Christine Sunderland

Today is Palm Sunday, a major festival in the Christian year. It recalls and celebrates Christ’s humble and glorious entrance into Jerusalem on a colt, to begin the week leading to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. As Jesus entered the gates of the city, the “multitudes” waved palms in greeting. They spread their garments and branches before him, to honor him. They expected an earthly king but were given a suffering savior.

Just so, all creation is sacramentally intertwined with the story of birth, death, and resurrection. As Christian writers we do the same: we create living sacraments called books. Our books contain pages that contain words, outward and visible signs of inner and spiritual graces. Sacraments make the invisible visible, revealing God to man, Creator to creation, linking us. Our linked and inked words on paper or screen enliven people and places and events, for they are realized in our imaginations, making them visible.

Keeping these miraculous truths in mind, we infuse our earthy words with heaven. We raise a Jacob’s ladder for our readers to climb, so that they experience God in our pages, with settings mirroring heavenly truths. In a sense, each rung the reader climbs is a chapter leading to truth about Man and God.

And thus, while the actions of my characters inform the plot – a spiritual struggle leading to a climax and resolution, hope-full of grace – the places in which they find themselves reflect bits of heaven too. The details of the natural world are vividly portrayed in their drama and beauty, reflecting light or darkness, dawn or twilight. Leaves shimmer, paths beckon, thunder rumbles, lightning strikes, waters pour from cliffs and the heavens. We smell and see, touch and taste, and hear a melody from afar, just as Mary Magdalene did on that first Easter morning as she ran to the tomb, bearing sweet oils to anoint her Lord’s body.

Who was Mary Magdalene? I recently signed a contract with En Route Books and Media to re-issue one of my out-of-print titles, The Magdalene Mystery, originally published by OakTara in 2013. The story involves a young woman, Kelly Roberts, who searches for the historical Mary Magdalene on a quest devised by Kelly’s late godfather, a bequest meant to pull her deeper into her faith through first-century history and Gospel accounts. What did Mary Magdalene see on that first Easter morning? How do we know these accounts are true? How do we know history is true, especially claims of resurrection from the dead? Are there true reasons to believe?

My characters explore these questions in a journey threaded with suspense and intrigue. They set out for Rome, where they search for clues in basilicas, going back in time to early manuscripts and ancient cloisters. They begin to piece together the puzzle of perception, pulling the past into the present, so that it touches our hearts and minds today. Just so, the present reaches to the past to make this happen. This touching and linking reflects our own reaching to touch Christ and be made whole, just as it reflects his reaching to us as the Good Shepherd.

The second half of the novel is set in southern Provence, with visits to Marseille, Saint Maximin, and the Sainte Baume Sanctuary. The great Sainte Baume massif which straddles the coastline is home to a grotto where it is said Mary Magdalene spent her last days. The grotto is a sacramental setting, for a chapel has been created in the cave, with dripping rock walls embracing altar and pews and flaming candles. The natural world has been tamed by the spiritual, just as man tames passion with spirit, body with soul.

There is a path that leads to the La Sainte Baume grotto, about a forty-minute walk through the forest. It has become a pilgrimage for many. A pathway is also a sacramental setting, for it reflects our own journey through life, from birth to death and new life in Christ. We journey in time, reaching to touch eternity.

Sacramental settings help the author to invite the holy among us. We reach for heaven, rooted on earth. The reader glimpses the created order, our place in it, and God’s actions among us. The Cross, rooted in earth, touches heaven. The horizontal beam embraces mankind. We reach for the Cross as Christ reaches for us.

The eternal shafts its light upon earth, streaming through windows onto stone altars, and our readers reach, like the Magdalene, for the pouring light, to see the risen Christ in the garden. In our pages our readers wave palms and sing hosannas. They too can join the entry into Jerusalem. They too can step through the gates of the holy city. They too can sing, “Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.” (Matthew 21:9, KJV)

Many Threads Makes a Strong Cord

Review of The Magdalene Mystery by Christine Sunderland, forthcoming from St. Louis, MO: En Route Books and Media, 2022.

Reviewed by Francis Etheredge, April 5, 2022

While the following biblical text is about the danger of encountering a threatening individual alone or, more positively, the benefit of doing so in the company of others, ‘A threefold cord is not quickly broken’ (Eccles 4: 12), it can nevertheless apply at a number of levels to The Magdalene Mystery by Christine Sunderland.

