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A Woods of Words, a Forest of Phrases

Posted on February 8, 2015 | 4 comments

FT YelpMy novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, has left home for a few weeks. I finished up the first draft and sent it out into the great wide world to see how it would fare. But I miss the characters. Zachary left his music and poetry with me, so I have that. I go to Anna’s exercise class on a regular basis and often think of her. Jessica introduced me to the history of Berkeley, coloring my weekly visit to my Berkeley office. And Father Nate left me his old prayer book to thumb through.

The Fire Trail first flew away to my local editor. Another copy has nested with the Sisters of the Presentation in San Francisco, and a third manuscript found a home with my bishop who understands people and thus character. Later, when the manuscripts come home, I shall incorporate their suggestions and shall send it out once again, a final draft, to visit proofreaders familiar with Berkeley and the University of California.

It is a miraculous thing, how a story can grow like a living creature.

I read recently that our brains are always changing, constantly being remolded by experience and use. Tissue is repaired, damaged cells healed. I marveled at this vision of life itself, the changing nature of our cells, our bodies, our minds, as we age and interact with our world. Nothing stays the same. We are ever-moving, ever-growing, ever-dying, amorphous.

And so I considered the power of choice, of free will, of my own ability to govern that moving, growing, and dying so that instead of drunkenly swerving down the road of life, my span of time might take on a certain shape, might follow a rational, reasonable course. As I pass each crossroads, I must choose. I can stop, turn around, and go back. I can turn; I can go forward, crossing the road. I can repent; I can deny there is a choice. I must choose, again and again, for there are many, many crossroads.

But all of these choices are informed by knowledge. I must know where I am going, and perhaps more importantly, where I have come from. The ability to choose wisely assumes also that I live in a culture of freedom, either in the West or in a place imbued with Western ideals of freedom and democracy. Choosing the right road  assumes I was raised to choose and cherish liberty and justice. It assumes I have been taught self-control and responsibility, the pillars of freedom. It assumes I have been taught the history of Western culture, from Abraham to Greece to Europe to America and the West’s many flowerings worldwide.

I was fortunate to receive my public school education in the fifties and early sixties, just in time. I don’t recall feeling unsafe. There were no bullies or knives or guns. Teachers were allowed to discipline, for self-esteem was achieved through hard work. America-bashing was not yet fashionable, but would be soon. The flag flew high and proud. It was neither worn as clothing, nor burned in hatred. I was taught symbols matter, language matters, and all lives matter, not just some. Our political leaders spoke of America as precious and exceptional, necessary to world peace. I was also blessed with growing up in the beating heart of the Church, so that where I came from and where I was going was clear and comforting and inspiring, all three. I strayed for a time, but, to paraphrase Waugh and Chesterton, God pulled me back with a “twitch upon the thread” and help from C. S. Lewis. The twitch would have been more difficult without the thread already in place. It appeared God had pulled Lewis back in a similar way.

And so as I witness the foundations of Western culture crumble, that is, the education of the next generation through social ideals as well as classroom texts, I take some comfort in my little novel of ideals and text, The Fire Trail. I pray that I make the right choices in the next few months with regard to the novel’s sculpting and firing, so that the pages glow like amber embers. My attempt may be too little too late, but I’m glad, as I traveled my my own trail, that I chose to write these words, to breathe life into Jessica and Zachary, Anna and Nate, so that they could turn their own pages, make their own choices as they journey on the trail through my woods of words, my forest of phrases.

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Traditions and Arrangements

Posted on September 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

Writing ImageIt is Labor Day, a time to honor work, the working man and woman, those who contribute to our world with their time, talent, and the sweat of their brow. It is appropriately also a time to send our children to school to learn how to do this, how to use their lives productively, how to work and to become responsible for their hours and days. So I turn to one of my many labors, my novel-in-progress, hoping to one day carry it to full term and allow it to breathe.

In creating the back-story for one of my characters, I have revisited the huge topic, Western Civilization: what it is and do we want to preserve it, and if we do, how do we go about it?

