But each of us must accept the invitation to enter the light, so that we may truly love one another, so that we may fully see the path ahead, the choices we will  need to make along the way. We must don the wedding garments of Baptism and Confirmation. We must wear the robe of penitence and sing the songs of praise, as we mourn and we celebrate our sisters and our brothers.

We have been invited to love, to share incarnation on earth, to journey with one another, to ring the chimes and toll the bells as we pass through these remarkable and holy passages of life.

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Friends

Posted on October 6, 2013 | 1 comment

I am often struck by how unique each of one of us is, and the miracle of this truth occurring again and again and again…. into infinity. 

It is like the prism of color we find in light, the colors that aren’t actually colors, but merging into those on either side. Where is green? Where is red? Where is blue? And yet every shade is there, to an infinite degree. It is like the perfect note soaring into a blend with other perfect notes in a string quartet, notes creating melody creating song, a song that echoes in your minutes and hours and days. It is like beauty, this unique person in a unique body. 

And so when I gaze at my friends, ordinary folks chatting around tables and milling in our undercroft after church I am often stunned by the glory of God’s creative power. I heard in a sermon once that each person is like a universe with its own planets and suns and moons revolving around one another. And yet the universes come together at times to form society, to gather in gatherings, to befriend in friendship. 

Friendship, our preacher said today, is something one works on. It is also a key and valued component of a good marriage. In friendship we look after one another, we sacrifice for one another, we celebrate and mourn with one another. We are not alone when we have friends, and to have friends one must be a friend, one must be-friend.

In our Gospel reading today Christ heals the man with palsy, who is dropped through the roof on a pallet into the crowd. His friends organized this operation, having faith that the Galilean prophet would heal their sick friend. Somehow, they open up the roof of the house and lower him in. They have faith. 

They have faith that the Prophet will respect their friend’s presence, lying on the pallet. They know that Christ will see this man as beloved and unique. They know that Christ will, in effect, see him. They are right.

Christ does see him. He sees inside of him, all of him, every shadowy corner. He says, Your sins are forgiven. He sees the man fully for who he is, good and bad. He loves him. He redeems him.

I have a number of friends who are crippled, or palsied, or maimed in some way. For that matter, everyone I know is maimed in some way, be it spiritual or physical, including myself. Yet the love of God sees us and holds us close, each of us. For we are created in his image, unique and miraculous beings placed in our moment in time. And we are given the power to love as he loves, respecting and cherishing all human life, from the womb to the grave.

I have been watching the video, War and Remembrance, a TV drama which reenacts the horrible holocaust of World War II. Here we see individuals who did not respect human life, who did not cherish each and every person created by God. It is a chilling reminder of a slippery slope.

To say we are part of the human race is not enough. We are much more than that. We are brothers and sisters, befriended and cherished by God Almighty, and we go through our time on earth breathing his breath, the power of his Holy Spirit.

My sister, the poet Barbara Budrovich, sent me one of her delightful poems, which, while this one is about punctuation, it is also about friendship, for our language reflects our deepest desires:

Who Am I?
Barbara Budrovich
 
I’m Comma’s identical twin.
 
With s by my side
I make others multiply.
 
Like our Ellipses
I stand for the missing.
 
I dwell in the sky
And bring–to the lonely–companions
Worth holding.

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On Angels and Devils and Holy Confirmation

Posted on September 29, 2013 | 1 comment

I recently finished a book called Raising a Modern Day Knight: A Father’s Role in Guiding His Son to Authentic Manhood, by Robert Lewis. One of the many valuable suggestions in this unique and compelling work is the creation of ceremonies that celebrate stages of maturity. These ceremonies are not merely for father and son, but for communities of fathers and sons. They serve to give the young man self-knowledge, ideals, and support.

Ceremonies marking rites of passages are not new to mankind, but with the disintegration of American culture, ceremonies are often overlooked. It seems that there was a time when the many cultures that formed our union melted into the pot we called America. Not so much anymore, as we shift to encourage multi-culturism, which whether intended or not, affirms division rather than union. It is true that our many ethnic threads strengthen us and richly texture our nation. But being a naturally inclusive and friendly people, we have chosen a celebration of division, so that what defines America – both internationally and domestically – has become increasingly difficult to state.

