“‘Oh! it is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame…” —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I don’t have time to read fiction,” a conference attendee told me, as she stood beside the Catholic Writers Guild vendor table, nonfiction books piled in her arms. “All I have time for is spiritual reading.”

A few hours later, another attendee, after looking over our fiction selection, told me the same. “I’m a professional caregiver. My job is stressful. I only have time for spiritual reading.”

Hmm.

Hmmmmm.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

I didn’t argue the point. We smiled, and they went on their merry way. Yet these and similar exchanges beg the question:

What counts as spiritual reading?

No doubt you can guess my answer, that fiction is formative, spiritually and humanly, and instead of setting up a dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction, we ought to take a both/and approach. Sometimes Jesus gave his listeners the straight dope. Other times, Jesus told stories. Fictional stories. Q.E.D.

If you’re convinced, might I suggest you browse the offerings at Chrism Press?

Otherwise, buckle up, because you’re in for a long treatise.

“Insipid” Fanny Price.

Fiction as Spiritual Reading: Three Stabs at an Argument

(1) Argument by Anecdote.

I discovered Jane Austen in high school, thanks to the 1995 A&E adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which our public library had on VHS. Next, the novels themselves. I loved every single one of them.

Except Mansfield Park.

I couldn’t stand its heroine, Fanny Price.

Certainly I valued Fanny’s philosophic mind and moral certitude. She is a good person. But Fanny is mousy and humorless, and I had no patience for her.

“Austen wrote a dud,” was my sixteen-year-old assessment, as I tossed the book aside.

Years later, an older friend suggested I reread the book with the word “abuse” in mind. This radically changed my view of Fanny and helped me see her character arc more clearly, especially as I began to think seriously about family dysfunction. While I still wouldn’t say that I liked Fanny, my prejudice lessened and my sympathy increased. Same with my intellectual curiosity—the more I contemplated the story, the more questions I had. I ended up writing my college senior essay on Mansfield Park.

Spending more time with Fanny Price made me a better reader, a better student, and a better human.

Does this count as spiritual reading?

Bust of Aristotle, Trinity College Dublin.

(2) Argument from Authority

Aristotle may have a partial answer. From the Poetics:

Two causes, and natural ones too, seem generally responsible for the rise of the art of poetry: (1) the natural desire to imitate, which is present from childhood and differentiates man as the most imitative of all living creatures as well as enables him to gain his earliest knowledge through imitation, and (2) universal enjoyment in imitations.

That is, we learn by acting things out. What’s more, we enjoy it.

We find an indication of this in experience: for we view with pleasure reproductions of objects which in real life it pains us to look upon—likenesses of very loathsome animals or dead bodies, for instance. This is especially true if the reproductions are executed with unusual accuracy.

Awful stuff happens in stories. And we love it. (Conversely: No conflict? No good and evil? No story. 😴)

The reason for this is that learning is the most pleasant of all experiences…

We love watching our heroes get put through the wringer because we’re learning. These imitations of life teach us about real life.

…not only for philosophers but for the rest of mankind as well, although mankind has but a small share in this experience.

A good story is universally accessible—in which case, no wonder Christ told stories. A fancy degree may help one speak intelligently about stories, but it is not required.

In fact, mankind’s pleasure in beholding likenesses of objects is due to this: as they contemplate reproductions of objects they find themselves gaining knowledge as they try to reason out what each thing is; for instance, that this man is such and such a person. (Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Preston H. Epps, pp. 5-6 / 1448b.)

Stories make us think. Stories lead to knowledge. Stories help us contemplate human nature.

Does this count as spiritual reading?

Fra Angelico, The Sermon on the Mount

(3) The Incarnational Argument

Let’s return to Jesus’s storytelling and attempt some armchair theology.

God took on human flesh and became a man in all things but sin. In this, we have the divine exchange, that “we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

Everything Christ does in his Incarnation has eternal significance. That he experiences humanity in its fullness has significance. That he experienced emotion has significance. Christ hallowed tears. He hallowed laughter. He hallowed pain and suffering. By his teaching and his presence at the wedding at Cana, he hallowed human love, raising marriage to a sacrament.

And he hallowed storytelling—a natural human activity, which we all do and have done since we were children, as Aristotle points out. Christ is not only a storyteller, but he’s the Master Storyteller. He not only tells the divine story, but he is the divine story.

