Christine Sunderland

“BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.” (Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent, BCP 1928, p. 92)

In this holy season of preparation for Christmas glory, we are focused by ritual and habit, carefully sculpted over a lifetime, rather like an athlete training for a race or a tourist researching a destination, to forge our hearts and minds to welcome the Son of God in a manger in Bethlehem, this Year of Our Lord, 2023.

Even with lockdowns, the Internet, the busy-ness of shopping and decorating, the noise and confusion of our world, the demoralization of recent cosmic events (the butchering of children at home and abroad, from conception to adulthood), and the short attention spans that dwarf our intellect and consciousness, we reach for our Rule of the season to give sight to our blindness, hearing to our deafness, speech to our dumbness, to sanctify this holy time as we should and are called to do.

And so we look to ingest words, to feed on the Word, so that we may confess, repent, and find the path through life that leads to our heavenly Jerusalem. We have gone astray like sheep, following the loudest voice, half asleep with the drug of self, slipping and sliding deeper and deeper into the darkness of our time. And as we add the words of the First Sunday in Advent’s prayer, we cast away those works of darkness and we put upon the armor of light.

Words have always fascinated me, ever since I learned to read. I recall by the age of ten I was reading Dickens along with Nancy Drew, and devouring library books brought home weekly, piled high (we were limited to ten at a time). I recall the delight I felt in anticipation of all those words and what those words would bring me, where they would take me.

For words aren’t just letters strung together, as we all know. They are symbols for something else, something real in our world, colors we see, people we meet, dangers and rescues and puzzles solved. Words enter our heads through our eyes and create places far away or right here. They invite us into their world.

Just so, Holy Scripture tells us of God’s great acts among mankind. It explains where we have come from, where we are today, and where we must go. These words sculpt us to become the person we are meant to be. They are words of life, connecting us with our living Creator here and now. And in this linking, this knowing, this glorious union with the King of Kings, we are protected by his light in our world of darkness.

We hear and read these words of life so that we may not know death, so that we may have hope and comfort. Christ’s words in the Gospel today are cosmic: “there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring, men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of Heaven shall be shaken.” (St. Luke, 21:25+)

Our Lord goes on to describe his Second Coming in a cloud with power and glory. He is warning us of the advent of the last days and to watch and wait and pay attention to the signs all around us, to be ready.

Advent is a time to consider the three great comings of Christ – in a manger in Bethlehem, in our hearts through prayer and Eucharist, and at the end of time. 

History is real. Time is real. Christ is real. He was real in history, and is real now in time through his Spirit. Fear not, for behold we will know great joy when this babe is born in Bethlehem. He will dry our tears and hold us close with his love.

And he will teach us to love, to love one another, should we turn to him to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his words of life.

And we light our second candle, a flame to banish the dark.

Every Advent I re-memorize the prayer – the Collect – prayed daily in the prayer offices of the Church, including the four Sundays in Advent:

“ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.” 1928 Book of Common Prayer, p.90, Thomas Cranmer, 1489-1556, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Henry VIII.

And so I will set up my Advent wreathe tonight, this First Sunday in Advent, and light that first candle.

Advent is a fascinating season, a season of preparation for the greatest of all events in the world, the birth of Christ, and yet it is full of “great humility.” How do you combine the two, greatness and humbleness? To be sure, mankind has turned any remnants of humility into pride, and the festivities often neglect the true festival, the coming of the Son of God, to give life to our world of death.

In this sense, then, Advent has been betrayed by misuse and buried in the attic of our childhoods, so I approach these few weeks quietly and with deepening wonder. For the weeks of Advent are serious ones – with themes of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell to help us face the reality of our lives, of life itself. We consider death, an event that we will all encounter; we learn of judgment, an accounting of our life; we are given hope that our penitence will rebirth our souls and send us to Heaven rather than Hell.

Christians today don’t like to speak of Hell. And yet we see bits of it all around us. We see the darkness in the butchery of children in the recent October 7 attacks, in the transgender kidnappings, in the lives of the unborn snuffed out. 