This morning when we celebrated Holy Confirmation in our parish church, I was thankful for this moment of definition. The bishop laid his hands upon the heads of the confirmands as they knelt on the steps leading to the altar. As Anglican-Catholics, we believe that Confirmation marks publicly the moment when children become adults in the Church. For adult confirmands it marks a new adulthood in the Church, as they witness to their beliefs. The younger confirmands are asked to confirm the promises that were made for them as infants in Baptism. They are of an age of reason, no longer children, and they can promise with understanding. “Do  you promise to follow Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour?” the bishop asks them. The bishop then prays that they be strengthened by the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and that they be given the Holy Ghost’s gifts of grace: wisdom and understanding, counsel and ghostly strength, knowledge and godliness, and lastly, holy fear.

They will need these knightly gifts, I thought, as they live out their faith in a world often hostile to Christianity. They shall don the shield of faith and the armor of righteousness, and the Church, the Body of Christ, shall comfort and nurture them throughout their lives, through marriage, childbirth, sickness, even in their dying. God shall never abandon them. As a shepherd he shall lead them beside still waters. He shall restore their souls.

It was particularly fitting, on this bright Sunday morning as September gives way to October, that we celebrated these Confirmations, these confirmings of faith and receivings of the Holy Ghost, on the feast day of St. Michael and All Angels. As the lector read from Holy Scripture, we heard the account of the great war in heaven when Michael the Archangel threw out Lucifer and his angels. “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 they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony… 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+)

Angels and devils are not common beliefs today. We might speak of angels whimsically as though reliving the fairy tales of our childhood. But devils are definitely not the stuff of acceptable conversation. Yet Scripture affirms their existence. Demons are said to be angels – pure spirits created separately from mankind – who have rebelled against God and now are given a span of time to scurry among the people of the earth, wreaking havoc where they can and undoing the good that is being done.

The good angels, however, are with us too, and we can call upon them. They are all around us, if welcome. And Confirmation – that affirmation of faith in Jesus Christ – welcomes them. These angels help us to be modern-day knights. They guide us on our journey on earth as we head to heaven. At times, I believe, they protect us from bodily harm. Dear friends of mine recently survived a rear-end collision, emerging from their totaled sedan shaken but, it turns out, having suffered only minor wounds. Angels were there, I am sure, as the drunk driver slammed into their car, stopped at a red light. Angels took some of the brunt of that crash.

So with ceremony and prayer and song, with ritual and the dance of the Eucharist, we re-affirm who we are, what we are, where we are going. We re-affirm to whom we belong, and with the company of the angelic host we are given our own wings to heaven. With the gifts of the Holy Ghost we are embraced by the Body of Christ.

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On Flying Dancing Halls

Posted on September 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

It is a glorious and satisfying thing to discover an author who speaks to you in new and miraculous ways, an author sending you on a mission to read everything he has ever written. I have discovered authors like this over the years, with Lewis, Tolkien, Austen, Dostoevsky. I went through a Sherlock Holmes period, a Dickens period, and as a child I read every Nancy Drew that the library offered. On the other hand, I did not feel this way about Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sartre, Camus, Woolf, Ibsen, or Henry James. I fear I gave Shakespeare no more attention than was required in my Literature major, having to work too hard on his poetic diction. These authors come to mind now, but there were dozens more – some who invited me on another leg of the journey, and some who didn’t.

So when I received the small used volume titled Father Malachy’s Miracle by Bruce Marshall in the mail, the book having been transported through the air from London, I opened it not knowing if it would challenge or change me. I’ve read it twice now, since I will be reviewing it on CatholicFiction.net. I’m sure I shall read it many more times, and be warned that I am cornering the market on any other books by Mr. Marshall that I can find. Alas, his books are out of print, something I hope to remedy one day.

But getting back to Father Malachy and his miracle, for he has become part of the peopled universe in my giddy brain. The book is, as the title implies, about miracles. The writing is dense, poetic, with rhythmically long sentences that flow like a sweet river to a welcoming sea. The metaphors stun me with their humorous and loving descriptions of ordinary people. God shines brightly through this lay-Catholic writer. When I am not sighing with authorial envy or jotting down ideas to use one day, I am nodding my head in agreement (aha, finally someone has written exactly what I think, and yes, that’s exactly how it is or was…), or I am laughing out loud.

One of many delicious passages is the author’s description of the Bishop’s Bad Brother (the “Bee Bee Bee”), a man of the world who enjoys dancing halls and wine bars:

The Bee Bee Bee was a simple soul who lived, as do many souls less simple than he, as though his sense perceptions were the only realities and as though arm-chairs and pork pies and pretty girls were exclusively and finally arm-chairs, pork pies and pretty girls.