A story, then, that weaves the vulnerable, whether layman or woman, the scholarly, whether honest or unscrupulous, those that follow, whether helpfully or drawn in to doing harm, with an almost liturgical recitation of the Christian Creed as the story progresses through numerous, intriguingly interconnected places and people – is advancing the biblical and streetwise wisdom of not “travelling” alone – but choosing your company well! Indeed, in what can be an anonymous and easily disguised forum for abuse of various kinds, the internet itself needs that open and companionable use to protect even those who are using it to do good; and, again, combating misuse is more about openness and collaboration than the “lone ranger” mentality so advocated in fiction generally.

The book takes us through a series of introductions, indicating each person’s complexity but not necessarily telling all until there is an unexpected twist which takes us into how the dreadful past reaches into the present – just as the magnificent and holy splendour of those who have gone before us can still encourage, inspire and even enable us to hope beyond our debilitating fears. The characters, then, are enthralling and varied people, as well as “unwanted” – not unwanted because of being rejected but because of being unwilling to be drawn out of the heart’s unholy preoccupations. Indeed, it is at once the challenge of the novelist to draw close to the heart of the character but, even where necessary, not to be drawn too far into the details of what does not need to be described; Christine Sunderland, then, does come uncomfortably close to her nemesis but, at the same time, avoids turning too far down the drain.

On the one hand, Jesus Christ said: ‘you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he’ (John 8: 24). On the other hand, St. John Vianney, hearing the desperate plea of a woman’s prayer about the outcome of her husband’s suicide, answered that “I tell you he is saved. He is in Purgatory, and you must pray for him. Between the parapet of the bridge and the water he had time to make an act of contrition” (p. 122 of Ralph Weimann’s, Bioethical Challenges at the end of Life). The conflict between good and evil, at times played out within a character as between characters yet raises a good number of questions. Does revenge blind? Does escaping detection isolate a person even when they seem to be surrounded by others? Are there limits to the possibility of repentance such that, in the time it takes to die, would it be repugnant, impractical or even implausible to let a person reject their own wrongdoing? What if we consider a person from the point of view of God – does the figure of Mary Magdalene, the forgiven, freed and generous woman of the Gospel, raise the possibility of a different outcome beyond what we inevitably think a person deserves?

Even if, in the course of the book, there are dominating events there is also a golden thread which both entails being led to make discoveries, whether of evidence, personal culpability or faith or their interrelationship with one another, which lights somewhat like a faith flare-trail, taking us out of danger but still requiring our active participation in recognizing where we are at any particular moment and, just as importantly, where we are being led. But perhaps the danger we face is not just a consequence of our own singular, sinful ways, but the possibility of a “victim” mentality “justifying” any kind of action – because of what was done to us. Or, conversely, hiding ourselves so successfully that we do not realize that we are degenerating, somewhat like a living corpse, precisely because what is so well hidden is no longer in the fresh air! Alternatively, drawing on both faith and reason, reason and faith, we can begin to see the evidence of the need for faith and facts upon which faith is founded and, as they come together, see more and more clearly the answer to which they both point. Even so, is the journey of faith through the Apostle’s Creed too simple an account of meeting salvation in Jesus Christ? Or, alternatively, is it a beginning which, like the life of Mary Magdalene, can go to unknown depths of beauty’s radiance? What about evangelization, announcing the Good News that Jesus Christ is our Saviour and Lord of all that afflicts us? But does it always have to be a preacher that announces the love of God to us – cannot it be in that intimate, interior dialogue between God and each one of us that benefits, as well, from the word of witness from those to whom He has drawn close, that that closeness may help others come close to Him?

In between the diverse elements of the book so far, there is also a dialogue about the value of research and the university as an actual place of learning; indeed, if there are fake trails so there are also fact-finding trails too, which may not exactly coincide with “institutional learning” but may be more about the raw school of investigative trails through the past’s presence among us. On the one hand, however, it could be argued that good, principled research will find its way into the academic halls of residence and influence those who can benefit from that; but, on the other hand, has the novel become a way of arguing in the marketplace, like the philosophers of old, to advance a reformation of learning to a wider audience? Is the very presence of the Catholic Church as an arbiter of good practice, a haven for the learned who have come to love God and their fellow human beings, and a sanctuary for those who need it, a place too perfect in view of the reality of human sinfulness? But, again, is the living inheritance of Mary Magdalene’s past a reproach, as it were, that the healing of Christ is to be sought more than the perfection of appearances; indeed, is she a permanent reminder that Christ came for those that need the doctor (cf. Mark 2: 17) – not those who are so unable to recognize their own reality that they cannot see the need to seek Him?