We see the darkness of Hell in the silencing of Heaven, with attacks on God’s chosen people, on houses of worship, on academic speech.

We live in a dark world, and in Advent we pray to see light, to see the star that will lead us to Bethlehem. That star is there for all to see who are not blind. It is bright with the love of God and the love of mankind. It is our beacon of hope in a world of despair.

And so we follow the star through the season of Advent, learning our Advent Collect to say each day, to add to our morning and evening Our Father who art in Heaven… We want the words on the tip of our tongue, so that we can hold them in our hearts forever.

We look forward to God the Son’s glorious majesty in the world to come, to the Judgment, and to Heaven’s gates opening to us, when we rise to the life immortal. We pray for grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

And so we journey to Bethlehem, to the cave stable, to Mary and Joseph, to the Christ Child in the manger, our only hope of Heaven and our true Light of Life, giving thanks for God’s great acts of salvation among us.

Deo Gratias.

The ordering of chaos has long been a goal of mankind, and long been my own goal, to be sure.

The world often seems chaotic, and yet we see order and meaning in its folds, its wrinkles, the weave of life itself. Those who cannot produce order and meaning in their lives often descend into madness, allowing the chaos to reign.

The order and design of the world – and the universe – is one of the themes of my novel-in-progress, The Music of the Mountain. For music is orderly, if it is to be music and not noise, a judgment that is often subjective, given the cacophony of modern music. Nevertheless, perfect ratios create harmony, and melody pulls the notes into patterns discernable to the human ear.

When Christianity, rooted in Judaism, influenced art, music was musical. Notes painted pictures and meaningful moments. They told stories of heartbreak and heroism, of lives lived in beauty, truth, and goodness. Some of this continues today, in spite of the disorder of atheism and agnosticism, but it remains rooted in Christ and his salvific actions for mankind, a divine order ordained in Eden and destroyed by the Fall of Man, a divine order redeemed and made whole should mankind choose life over death, hope over despair, love over hate, truth over lies.

My bishop of blessed memory often said that Christians are a people of reality. We face truth as best we can straight on, without blinders, so that we do not become blind by our own misguided perceptions and opinions. We look to our truth book, the Bible, to discern reality today, to understand the patterns that underlie and inform all of life. From the historical accounts in Holy Scripture we can discern how we fit into those patterns, how each of us is given unique gifts to live out the art of our own life. We look to the Church to formulate doctrine from these great events recorded in Scriptures, giving these truths shape and meaning that effects our own lives.

When we do this, when we become what and who we are made to be, the canvas of our life makes sense, with its broad strokes and its fine lines. We become a book to be read by those we encounter in our time, just as those we encounter become books for us to read with delight. Each of us is a musical score, a symphony, a harmonic singing of the spheres that joins other notes to form grand choruses.

God is our conductor. There are sections of the orchestra and each one of us is placed from birth where we are meant to be, where our song will be sung, and our glorias will harmonize with the others.

Each one of us is a work of art reflecting and portraying our God of love and his marvelous marvels in time and eternity, living out our divine diversity in all of its beauty and goodness and truth.

Chaos is the result of the Fall of Man, and we live in a world of chaos. And yet, when we search for the truth and see the truth of the human condition we are invited to carve something beautiful out of the chaos, just at God did in the beginning, when he created something out of nothing, filled the void with light and meaning.

There was a time in my life when I rejected belief in the God of Christianity. I was an agnostic, I suppose, and a materialist, that is, all that is real is the material world of matter. C. S. Lewis pulled me out of that suicidal worldview. He pointed to the resurrection of Christ and the logic of belief.

And once you believe that the resurrection most likely happened… there are certain conclusions you cannot escape. Who was/is he? If he was/is who he said he was/is – the God of life and love conquering death – what instructions did he give us? What laws, stories, ways of living did he prescribe?

