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Americans for Life

Posted on January 24, 2016 | Leave a comment

voteThey marched in freezing temperatures with a blizzard fast approaching. Washington D.C. was closed down – transportation systems crippled. There were fewer valiant witnesses to the Pro-Life plea than in previous years, yet their hearts burned with the love of life and of God. 

And it was perhaps the fire within them that I saw in the photos of the tens of thousands gathered in our nation’s capitol, to march to the steps of the Supreme Court. In the dark of winter they carried their flaming hearts, lighting the way, reminding the world to see what we have done and are doing to our nation. 

It is difficult to see in a storm, and a blizzard is blinding. But these valiant marchers represented the majority of Americans who do not believe abortion on demand should be the law of the land. They represented the forty-three million unborn children murdered, a massive genocide. Their crime, these little ones? Wanting to live. 

I am thankful these protesters gave witness. Abortion is like the elephant in the room, only it is an elephant in our nation, avoided, not spoken of in polite society. Those of us who can see the elephant can no longer turn away and pretend it’s not there. We cannot say that taking innocent human life is a choice, a right, in a civilized world. Recently it seems that our laws protect those who break them, yet do not protect the innocent, the least of us, the most vulnerable, the unborn. 

There will be a judgment one day, a day when each of us will stand before God in His brilliant all-seeing light. We shall answer for our lives. We will be judged, essentially, on how well we have loved one another, on whether we loved life more than death, loved others more than ourselves. God does win in the end, and he is a loving God, desiring us to love, commanding us to love. 

The annual March for Life is held on or near January 22, the day of the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, Roe v. Wade. It is a wintry time, when light is less. But the days are lengthening, and soon we will enter the Lenten Season to prepare our hearts for Easter. Lent means lengthening, a stretching of the light to shrink the dark. And so our nation, in the cold of winter, tries to see a way forward in today’s blizzard of choice. Our nation needs to lengthen the light and shrink the dark.

January 22 borders deep winter and early spring. In the Church we have been celebrating Epiphany, a starry season of light and seeing, of manifestations of God become man, when Eternity intersected Time. Epiphanytide is short this year, two Sundays, so that today we suddenly find ourselves in Pre-Lent, three Sundays before Ash Wednesday. We prepare our hearts for Easter, and in the discipline of fast, prayer, and sacrifice, we shed light on our own lives so that we can repent and move toward the light of God’s love once again, so that we can truly see the resurrected Christ and partake of his resurrection. During Lent we confess our unlove, the selfishness that hardens our own hearts, and that hardens the heart of America. 

Our nation, in this election year, is also called to choose light over darkness, life over death. Our country is called to repent, to change. As we cast our votes we become part of our culture, be it one of life or death, and we become responsible for its law. Each of us will one day account for the vote we cast, the part we played in creating those laws. As a conservative in California, my vote doesn’t seem to make a difference in the electoral system. But I know it does. God counts my vote, and it lessens my culpability in the ongoing genocide of our next generation, a genocide that averages a million babies a year, forty-three million lives in the last forty-three years. 

We hear that women want to “own” their bodies. They want to fulfill their dreams. Such ownership of another person is slavery. Dreams are not fulfilled through such ownership. Such dreams, built on such a lie, are nightmares. President Lincoln and Dr. King knew this. Such nightmares lead to suicide; such lies will kill America.

We must pray for our country, for this lie lives in our law. It is said the tide is turning, that eighty percent of Americans now favor restrictions on abortion; two-thirds of those are “pro-choice.” As we enter this time of choosing our leaders let us choose those who will work to redeem our culture, so that America can once again be a beacon of light to a darkening world. 

As we step into Lent, we must pray for light and life. We must fan the flames of love in order to see our way to Easter.

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All the Difference

Posted on January 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

star of bethlehem.jpgThomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution recently wrote about political lies of the last few years: 

“Lies are a wall between us and reality… Reality does not disappear because we don’t see it. It just hits us like a ton of bricks when we least expect it.”

Lies encourage us to deny reality, to “put our heads in the sand” and thus are dangerous. To say the Benghazi terrorist attacks (2012) were a demonstration over an inflammatory video, is a lie told to calm fear. But it invites complacency and so emboldens terrorists, both domestic and international. We have mourned lives lost in subsequent attacks because of this lie. This lie ensured the election of the current president, and a wall rose between our national defense and reality. 