All other stories are echoes of this, participating in his story to greater and lesser degrees. And because human stories participate in Christ’s, they carry some of that same power.

Good stories aid contemplation. Good stories form the mind and heart. Good stories train the emotions through empathy and catharsis. Good stories depict the complexities of the moral life. Good stories invite us inside the minds of others, fostering love of neighbor. Good stories help us to laugh at ourselves. Good stories expand our horizons. Good stories acknowledge the reality of Redemption—if not overly, then in their bones.

Does this count as spiritual reading?

I think it does.

Finally, seven months after its release, someone has objected to the religious content of In Pieces. Before publication, I had thought it would be the first complaint I’d hear. That it took seven whole months is proof that I’m small potatoes.

Don’t feel sorry for me. We are all free to like or dislike a book, the religious critique doesn’t bother me, and I am not here to debate a reader—that would be silly. But the fact that I finally did receive that criticism reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about religion in fiction generally, and religion in the Molly Chase series specifically. I’ve been thinking through approaches and guiding principles, and I’m curious to know what y’all think.

No one likes “preachy” fiction. The workings of grace are mysterious, and our attempts to describe religious experience often fall flat, especially for readers outside the writer’s denominational soup pot. Authors are instead advised to depict religious experience at a slant, rather than directly, whenever possible. Doing so keeps the themes from reading on the nose.

But what do we do when we have a story about religious people? Who grapple with religious truths? Who experience religious awakenings? Who live within and react to the particularities of their religious culture? Whose beliefs shift or make demands and effect their choices and comprise the story’s plot? Do we ignore these stories all together, out of fear of writing preachy fiction?

Of course not. Many great novels take up religious subject matter. Novels like Brideshead Revisited, Kristin Lavransdatter, The Brothers Karamazov, Silence, anything by George Eliot…

…but I am no Evelyn Waugh or Sigrid Undset or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Shūsaku Endo or George Eliot. Therein lies the problem.

What to do?

Dostoyevsky's notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov (Wikipedia).

Let me pause to lay my cards on the table. I was raised in the Church of God and became a Catholic my senior year of college. While I was in the process of converting, I met my husband, a cradle Catholic and “revert,” or a fallen-away Catholic who returned to the faith. He is now a theologian and professor of Catholic studies at a Protestant college. (You can learn more about his story here.) I am not a bitter convert. I have nothing but love and gratitude for the people who taught me about Jesus and baptized me. I see my conversion as a continuation of the journey I began under their care. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all.

I say this not to downplay the real and painful divisions in the Church, but to emphasize that a person can embrace what is common to all Christians, in the hope of restoration and full communion, while holding to one’s own beliefs.

Despite my background, I never set out to tell a Protestant-to-Catholic conversion story. Conversions are notoriously tricky to write, and I was plenty annoyed when Josiah Robb decided this was his (and consequently Molly’s) path. I understand now why the story itself demands a conversion, but I was and continue to be uncomfortable writing it. In the early draft of what became In Pieces, I tiptoed around the subject, not wanting to annoy or upset future readers—it’s a subplot, after all, so no need to draw attention to it. Right?

This was the manuscript I submitted to WhiteFire Publishing at the end of 2019, several months before they—we—founded Chrism Press for Catholic and Orthodox Christian voices. WhiteFire serves a broad range of Christian audiences, yet I remained concerned that my book was too Catholic for them, even with my soft-shoe approach. Again, I’m a convert. I know both sides, and certain things simply do not translate across the Tiber.

Little did I expect WhiteFire to ask me to lean into the book’s Catholic themes.

Which makes sense! Better to write with boldness than to placate a hypothetical antagonistic reader, right? (I can hear my publisher’s voice right now: “Let the audience self-select!”) Yet I still wanted to write something that engaged, rather than enraged, non-Catholic readers. The Catholic viewpoint is as valid a storytelling viewpoint as any, but I wanted to avoid preaching to the choir. After some back-and-forth (“Are you sure?” “Yes, we’re sure”), I got to work.

These are the tactics I employed:

(1) I reframed the fundamental conflict as personal and familial rather than theological. Know thy genre: this is a story, not a theological treatise. (Zzzz…) I moved most of Josiah’s theological wrestling to the backstory so that he has but a handful of questions remaining when the book opens. The conflict instead centers on his relationship with his devout Congregationalist mother, Sarah Robb. He doesn’t want to disappoint or worry her. A reader may or may not care about the religious stakes, but family conflicts are universal.