Returning to the theme of threads, with which this review began, there are several story threads that make a thoroughly woven account on a variety of different levels and, just as with the knotted back of a piece of embroidery, we do not see the whole clearly until turning over the last page and getting, as it were, the beauty of the whole design! A richly rewarding read from a closely observing writer!

Francis Etheredge, Catholic husband, father of 11, 3 of whom he hopes are  in heaven, author of 12 books on Amazon 2 more due in 2022: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Francis-Etheredge/s?rh=n%3A266239%2Cp_27%3AFrancis+Etheredge

My late Bishop Morse of blessed memory often said that “Passion” in the context of Passion Sunday is the combination of love and suffering. The root is pati (Latin), meaning suffering or enduring. It is curious that today’s meaning retained the idea of love that is found in the Passion of Christ. The lives of the early Christian martyrs were called passio. In the Middle Ages there were Passion Plays depicting these last two weeks of Jesus’ sufferings before his crucifixion. So Christ suffered out of love for us, and this abundant love is good to recall as we enter today the Way of the Cross, leading to Palm Sunday and Holy Week and Easter.

Christianity infuses the sufferings we experience with love, giving them meaning and purpose. As Christians we offer our sufferings to Our Lord to be one with his own on Good Friday. Our fallen world is full of suffering. If you live long enough you will see it all around you and will most likely experience it yourself. My bishop also often said that to love is to suffer. While at first that seemed strange to me (I was too young to understand), I now sense what he meant. For true love, both brotherly and marital, is the sacrifice of self for another’s good. When we give to our brothers and sisters a portion of our worldly possessions through tithing or time or charity, we do so at a sacrifice to ourselves. If we don’t experience this, we aren’t giving (loving) enough. (And that was another saying of Bishop Morse, “I always confess that I have not loved enough.”)

We are told by the Church to “offer it up.” Offer our pain to Christ in the moment, and he redeems it. I have found this to be true again and again.

There are times when we are betrayed just as Our Lord was betrayed by one of his disciples, and even ironically with a kiss. It is a double suffering, it seems, when a friend or loved one betrays your trust in them. When they gossip about you or even slander you. I try and watch my tongue (funny phrase) and not be guilty of this easy sin as often as I am tempted. When betrayal occurs by a clergyman, be they pastor, deacon, priest, or bishop as has happened since beginnings of the Church, the suffering is acute. I understand the pain of those who have come forward to testify past sexual abuse by clergymen, for the trust placed in them is often God-like, absolute, and the abuse of this trust is as bad as the actual abuse if not worse. Often, these victims never darken the door of a church again and live lives of silent and bitter judgment. They have been twice maimed. And such betrayal is a betrayal of the entire Body of Christ as well.

Someone once said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Teachers and clergy and those in elected office, given a forum of adoration, are often tempted to corruption. Somehow they think it is their due right. They are proud and think they are invulnerable, above the law of both God and man. I have known bishops who were saints (Bishop Morse of blessed memory above) and others who were something far less, for these latter betrayed the entire Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, the Church.

Mankind is a fallen race, yet even in the fallenness, owns this great expectation to be perfect.

This dichotomy – our dark souls and our bright ideals – is redeemed on the Cross of Christ. We have good reason to believe in Jesus Christ and his resurrection from the dead. We have good reason to believe in a loving and living God. For the demands of perfection we place upon others and ourselves to a lesser extent are the living presence of something divine, something super-human, supernatural. Where did we get this strange idea of how we should be? When we live in a manner reflecting how we should not be?

Betrayal. Our Lord will be betrayed. We know the story well. And so I look into my own heart. How have I betrayed him? But he gives me a way out – confession, repentance, and absolution through his Church. The Good Shepherd brings me back into the fold, calling my name. He finds me wandering on a cliff-face, lost, so near the edge, and he carries me home on his shoulders. If I suffer, he suffers with me. He is good, and he is a shepherd. He loves us. But we must repent.

Our world is burning, and with it Western Civilization, and with the collapse of the West, the threat to religious freedom becomes real.

In the meantime, we worship in church as often as we can, so that we may have the Word imprinted deep in our hearts, that we may come to see what is truth and what is a lie, so that we may be true to who we are created to be and become. We receive the Real Presence of Christ into our bodies so that our sick souls may be healed, then clothed in his bright holiness, so that we may love as we are meant to love.

Each time, we leave the church renewed. We are able now, with this nourishing supper never to be our last, to re-enter the world of passion, of suffering love. 