And so the journey of faith began in my heart, age twenty, fifty-six years ago.

I have learned that the journey cannot be made alone, but must be with others, as prescribed by Christ, that it is a path of continual repentance, absolution, and renewal, that the deeper you go into the love of God in his Church, the deeper you go into beauty and goodness, that the joy of communion with others and with Christ himself in the Eucharist, the greatest of all prayers, is contagious, spreading from one Christian to another, so that when you hear the Psalmist sing, make a joyful noise unto the Lord, you know what he is singing about and you can sing along.

(I have also learned that long sentences reflect the warp and weave of our life in Christ and so I indulge in them often. Indeed, we are long sentences, words birthing phrases with each passing moment, with each turn on the path to Heaven.)

And so today on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I give thanks for the blessings of America, and for the blessings of the Church, the Body of Christ. I give thanks for not being alone on my journey and knowing Christ is beside me, beside us, within me, within us, as we sing our songs, making those joyful noises we call music. We are not alone.

And today is also what has come to be known as “Stir up Sunday” because of the opening prayer in our Elizabethan prayerbook:

“Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” (BCP 225)

We are stirred up for we enter the season of Advent soon, a season that ushers in Christmas and that miraculous season of giving, of music, of harmony, of love. We are stirred up to prepare for Our Lord’s birth and all that that means for each one of us, when this magnificent God of love took our flesh, became incarnate. Such incarnation incarnates each one of us with Christ himself, his spirit, his love.

And so it goes – the mystery and miracle of words and music and you and me. We follow the star to where it leads, to meaning and purpose and rebirth.

The chaos of the void is no longer a threat, for we have been redeemed by Love.

It’s turned cold here in the Bay Area, with some rain during the week. We live on the edge of turning seasons, a turning of the natural world and a turning of the spiritual world. We rotate with time, as it pulls us ever forward, having spent the past, now spending the present, and soon to spend the future.

For time disappears behind us as if we are traveling on a path through the woods, speeding on a highway that parts the trees, and we glance back furtively to see what we have left behind.

As Christians, nothing is lost, nothing is wasted, and I find that immensely comforting. As my bishop of blessed memory often said, everything counts, nothing is lost, and when I reflected on his words, I would think, that cuts both ways, the good and the bad.

But then when I think of tragedy in the past, I know that is can be remade to our benefit. For suffering does indeed ennoble us, gives us texture and understanding. Suffering teaches us how to love in the midst of pain, and it teaches us how to love the unlovable.

My mother had a fall recently. She is 103, 104 in January, and she mentioned this afternoon that she had been reliving her life in her head. I suppose it is her version of her life – her memory bank. Other versions, perhaps not sanitized versions, might appear in our Life Review when we enter Heaven. Many of those who have died and returned to life give accounts of a Life Review in which we see scenes in our life, possibly triggering regret and repentance.

For at the end of the day, the end of our time, where the dark road through the forest emerges into the bright daylight of Heaven, we recall the miraculous words that open Jerusalem’s gates: I’m sorry. I haven’t loved enough.

I ponder these things as we spin from fall into winter, from Trinitytide into Advent, from Thanksgiving into Christmas. The days grow shorter, the nights darker and crisply cold. The air seems clearer and cleaner, and I’m told that winter’s clarity peaks in January, a good time to ascend Mount Diablo (aka Angel Mountain) and see forever.

And so we approach Thanksgiving and give thanks for our lives on this good planet Earth. We are a part of something, you and I, an integral piece of the cosmic puzzle. We can see our world is beautiful yet corrupt. Our flesh is good but it decays. Our loves decay. We must be on guard to love more and not less, to give more and not less, lest we shrivel into something not so integral, a piece of dust in a galaxy of time. How do we do this? How do we turn evil into good? Hate into love?

We cannot do it alone.

We open our hearts to our Creator and invite him in. Come into my heart, dearest Lord Jesus. Come in and live there, plant seeds of life, turn my decay into glory.