And so too, as individuals, we might choose to believe lies for reasons of comfort. But such lies are dangerous as well, inviting greater suffering and confusion when reality “hits like a ton of bricks.” 

Reality has a way of eventually hitting us, and so too, belief in God and the claims of Christ are worthy of examination as to their truth, their reality. “What difference does it make?” many say, imbibing the lie of our culture that all beliefs are equal, all faiths equally true. While all believers are worthy of respect, how can all faiths be equally true, when one denies the claims of another? Alas, it makes a great deal of difference what a person believes. Living a true life means seeking the truth, embracing reality, sorting fact from fiction and avoiding the ton of bricks. One of the greatest lies of our age is that there is no truth. The truth exists apart from us, whether or not we can grasp it at any particular moment. 

I have long suspected the lie of “closure” in regards to mourning. Stephen J. Forman, a cancer doctor, writes in the Wall Street Journal “how the loss of a loved one is a part of each person’s life forever…. the reality is that closure is a myth.” Grief changes over time, but grief is woven into the weave of our souls, giving us greater compassion, understanding, and empathy. It makes us “wise” or “deep” or simply “good.” Suffering and grief helps us see. To remember at sudden moments, even with tears, those whom we have lost is a good thing, not one to be suppressed: 

“The danger of the idea of closure is that it heightens aloneness, by giving us a false expectation that these experiences should and will at some point end. They won’t… To deny (memories) is to deny precious moments of love, fellowship, gratitude and inspiration… To close the memory does not sustain the healing or help in proceeding with life. Such echoes from the past are voices in the present and are sometimes warmly felt.” 

This can be said of nations as well. To close echoes from the past is to deny who we are, forged by the past in this moment in time. To live only in the present is to force closure on the past, to live a lie, to disavow our nature. Our history is our life story, our identity as Americans. It is a cloak we cannot afford to shed, one our nation must wear in order to survive. 

To find closure after terrorism may for a time ease our national life. We pretend it didn’t happen and we carry on. But it is a lie to say it makes no difference. Of course it makes a difference. Those who died for our country must remind us continually what is real, what is true and what is false in our national narrative, how we face our future and defend our freedoms. 

Children long for boundaries. They beg for limits so that they can see the truth about their world, what is good and what is bad. Good parenting sets limits and teaches the truth, the reality, of forbidden territory. In this way they become responsible adults, for they have learned what is real. They can search for truth and face it. 

And so as we worshiped in church this morning on this First Sunday after Epiphany I gazed at our bishop’s chair, empty. He left us for Heaven, and now, seven months after his parting, his wife has joined him. As I looked upon the chair, I was gifted with a flashing memory of the bishop and his wife, as I knelt on the russet tiles, in the filtered light streaming from clerestory windows, in the singing together the Creed, the Gloria, the Our Father. The bishop and his wife were epiphanies that graced my life and I knew that they would continue to grace my life through the opening of my memory, the refusal of memory’s closure. Their lives were woven into mine, as mine was into theirs, through love, through the grace of God. I consider those memories, even in the depths of loss, to be precious piercings of my heart. These epiphanies, these openings, reweave my heart and soul, adding to the texture. I do not desire or need closure. 

In the Church, the Feast of Epiphany celebrates the coming of the Wise Men from the East who brought the Christ Child gifts. Epiphany means manifestation, the revealing of God in human form in Jesus in Bethlehem. With Epiphany, Christ is now manifested to the world, not just to Israel, not just to God’s chosen ones. The Wise Men follow a star so that the heavens as well take part in this epiphany, this revealing of God. They follow the star to a stable, a hillside cave. The universe shines a beam of light onto a newborn baby in the hay. The Magi, scientists of their time who studied the heavens, kneel before this child. They bring him gold for his kingship, frankincense for his divinity, and myrrh for his burial. After this epiphany in their lives, they will never be the same. 

And we will never be the same. Like the Magi, we kneel before Our Lord in our local church. We gather before his tabernacle, his stable, just as the Magi did two thousand years ago. We pray that we be made worthy to receive him through confession and absolution. As we pray, we are changed by the prayer itself, for we enter moments of epiphany, dwelling in time woven with eternity, knowing that God himself is with us and within us. 