I am a saver of cogent words, powerful words in print. I snip bits from newspapers and magazines. I file them, where they sleep until resurrected in a moment like this when I am constructing a novel, drawing the blueprint that will become a huge house of many rooms. I am an architect, I suppose, in the planning stages, building inch by inch, word by word, scribble by scribble. Each room is a character, and they meet from time to time in the house, rub shoulders, touch one another’s minds and hearts and souls with their hopes and fears and regrets. Some rooms are dark, some light, some warm, some cold. They are all under the roof of my little novel, linked by halls and doorways and stairs.

The bits and pieces snipped and saved, ideas that will flow into these rooms are expressed by many ponderers from the English-speaking world. They voice concern, and rightly so, that without the Judeo-Christian underpinning of Western culture, the free world will collapse. One doesn’t have to be religious to worry about this… one merely has to face the reality of such a loss and how it would affect, at the very least, our ideas of liberty, law, and democracy.

Thomas Jefferson’s words decorate his memorial in Washington, D.C.:

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

Jefferson, a skeptic, is referring to slavery, but these words could have been written today. We all wonder, believers and skeptics, whether our liberties can be secure when we remove the author of the liberties, and when we remove the idea that these freedoms are gifts not rights.

Peggy Noonan writes that there are reasons for traditions and arrangements, some are good, some not so good, ways of doing things learned from experience. These ways have also risen from religious roots. Through the centuries since the birth of Christ, the West, under the influence of the Judeo-Christian social philosophy, has organized life based on the belief that God exists, that he loves and desires us to love, that he made man to be a free, thinking, creative being that would respond to him in turn, freely, thinking, and creatively. Behind the rule of law, behind our institutions of family, church, government, and free press, supporting our right to organize our workers, to gather in peaceful assembly, even behind our table manners and Robert’s Rules of Order, lies the Judeo-Christian definition of man and his purpose. So there are reasons for our traditions and arrangements in the Western world; there are reasons we labor to protect them.

The traditions and arrangements have changed from time to time, tweaked here and there, discarded here and restored there, fought over, around, and within, in word and in deed. Slavery challenges and condemns us, in the Classical world, among African tribes, and on American plantations. Today a child in the womb is seen by some to be owned by the mother, the unborn having no rights. Across the world, children are bought and sold, trafficked for labor, sex, surrogacy. Women are in bondage, jailed, beheaded. Believers are martyred. We see these things, we judge them to be right or wrong, and we labor to change them. So there are times when we need to alter traditions and arrangements to better reflect the Judeo-Christian definition of man and his congress with one another. But without the ideal, the standard by which to judge, how can we decide, act, affect the real world?

It is a conundrum, for our ideals of respect and liberty prevent coerced belief, even if belief may be necessary to uphold that liberty. So folks speak of a public square where we honor these ideals and seek common ground to move forward. They say we must reflect before deserting traditional definitions of marriage and family, that is, a man and a woman raising their own children. These arrangements have held and continue to hold society together. Studies show that the father is more committed, the mother more protected, the child more loved, when this traditional view is encouraged by government representing society. There is less delinquency and fewer single parent households.

I believe in the author of this code of life, this Judeo-Christian God, so it is easy for me to believe in these traditions and arrangements. I believe there will be a judgment (perhaps it’s ongoing) – a reckoning not only I will face but the world as well. We reap what we sow.

But I also pray that those who do not share my belief in that God, consider embracing his traditions and arrangements that have been honed through the centuries. If skeptics value liberty and the rule of law, respect for gender and race, care for the poor and handicapped, the unborn and the aged, if they desire freedom of thought, speech and worship, they would be wise to support the institutions that uphold these Western ideals.

I suppose the world is much like my blueprint for the mansion with the many rooms. Every person is different, unique, but together we have a common humanity. We share the earth and we share a long history. We live under the same roof of suns and moons and stars. We meet in common areas to agree upon traditions and arrangements, but we must build on those of the past, rather than begin anew each time. We nail and we hammer, we add here and pull away there, but we must consider why we do what we do and what we shall lose if we don’t. We must not forget how we arrived at this place, in this time, and why the rooms were decorated and arranged just so, before we tear them down. We must recall, if we are graced with belief, who labored to create this great house, our world, and that he calls us to love one another as he has arranged for us to love.