We live in a miracle, the miracle of America, where freedom does indeed ring. It is up to pull the heavy rope at the base of the belltower to ring the golden notes of freedom across our land. We pull and let go, pull and let go, pull and let go. The bell swings in the tower, calling the lost and forlorn to our shores, to enjoy equal justice, equal opportunity, and equal expression.

Each one of us then glories in our uniqueness, for no two of us are the same. We are dignified and sanctified having been created in the image of God, and we join hands to fulfill our purpose, why we were created and what we are meant to do.

We give thanks. We give thanks for those who sailed from distant shores in search of peace, fleeing persecution or poverty or penury. We give thanks for those who offered their time and talent to make this country better, to make this country safer, to make this country the way that the God of Abraham desires it to be. The list is a long one and growing longer – all the men and women over four hundred years who gave themselves to freedom, by responding responsibly to the call to be all that you can be.

We give thanks for all these blessings, and we pray that we do not take them for granted, that we see them the fruit of our prayers and our work and our humility. We see these blessings of the land and our nation as great gifts not to be squandered, but to be understood as cultivated carefully through the generations.

We give thanks for the children and the fathers and mothers who raise them to be in awe of their birth and what the talents given to them in this remarkable country. We see our sons and daughters grow in love and wisdom, feeding on our lessons of life, of lives lived in the past, of deeds done through the years, of the need to plant seeds in fertile soil to reap a good harvest.

We tell the stories of The Little Red Hen, of Chicken Little, of The Boy Who Cried Wolf so that our children learn to value industriousness, truth about skies falling (or not), and sounding false alarms. We heard these stories, and many many more, and we pass them on to our children.

We are thankful for all of these things as we spin from November into December, but most of all we are thankful for life, for the unborn forming and growing and seeing light and breathing those first breaths. We are thankful for death too, oddly and gratefully, as a culmination of our life, a joyous exclamation point that finishes our story, our own Book of Life that we will see one day, opened before us by our dear Lord Jesus.

And we are thankful for our Creator of all, from whom all blessings flow.

Yesterday was Veterans Day, a national celebration in which we salute those men and women who have defended our country to keep the peace. In many ways, the Armed Services are our national border, for they protect us from harm, protect our homes, our communities, our nation. They salute the flag with their lives, and thus embody freedom. They risk all so that we may be free.

My last novel, Angel Mountain, is set in the days between Veterans Day and Thanksgiving, 2018. Those days in California were days of fires and earthquakes, shooters and riots, but we had not yet experienced lockdowns and deadly viruses. Even so, the times called for reflection on the big questions, including, is the world coming to an end? Since then, with the compounding horrors at home and abroad, we continue to ask this, along with life’s meaning, death’s meaning, and so we look to Christ and his coming among us.

God reached down and touched us with Love Incarnate, his Son. What did the Resurrection mean? Surely it was an event that broke the physical rules of life and death and would portend salvation for mankind. It was larger than earthquake and fire, so large it would become tiny and enter our hearts to live, take up residence, infuse our flesh with Eternity.

And so America was founded on Judeo-Christian beliefs about the nature of mankind – the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the importance of the family, of begetting children, of love expressed by spirit and flesh within the sacred protective space of marriage. And yet since the beginnings, there have been divisions, for we are fallen and must be healed, lifted up by Christ.

All this our veterans fight for – the right to believe, to speak, to raise our children with the lessons of history and faith. We are thankful.

Without America, without the shining light on the hill, the world will grow dark. It is time to salute the flag, to renew our vows as citizens, as responsible adults who can dispel tyranny abroad and value democracy at home. For many still yearn to breathe free, these teeming masses that see our Lady Liberty in the New York harbor. They look with hope to America, those who cross our borders. As Emma Lazarus wrote, the words engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty,

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

As we were taught by Judaism and Christianity, we befriend the lost, the poor, the defenseless. Not many other nations do, and those who do so are modeling America. We must continue to be that door in the harbor, that light on the hill. We must not allow the world to go dark.