To kneel before the manger or before the altar, experiencing such love, and to say it didn’t happen is to deny reality. It is to lie about the greatest truth of all, the greatest reality of all, God dwelling among us. For if God loves us and lives among us and within us, it makes all the difference to our own lives, and to all the world. We can now look truth in the face, even search for it boldly, knowing that we will be wiser, like the Magi on that holy night two thousand years ago. Our lives will never be about closure, but about opening. We will travel, epiphany by epiphany, into the open heart of God.

 

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Sacred Dignity

Posted on November 8, 2015 | Leave a comment

Michelangelo CreationThe belief in the dignity of every human being is based on the Genesis account of creation, that we are made in the image of God. The Judeo-Christian tradition celebrates this idea that there is a sacredness, a holiness, to all human life. Our system of laws and our identity as free nations in the Western tradition are founded on this idea.

And so it is vital that we do not disparage Western civilization. We must not equate our values to those of other cultures, as if there were no difference, but rather give place to the Western tradition as vitally superior, a way that respects human dignity.  There is a moral hierarchy, with judgment and approval, and we desire to preserve our own culture in a world that seeks to destroy it.

Being made in the image of God makes us different from other animals, for we are given the ability to reason. We seek truth and ferret out lies. We are blessed with minds that sift and sort facts in order to conclude. We recall the past to conserve its best for the present, so that we may effectively plan the future. And we do this to provide for our children, the next generation, stamped with this sacred dignity as we have been.

Our belief in human dignity is the foundation of our desire to do right and eschew wrong, to uphold truth and expose lies. And so it is troubling to see the public twisting of truth today – Ms. Clinton’s hiding of state emails and lying about them; the mainstream media’s near cover-up of her obstructions; her lying about the Benghazi attacks on September 11, 2012 when she claimed they were a reaction to a video. Lies about lies, covering-up cover-ups. It is deeply troubling that Ms. Clinton, who clearly sees herself as privileged and above the law, is running for the presidency of our nation, a country based on equality before the law.

Our belief in human dignity, the foundation of this equality, also raises concerns when government allows some racial groups to be above the law and others left unprotected. Where police presence is threatened by cellphone cameras, as it increasingly is, those same communities become victims of their own violence. Most black crime is caused by blacks, not police, and those rates are rising rapidly with the retreat of law enforcement in black neighborhoods. According to FBI Director James B. Comey, in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School, October 23:

“Something deeply disturbing is happening all across America…something has changed in 2015. Far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year than in many years…. far more people of color are being killed… And it’s not the cops doing the killing.. We need to figure out what’s happening and deal with it now.”

Without the rule of law and its enforcement, the truth of sacred dignity is forgotten. Chaos reigns, tribes war against one another, families feud for power, and a jungle culture becomes the new American way. Civilization crumbles, dignity disintegrates, spirits shatter.

The belief in the value of human life is an exceptional one, unique to the West and its children of many races around the globe. The twentieth century saw this belief erode when the false narrative of population explosion swept America, propelled by the mainstream media. Paul Ehrlich, a biologist with no credentials as a demographer, wrote The Population Bomb in 1968. This myth of overpopulation birthed the United Nations Population Fund and the Malthusian Club of Rome. Indira Gandhi’s government forcibly sterilized eleven million, among whom 1,750 died. China’s one-child policy, supported by UNICEF, was rigidly enforced, causing a surfeit of boys and a disappearing work force, not to mention the tragedy in human lives. As Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal: “It’s not surprising that someone like Mr. Ehrlich, trained as an entomologist, would be tempted to think of human beings as merely a larger type of insect.” The lie was lucrative, providing posh conferences and bestseller books, becoming self-propelling.

The truth is that the world’s population could fit comfortably into an area the size of Texas. But without belief in God and the sacred dignity of his people, interest groups seek power and wealth at the cost of truth.

The importance of Western values is seen in a story told by Jonah Goldberg in National Review about General Charles Napier, British commander-in-chief of colonial India. General Napier was asked by Hindu priests to be allowed to practice their venerable custom of sati, where widows throw themselves onto the funeral pyres of their husbands, sometimes forced to do so. The general replied,

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Not all cultures and customs are created equal; we must evaluate and judge according to our founding belief, the sacred dignity of every human life. We must follow the Napier Doctrine.

In another instance, Mr. Goldberg cites the New York Times’ report that American soldiers have been ordered to ignore child rape by Afghan soldiers, even on U.S. bases. Special Forces captain Dan Quinn retaliated against an Afghan commander who kept a boy as a sex slave. Quinn was removed from his command.