We learn he has little interest in scientific mysteries or theological mysteries or angels dancing on the head of a pin. He lives for the moment, but he is a mystic:

Like most of his kind, he would have scorned the name of mystic even if he had known precisely what it meant. And yet that was what he was: a mystic, an inverted mystic who found in beer and dancing instructresses what tired business men found in golf, and worldly young women in lovemaking, and monks and nuns in prayer and contemplation: an escape from his own personality or rather a taking of it and plunging it in something bigger than and exterior to itself. 

An inverted mystic. He escapes from his own personality by plunging it in something bigger. I have often thought we are all mystics in this sense, that everyone has a desire to lose themselves in something or someone. We say we fall in love, we say we are swept away by a movie or a book. We want to jump on bandwagons because they are large and powerful and tell us what to think. When we say we are swept up or swept away we sigh with pleasure simply in the recollection. We plunge into work or play or fashion, fads, or Facebook. We lose ourselves in nature – beneath giant redwoods, beside a crashing sea, within a rose garden. We soar outside of time, killing it.

Perhaps this urge to lose ourselves in something bigger is an innate desire for God, a desire for our Creator, a desire for our Heavenly Father who calls us home, invites us to his table again and again, back to himself. I often think the Church is the messenger, the host of that invitation, or the invitation itself, to dine with God, dine on God in the Eucharist. Through his Church, God welcomes us into his own dancing hall, with his own family to love, sisters and brothers who return that love. We are brought inside his circle, made members of the Body of Christ, and we know we are  home, that we be-long, that we are longed-for.

We are mystics and we have found our heart’s desire. And oddly enough, in finding our Creator, we rediscover our true selves. For who knows me better than the one who made me?

The idea of the inverted mystic was one small miracle in this little book of miracles, a sweet novel set in Scotland in the 1930’s in which a dancing hall flies through the air (by power of the Holy Ghost) to land on an island called the Bass Rock. And as we consider the flying dancing hall we also consider other movements of electrons in our world, changes made to bread and wine, resurrections not governed by scientific theory, events we call supernatural. We consider miracles and the Creator of our world, the one who has power to change that world’s matter.

I must end this here, for I have just opened a small brown paper parcel containing Bruce Marshall’s The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith. The invitation is loud and compelling.

There may be echoes of Father Malachy in my next novel about a deserted chapel in a park in a suburb of San Francisco. Father Malachy, or his twin brother, may fly from Scotland and into my pages, flit across a great sea, and land in the present. But such is the stuff of miracles.

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Fires and Floods

Posted on September 15, 2013 | 1 comment

We live at the foot of Mount Diablo, “Devil’s Mountain,” so when billowing smoke rose beyond the peak this last Sunday, we watched, waited, and checked Internet updates regularly. The fire raged on the other side, swallowing the dry brown grass, but only 10% of the fire was contained as darkness fell. It continued to grow, it seemed, far faster than it was being contained. By Monday the area burned had doubled to nearly 4,000 acres, and the containment figure was 20%. New crews arrived from distant parts, and planes and choppers flew overhead, dropping, we knew, waters to kill the inferno.

Horses were rescued, folks evacuated. Fortunately, no lives or homes were lost. And the fires never reached our home, never crested the mountain.

Not so fortunate were residents in Colorado along the Front Range this last week. As my son and his family were evacuated from their home in North Boulder by the National Guard, they watched a power station explode in the darkness. Roads were collapsing, bridges swept away. My son and family were safe, and the house too, on higher ground, is still there, at least so we hope and pray.

Fires and floods. No earthquakes yet, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. Mother nature isn’t always a nice or predictable mother. She can be ugly, brutal, uncaring. No matter what the Romantic poets thought about flowers and sunsets and ruins, nature is heartless. We build houses to protect ourselves from her wrath. We invent ways to light the dark when the sun no longer shines. We lay miles of underground pipe to allow easy access to fresh water that will miraculously arrive through faucets into sinks, tubs, and showers. We construct elaborate plumbing systems and dig septic tanks, so that with the push of a handle all uncleanness is flushed down a drain. Out of sight, out of mind.

We have watched other parts of the country suffer floods and fires and tornadoes, but this week, at least in California and Colorado, we experienced nature’s wrath firsthand. It is not the first time, for there have been floods and fires here before. But we are reminded again that we are little creatures. We think we are big, but we are small. In the twinkling of an eye, all can be burned, all can be flooded.