And so we are thankful to our veterans and all those who have served in these wars for freedom. It seems appropriate that Thanksgiving follows, and in this time we will consider the gifts we have been given, living in the most blessed nation on earth, America. For she has given us the gift of freedom, of faith, and of family. We must not squander these gifts. We must share them.

And most of all, we honor those who risk their lives to protect ours, so that we can continue to salute the dignity of all persons, each one made in the image of God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who loves us so, the God who died and rose again, the God that sets us free. 

I have been revisiting the backstory of one of my characters in Music of the Mountain, recalling a Holocaust escape from Vienna in August of 1938, based on the true story of Maria Altmann, niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, whose tale is told in The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O’Connor. Some readers may recall the movie with Helen Mirren portraying the recovery of paintings stolen by the Nazis when they annexed Austria in the spring of 1938.

Adele (1881-1925) was not living during the Holocaust, but the next generation was, and it is Maria and her family that were threatened by Hitler’s demonic deportations.

While the paintings by Gustav Klimt are beautiful, Impressionist with gold leaf, I was more interested in the Jewish community in Vienna and how they survived or didn’t survive. I wrote about Adele and Vienna in a February post as well as Vienna’s significance in terms of the Nine-Eleven terrorist attack on our shores, that Vienna repelled the siege of the Ottoman Turks on September 11, 1683, after 300 years of war. It was no coincidence that the planes dove into the Trade Center towers, symbols of free enterprise, and Washington D.C., symbol of freedom, on September 11. October 7 also recalled the anniversary of an earlier war with Israel.

Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

This recent Hamas terrorist attack on Israel returned my attention to the Holocaust of WWII. Indeed, there are similarities in terms of seeing it coming. Both Israel and the wealthy Jews of Europe relaxed their guard. In Vienna, the Jewish families who built empires on industry and banking, were pillars of society, donors to the arts and public works, with salons of literati esteemed by the ruling class. Gold leaf was appropriate decor for Adele’s portraits.

In returning to the story of Maria Altmann, how did she and her husband escape Vienna? I knew she and Fritz made it to Southern California, and she was alive in the early 2000’s to be consulted about the movie, “Woman in Gold” with Helen Mirren. It turns out Maria died in 2011, after winning her court case to retrieve the painting, but before Anne-Marie O’Connor’s account was published (2015). 

We in America can also appreciate these cautionary tales of being blind to the reality around us. The terrible attacks of October 7 will not be forgotten and may open our eyes, although it is a horrible price to pay to see the truth. Many of the policies of the Left are no longer “Liberal” but racist regarding minority classes, but most ironically, racist regarding Jews, who have been some of the Left’s largest contributors. We shall see how re-alignments form in the next few years.

Truth is true. Truth exists. Daily we must seek it, live by it, else how can we possibly function? It is easy to look away from unpleasant truths, but perhaps the greatest danger in covering our eyes is our very survival. For if we think all nations mean well, all peoples desire our good, evil is a fiction, and morality is a human invention, we have our heads in the sand, or perhaps Plato’s cave. We need to seek the light of truth, to see honestly the truth of human fallenness, in order to protect our peoples, our many glorious peoples, all of our races from everywhere on this good Earth.

Some have called for a ceasefire in Israel. True history of the region and the terrorists themselves would shout that this is foolish. Andrew Klavan of The Daily Wire wisely said that war is a grave evil, but we go to war to prevent a graver evil.

How true. World War II recalls this truth, including the horrendous and controversial bombing of Japan. September 11, 2001 recalls this truth, including our own war on terrorists abroad and the domestic tracking of our citizens. Today’s vulnerability recalls this truth, as open borders invite terrorists into America, our communities, our homes. There are people that mean us harm. Wake up from woke, America.

The West is wealthy and spoiled and decadent. We need to learn from history, not rewrite it. October 7 is a painful reminder. Wake up, America!

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.