Mr. Goldberg suggests an etiquette manual for Afghan troops that would include: “Do not rape young boys when you are a guest of the Americans. If you wish to follow your own customs in this matter, take note: It is an American custom to beat the stuffing out of men who chain up and rape young boys.” Hooray for the Napier doctrine.

We honor Western civilization. We celebrate the dignity of persons of any age, any class, any race, any gender, any place. We judge other cultures based on this belief.

For we are made in the sacred image of God.

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Truth and Lies and Shades of Gray

Posted on April 19, 2015 | Leave a comment

ft5I recently arrowed send and, instantly it seemed, my novel-in-progress flew from my desk in California to an editor on the East Coast. Before I clicked send, however, The Fire Trail had been rewritten with the help of a West Coast editor and other readers. Characters were developed more fully, I hope, scenes added and expanded, plot points remapped, histories made true. 

I am enraptured by what is true, a true truth-junkie. In all of my novels I have tracked and tried to capture truth, turning this elusive and challenging quality into characters who live and breathe, people who people my pages. For it is the artist’s solemn obligation to attempt this invaluable and possibly foolhardy feat, this re-presenting what is true about you and I, our world, our very existence. It is a big and scary subject, and some of us do not want to hear about it, for as T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

We call these realities “hard truths,” and they are ones which make some folks squirm: the definition of marriage and why the state should be interested in its definition, the sacredness of life from conception to grave, the need for freedom linked to responsibility, liberty linked to law, democracy linked to educated voters. Yet all of these truths are necessary for American culture to survive, indeed, for free peoples of the world to survive.

Approaching the election season, we voters must understand these issues in order to decide them. It is good and glorious that we have these months to debate truth, from all points of view. It is good and glorious that as citizens we can learn what is at stake, can recognize when truth is elasticized and remolded, is shape-shifting. In this learning process, we can pull truth back into its proper shape, return it to its true character.

And so in my little novel that flew through cyberspace last week I tried to pull these elastic truths back into their real shapes through my characters. The characters themselves, for that matter, are icons of many people I have known. They speak with voices I have heard. They have been molded with words as an icon is painted with prayer, so that they will one day turn around to face readers and say, “I am… so pleased to meet you.” Thus, the dance together begins, a waltz or a minuet, a conversation between character and reader, slowly, picking up pace and tempo, as the music of language is sounded.

Art is a medium of truth. It is a way of expressing the inexpressible, explaining the unexplainable, touching familiar notes deep within our common heart, as though we were an orchestra playing a symphony. The artist reaches into clay or image or symbol, tempo or melody or chord, and re-molds it to show something true about each of us. The medium is only that, a medium, material used to tell us about ourselves, who we truly are.

Unfortunately with the rise of advertising over the last century, truth has become malleable, slanted, slippery. And with advertising we recognize this, we are forewarned, and we hesitate before believing that snake oil will cure blindness.

But in the process, journalists, publishers, and politicians have been tempted to also twist and stretch truth, so that honest elections are held hostage to news media, be it print, video, or electronic. Shades of gray stretch as far as the eye can see. Colors and definitions disappear in a wasteland of relativity. What are we voters to do? We can only be aware, beware, and be wary of the lie that there is no truth, no right way forward.

And so as we listen and read, as we consider what direction our nation should take, who should lead us through the wilderness of our world, I am glad I created characters who live within the debates. I will refine them with honest fire, hammering and shaping their golds into revelations, beautiful and good and true.

For in the end, this is what we all desire, to know in truth where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going.

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Patient and Brave and True

Posted on July 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

My husband and I drove from one micro-climate to another this morning as we headed to our local church, from valley sun to coastal fog. I entered the Sunday School rooms, switched on the lights, and leaned the welcome sign against the front door.

I inflated balloons – red, blue, yellow, green – and tied them to white ribbon, making a Sunday School bouquet, and hung them next to the sign outside. The sign read, “Summer Sunday School, Saints of God, All Welcome.” I left the door ajar in spite of a cold breeze that had found its way through the July fog and into our church.

All was ready – the Attendance Chart with its stickers, the circular rug for Circle Time, the organ accompaniment downloaded into my smart phone for “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.” Small pails, pink and blue, waited for seeds and soil, the beginnings of new life, one of our summer projects.