The fires have been doused here on Devil’s Mountain. But the folks in Colorado are not yet “out of the woods,” to use an apt expression. When we want to say we are safe, we say we are “out of the woods,” we are out of that natural wild world where danger and darkness lurk, where floods and fires threaten.

So this morning in church, as I fell on my knees before the sturdy altar and its sacred tabernacle, I gave thanks to God for God himself. There is nothing certain in this world but God and his great love for us in the midst of all this uncertainty. This certainty – this rock-solid faith – is the foundation of the Church, one not built on sand, one not swept away by raging waters or wild fires. And how do we know this? Because of a man who lived two thousand years ago who said he was God, and proved it by walking on water, healing the lame, giving sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, and life to the dead. And finally, conquering death with his own resurrection.

In today’s Scripture reading we listened to one of my favorite passages of Saint Paul:

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.  (Ephesians 3:14-19)

Rooted and grounded in love. Indeed, we are so rooted and grounded in God’s love that the natural world in which we find ourselves will not have the last say, will not, in the end, conquer.

The breadth, and length, and depth, and height… of the love of Christ… which passeth knowledge… filled with all the fullness of God. These are words of hope, words of certainty, rock-solid.

These are words that are super-natural, other-worldly, and of this I am glad.

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Shattering Time

Posted on September 8, 2013 | 1 comment

An elderly member of our parish journeyed to Heaven this last week. Her photograph was in our church’s narthex this morning – bright eyes, red hair, full of life.  It had been many years since I had seen her like that, for she had been weakening for a good and Godly while, and I smiled in recognition. She was younger then. (So was I.) 

I carried her image in my mind as I entered the nave and took a seat alongside my husband in the long oak pew. Now, thinking over the morning and my friend’s celestial journey, I am grateful for this great ark of the church that cradles each of us in this world. We the faithful sit in the nave, a word derived from the Latin navis or ship, and our own church is shaped rather like a boat, this one sailing the seas of Oakland, California. One day I too, like my friend, will journey out of this world and into the next, but for the time being I am protected by the Church. And not only protected, but in this womb I am fed by the Church, until reborn in Heaven. And what is the heavenly food that I feed upon in this womb of an ark?  I feed upon prayer, worship, scripture, and God himself in the Mass.

Today was fittingly a day of rebirth in our parish, celebrating the opening of the new Sunday School year with our annual Ice Cream Social. The children trooped up the red-carpeted aisle for their blessings and trooped out to their class. Soon they skipped downstairs for ice cream and home-made hot fudge. There were many smiles as we indulged, and more smiles as we were quizzed on Bible story facts and figures. There were prizes too.

Our children represent a new generation being raised up that replaces those, like my friend, that have journeyed on. So we teach (and show) our children the love of God. We tell them the stories of his great acts among us, those great acts that led up to the Incarnation in Nazareth two thousand years ago and those great acts since the Incarnation. Our preacher said today (and now I paraphrase, reaching into my rough memory) that the Cross intersected time and space; the Cross made past and future all new, re-newed. It shattered time. And I saw in my mind as he spoke the fissures of an earthquake crackling and cracking through time and space, in every direction. The Cross and the Resurrection changed everything. The Cross vanquished time by vanquishing death, giving us eternity.

We teach our children these stories of before the Cross (B.C., Before Christ) and after the Cross (A.D., After Christ, the Year of Our Lord). We call these eras Old Testament and New Testament (literally the old and the new testimony or witness or history) and we cradle our children in the ark of these stories, each account true in different degrees and ways, so that the new generation may know and be protected by the love of God. We teach our children God’s commandments so that they may experience God’s loving forgiveness. We teach them to sing and celebrate and offer themselves to God in the great liturgy of the Mass, so that they may receive God back in the bread and wine, and so be inspired, full of the Spirit, as they travel through the hours and days of the week ahead.

We cradle our children in the Church, just as my friend had been nourished and cradled by the Church in her earthly life. Through the Church God holds us close to him, and we sail on the waves of our sea of earthly time, the way clearly charted and the destination in sight. The bow of our ark cleaves cleanly through the waters, whether stormy or still, our ship directed and driven by the words of consecration before the altar within, where in the glorious song and silence of each Sunday morning (and sometimes during the week), God’s priest re-members (pulls into the present) the action of the Cross and  shatters time in the mystery of the Mass.

Dear Dwan, may your soul rest in peace and may light perpetual shine upon you.

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