And it’s good to remember President Jefferson’s words, that our liberties are gifts from God our creator, and be thankful.

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Shadowy Borderlands

Posted on January 19, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’m setting my next novel in Berkeley, California. Folks ask me, “What is it about?” and I am challenged to give a coherent, short answer. “It’s a story about a girl who witnesses a murder…” I begin. But then, of course, it is so much more, and where do I truly begin, I wonder.

In some ways the theme is about borderlands, the edges of civilization. I believe our own culture is slowly returning to a wilderness state, with the borders of law, manners, social behavior redrawn each day, shrinking. We have been living in a darkening age for some time, a twilight time, but the night seems to be falling swiftly.

Berkeley is a perfect setting for a discussion about borders, for it sits between parkland wilderness and bay waters. Fire trails protect the townspeople from the dry hills above and hopefully break a wildfire’s path. The hills have known devastating blazes that devoured communities, so fire is no small threat. But other threats lurk as well, with a rise in crime in the civilized cities that form a necklace around the San Francisco Bay. Berkeley shelters its share of crime with lenient laws that encourage drug use, theft, and other violent means of self-expression.

Berkeley is also set in a landscape of intellect and passion, of mind and matter. Here the University of California, one of the greatest schools in the world, has birthed major scientific discoveries. The arts thrive as well, those expressions of our thoughts and beliefs and deepest desires. And yet traditional core curriculum is crumbling, no longer requiring a study of the past to understand the present. Gender and racial studies replace history, as though a narcissistic self-examination of skin and sexuality will throw light on civilization and what it means to create and foster civil society.

Berkeley’s early beginnings were Ohlone Indian, then Spanish, then Irish Catholic, having been settled by an Irish farmer (James McGee) who gave land to the Catholic Presentation Sisters for a convent and school. The city was named  in 1866 after an Irish Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685-1753) because of a line in the following poem:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

from Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America

The first line became shortened later to the cry “Westward ho!”  The line also became the title and subject of a mural by Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutz (1861), which can be found in the House of Representatives behind the western staircase. The phrase and painting represent the idea of manifest destiny.

The “course of empire,” of course, was thought to be at one with the advancement of civilization. The British Empire was and is a civilization built upon classical and Christian traditions, laws and values. As these authorities lose their power and persuasion, civilization loses as well, and cracks and fissures give way to a crumbling.

This week is the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, when “time’s noblest offspring” – America – legalized the killing of unborn children. Since that day, 41 years ago, 56,662,169 unborn babies have been killed by abortion. And we continue the killing, with 1,382 lives – daughters and sons, nieces and nephews – lost yearly. January 22, 1973 was a watershed moment in our history, a time when we turned in upon our own people, to feed upon our own humanity.

It has been said that when we do not respect human life – the unborn or the aged, the infirm or the ugly or the handicapped – we encourage a culture of crime. We look out for ourselves, not others. We take what we can when we can as long as we can. Moral parameters become defined by legal boundaries; individual conscience does not matter. Soon it does not exist.

January 22 hits me by surprise each year, like a slap in the face, and I join in the crying of those who march upon the capitols of our land. I cry with them to return civilization to our once great and generous and loving country. I suppose the surprise comes to me each year because this memorial anniversary arrives so soon after the birth of the Christ Child in the humble manger, the child that would love us no matter our abilities, looks, health, age, no matter if we breathed outside the womb or not.

So we are as a nation in a shadowy borderland, a shadowland, between civilization and the jungle. A fire trail runs around our cities, but can’t always protect us from the blaze, the inferno of self. When such a trail becomes God’s fire of purgation, a cleansing of these sins through repentance and forgiveness, only then can we love as we are meant to love – love even the unborn, even our neighbors, even, even, even…

May God have mercy on our people, and may all victims of violence be comforted and redeemed by his great love.

 

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On Flying Dancing Halls

Posted on September 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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