I Sing a Song of the Saints of GodThe teachers arrived, followed by the children. We sat around the circle and read the story about the Saints of God (based on the hymn).  I tapped my phone and the organ accompaniment began. We stood, singing and illustrating the words with hand movements and twirls. As we sang (and twirled) I pondered the words of this classic hymn (243):

I sing a song of the saints of God,
Patient and brave and true,
Who toiled and fought and lived and died
For the Lord they loved and knew.
 
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
And one was a shepherdess on the green:
They were all of them saints of God – and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.
 
They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
And his love made them strong;
And they followed the right, for Jesus’ sake,
The whole of their good lives long.
 
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
And one was slain by a fierce wild beast:
And there’s not any reason – no, not the least –
Why I shouldn’t be one too.
 
They lived not only in ages past,
There are hundreds of thousands still,
The world is bright with the joyous saints
Who love to do Jesus’ will.
 
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
For the saints of God are just folk like me,
And I mean to be one too. (Lesbia Scott)
 

I love this hymn for it defines a saint as practicing ordinary virtues. Saints are patient, brave, and true. Saints simply love God and because they love him, they try to do his will. They are “just folk like me.” They may not always succeed (saints are not perfect) but they try.

Patience and bravery are clear enough. But true? The saints were true to the truth. They believed God became man and died for us, rising again. And they were martyred, rather than deny this vital truth. They were martyred for witnessing to it, for telling folks the good news.

Mary MagdaleneMy recent novel, The Magdalene Mystery, is about truth and its telling in the media, in academia, and in the Church. It is about the truth of Saint Mary Magdalene, who she was and who she wasn’t. It is about how we know what we know about the stunning events of that first century, events that changed our world, indeed, saved our world.

Tomorrow, July 22, is the Magdalene’s feast day, and we celebrate this woman who knew Christ Jesus, was the first to see the risen Christ, and preached his resurrection in Provence. With Bishop Maximin, she traveled the roads east of Marseilles, sharing the good news with this Greco-Roman culture. Some years later, she died and was buried in the area of Aix-en-Provence. Today, some of her relics rest in the cathedral in St. Maximin and some in the Grotto of La Sainte-Baume nearby, where legend says she lived her last years. Other relics are venerated in the Vézelay cathedral and some relics rest in her Paris basilica, La Madeleine. 

A group of American pilgrims are traveling to La Sainte-Baume for the annual Dominican pilgrimage from the town to the cave (Dominicans care for the grotto). They will pray for blessings, for patience, for bravery, for truth, and continue praying a novena, a nine-day prayer cycle. And, according to many, Mary Magdalene is a powerful saint and will hear these prayers. Paula Lawlor, a mother of seven from San Diego whose intercessory petition was answered some years ago, is leading the pilgrimage. She believes Mary Magdalene saved the life of her son, pulling him from an abyss. She believes this was a true miracle, and is now committed to witnessing for this saint. It is clear that Mary Magdalene changed Paula’s life.

Our Gospel today told of Christ’s warning against false prophets, “Ye shall know them by their fruits…”. We know the saints by their good fruits, by the lives they led, and lead among us today. As I sang with the children this morning, I knew Mary Magdalene would have done the same, teaching the next generation the truth about God and his mighty acts among men. She would have shared her love of God. She would have encouraged them to be saints too, to bring forth good fruit. Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection, and she witnessed throughout her life, just as we do today.

This morning at church, after coffee and conversation, my husband and I stepped outside. The fog was gone, the sun shone brightly, radiantly burning away the mist, allowing us to see the leafy greens and the blues of the sky. A dim curtain had been parted, lifted, burned away, just as it was parted two thousand years ago in that Easter tomb-garden when Mary Magdalene saw her risen Lord.

(To follow Paula’s pilgrimage, visit http://magdalenepublishing.org/blog/.)

 

 

 

 

 

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Mary Magdalene and the Search for Truth

Posted on June 23, 2013 | 1 comment

A summer fog rolled in early this morning, blanketing the Bay Area and threatening misty rain to the north. Temperatures plummeted. The gray damp seeps into the skin and the spirit, and, as we entered the Caldecott tunnel on the way to church this morning, the white swirls slipped alongside the highway, creeping on little cat feet as the poet Carl Sandberg once wrote. The sun is hidden up and away – still there, I’m told, but hidden.