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

The Prayerful Kiss, A Collection of Prose and Poetry by Francis Etheredge (St. Louis, MO: EnRoute Books and Media, 2019, 148 pp)

Reviewed by Christine Sunderland

The title of this stunning collection of prose and poetry, The Prayerful Kiss, references Psalm 139 which begins, “O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me” (KJV), exploring God’s creation of man. And so, in his first meditation, Francis Etheredge asks, “When does conception begin?” Does it begin with a kiss, a prayerful, intentional kiss, a kiss that is open to life in the context of marriage?

Mr. Etheredge has gifted us with a profound and touching collection of paired meditations and poems. Drawing on his own life of searching for meaning, searching for vocation, and searching for God (sometimes without knowing it), the words ring true, seeded in the pain and joy of his own fallen humanity.

He travels the humble road from sinner to saved. His anguish is tangible. He confesses, echoing Saint Augustine, that he has not always accepted life, not welcomed the unborn he has fathered, growing in the womb:

“But then the child was aborted. Whatever was half-thought about the existence of a beginning, an initial moment of animation, the various possibilities of our lives, the pain of discovering that that child’s life has been abruptly, terribly ended, was a pain as uninvited and prolonged as the joy had been brief and brilliant. Thirty years on, however, this child is as present to me as every other child; and, even if I cannot explain it, I am conscious of a fatherhood that I cannot forget.” (50)

His fear of commitment to vocation and marriage is finally overcome by an enlivened faith, overcome by the living Christ in his life. He has dodged and hedged and turned away from the choices of life – marriage, career, priesthood – until, at the age of forty, he sees that God the Creator can re-create him, give him a new beginning. He finally hears and obeys Our Lord’s words, go and sin no more.

With God directing him he discovers his vocation. He commits to marriage and being open to life, to welcoming the children conceived in marriage. He trusts God and can now obey him, for he sees there is no other way. He will not fear suffering; he will not fear the unknown. He is reborn to a life of life.

The poems and meditations begin to reflect this new life of family and children. Some are painful to read because they are so real. “Losing Her” speaks of his young daughter being led away by a stranger in a market, but a prayer prompts him to look to the checkout stand and call her name: “First a fruitlessly nervous first call,/ barely audible,/ and then a second,/ louder,/ more blasting naming of my child/ which unlocks the hand/ leading her away/ to let her return and stay.” (64)

“Freezing” describes the horror of embryos frozen for research in this brave new world of genetics challenged by bioethics: “Freezing/ is indescribably stopping a beginning:/ a beginning begun in the outward mixing of what/ God personalized through recognizing/ His own work in the unnatural handling of human ‘potters’.”  (65)

Francis Etheredge is finally able to say he has been given grace to start again:

“This poor man called and the Lord heard him (Psalm 34:6); and, after over twenty years of marriage, those words have not ceased to have their meaning but, rather, have grown roots in the very depths of my being.” (85)

And as for vocation, he decides he must write to explore “the myriad and challenging questions” of life but also to “wake up to the need of others to be able to read what helps to be written.” (90) Why write? Write for both writer and reader, he says.

He then considers writing and the nature of words and the Word of the ultimate Creator: “Writing is like finding a word,/ His word, while unsplitting,/ making one word in all that exists:/ giving the reason/ faith finds in science/ the image of itself.” (96)  He considers Christ and His Church, the grace of God turning his inwardness outward and giving him faith.

And so his faith is “enfleshed” in this moment of belief. His heart was locked, just as the doors in the upper room after the resurrection were locked. But Christ entered, bringing life: “Thus breath will enter you and cause the ‘bones’ to ‘live,’ receive ‘sinews,’ flesh and skin, ‘and you shall know that I am the Lord.’”(Ezekiel 37:5-6)

The profound themes of life and death and grace not only carried notes of Saint Augustine, but also the rhythms and pace of T.S. Eliot. There is a profound seriousness of purpose, a dark night of the soul in an unbelieving world, redeemed by the bright dawn of Christ.

Not only do I thankfully recommend The Prayerful Kiss by Francis Etheredge, but I believe it should be a part of every English Department’s studies. I’m looking forward to the second offering in this trilogy, Honest Rust and Gold, and the third, Within Reach of You (En Route Books and Media, 2020, 2021 respectively), hopefully to be reviewed on this site.

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: visit  Amazon UK  or  Amazon U.S.

Christine Sunderland 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, the most recent being Angel Mountain (Wipf and Stock, 2020). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and a white longhair cat named Angel.