There are many things we cannot see from our vantage on the edge of this tumbling planet we call Earth. Yet we wake in the morning and go about our business of life as though we can see, trusting. We trust that gravity will keep us from flying off the edge and into orbit. We trust that if we eat we shall not be hungry. We trust that the vehicle we enter, start, and maneuver, will obey our commands, although we cannot see the engine or predict the oncoming traffic or crazies who lose control of the wheel. We trust without seeing. We trust and act as though we can see. If we didn’t do this we would be paralyzed, would remain under the covers, perhaps under the bed. (And we would starve.) 

In our daily lives we learn to trust greater authorities than ourselves, and we learn to trust the authority of experience. I use both authorities when I act as though gravity will keep me attached to the planet – the authority of science and the authority of experience, for I have never flown into orbit (yet). I trust both authorities with regards to eating and hunger. And also, I trust both authorities when I drive my car. Even when I pass through foggy patches and dark tunnels buried inside a mountain, I trust I will come out on the other side. Tunnel engineers tell me I will. My experience tells me I will.

This is a theme of my newly released novel, The Magdalene Mystery, which I am happy to say is now in print and available at Amazon and the OakTara Store. It is a mystery, a love story, a cliffhanger. But it is also about truth and trust and how we know what is true and whom to trust. It is about choosing which authorities to believe. It is about the manipulation of truth for profit, for power and the devastating effects of such manipulation in art, the media, the world at large.

Since Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a story alleging the marriage of Christ and Mary Magdalene, writers and composers have hopped onto his lucrative money train. Did these authors consider whether the claims were true? Did they see themselves as authorities? Were they New Testament scholars? But audiences believe these claims simply because they are in print, or in a movie or opera. The works are reviewed by media, after all!

The blind lead the blind. We live in a fallen world and much is at stake in this propaganda war. Propaganda is not a word one hears anymore, for twisting the truth to one’s own benefit has become common practice, and propaganda has negative overtones. Truth, propaganda says, is relative. But is it? 

Truth is truth. I for one choose the authority of the Church and two thousand years of debate and prayer and councils and scholarly exegesis. I do not have two thousand years to do this, and I am grateful that this is one wheel I do not need to re-invent. We do have expert authorities, at least as expert and as trustworthy as we will see in this world. There will always be fallen authorities, men and women who veer intentionally or unintentionally from what is real, embracing the false. There is simple incompetency. But we also have that vast consensus of history and tradition, Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead.” 

There has been a trend in the last century to profit from attacking large institutions. Big government and organized religion provide giant antagonists, becoming the new dragons to slay. The underdog rises from oppression; the prisoner throws off his chains. This trend developed naturally from the cult of the anti-hero, the folk hero with no princely powers who slays the dragon. The anti-heroes, ordinary folks like you and I, defeat or laud their ordinariness. They are lovable and inspiring. But when such trends cross into lies about the profound nature of life, death, love, God, and misstate the truth about man – who he is, where he came from, and where he is going – the trends become dangerous.

 “It’s just fiction,” I’m told. “It’s just a book, an opera…”

Ah, art, it’s subtle power! And it’s stretchy, flexible boundaries. And this, too, is a theme in The Magdalene Mystery. Is it okay – in art – to mislead, misrepresent, twist history? To rewrite what  has been said to be true for two millennia? To assume that because some don’t believe the Messiah came that the Messiah didn’t come? These are large leaps in logic, and dangerous ones. 

Like the sun behind the fog, God is not always seen, felt, experienced. Does this mean he is not there? We look to our authorities for belief that he is – philosophers, historians, theologians, our own experience. 

How do we know the New Testament claims are true? Did Jesus of Nazareth rise from the dead? If he did not rise from the dead, the Church offers me nothing. If he did rise from the dead, the Church offers me everything. If the Resurrection is true, all falls into place, for all the whys are answered. The fog burns away, the sun comes out. I see it all. I see Mary Magdalene reaching to touch the risen Christ, this Son of God with a resurrected body. I see God. I feel his great love for me.

So I’m celebrating my novel’s birthday. My characters  finally live and breathe, and can speak to you directly, after being cooped up in my brain and in my laptop’s memory. Perhaps they will stop nagging me, trying to escape. Now they join the characters in my other novels, a large family that keeps me sweet company even in the fog. This I know from experience.

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