(2) I developed Sarah Robb’s character to ensure she wasn’t a straw man. With the help of my writing group—all Protestants—I worked to make sure Mrs. Robb’s side of the conflict read well. I had already determined she was the daughter of a minister; it wasn’t a stretch to show her as educated, well-catechized, and wise. I reworked any dialogue or narrative that smacked of small-mindedness or bigotry. I also legitimized her criticisms of Josiah’s discernment process—she can see his shortcomings. (For the record, I adore Mrs. Robb. She’s one of my favs.)

(3) I brought in other viewpoints, including Molly’s. Molly’s family is Episcopalian, and her late mother had a rich faith life born of redemptive suffering. One of my favorite Molly lines: “Molly never understood why these distinctions mattered. Her mother had taught her that God’s grace was at work in every person who sought Him.” However, Molly’s opinion is decidedly a minority opinion, because…

(4) I set the conversion in its particular historical context. In Pieces opens in 1793, thirteen years after Massachusetts amended its constitution to allow the free practice of religion and two years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights. At the time, once-Puritan Boston was going through a religious upheaval, seen in its new denominational plurality and felt most acutely in the rise of Unitarianism, as church after church renounced “irrational” Trinitarian theology. This was (and is) a big deal. Bostonians of 1793 cared deeply about theological and philosophic principles. We may live in a relativistic age that sees “religion” as antithetical to faith, but not they. That Josiah is an armchair theologian, and that Mrs. Robb is panicking about her son’s unorthodox views, fits the setting.

(5) Finally, I left certain questions unresolved—most importantly, the matter of Josiah’s conversations with his dead father. Was his childhood vision real? Is this wishful thinking, as Mrs. Robb thinks it is? He may very well be delusional. His experience is sketchy even on Catholic grounds, despite Catholicism’s theological framework for private revelation and saintly intercession. The reader is free to interpret things as he will.

Was I successful? Well, at least one reader thought I failed miserably. C’est la vie.

Panning back from my own work, it’s worth asking ourselves what we’re looking for when we read “religious” stories. Do we want to recognize ourselves? Do we seek edification? Affirmation? Knowledge? Understanding? Familiarity? Unfamiliarity? What conflicts and questions are we interested in? Not interested in? Do we like our religion explicit on the page, or kneaded into the story’s dough? Do we not like religion at all? And why are our preferences what they are?

Writers: Are you eager to write about religion, or do you shy away from it? Why? What do you think is the best approach to take?

Have thoughts? Contact me here.

With a membership of a billion people, the Catholic Church cannot help but be a “big tent” church—not that the Church wavers with regards dogma, but that her children adhere to a wide range of opinions, some true, some less so. Catholics argue with each other about all manner of things—a fact the media, left and right, has learned to exploit for their own purposes, for a journalist can always find an interviewee who will say, “Well, I am a Catholic, and I believe XYZ.” And if the interviewee can (mis)quote a theologian, a papal encyclical, or the Catechism, so much the better.

Few topics rouse ire faster than women’s issues. We have Boomer-esque second-wave feminists at one end of the spectrum and pro-patriarchy pundits at the other end. We also have a “third way” camp, mainly comprised of John Paul II devotees, which thinks the first two groups are missing the point. Lastly, we have the large swath of faithful people who are too busy with the actual work of marriage and family (or religious life or apostolate or anything and everything else that constitutes Christian living) to follow the debates closely; though, if asked, they might have practical wisdom to offer.

The range of opinions inside of the Church looks similar to those outside. The difference is that Catholics think these things as Catholics. Sometimes we believe what we do because the Church teaches it; sometimes we apply or twist or make up Church teaching to justify what we believe. Either way, we crave justification from the Church herself.

We also look to the saints. Which brings me to St. Catherine of Siena.

Andrea Vanni, “St. Catherine of Siena” (detail), Basilica of San Domenico, Siena. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), mystic and Doctor of Church, was a consecrated woman and lay Dominican who is best known for having convinced Pope Gregory XI to leave Avignon, France and move the papacy back to Rome, where it belonged. Many people, including myself, have held her up as a positive example of what a woman’s vocation could be and a counterexample to the various flatfooted, hamfisted philosophies that plague us. Catherine proves that God is far more creative in His thinking in this matter than some make Him out to be. She, a nobody from fourteenth-century Tuscany, was given the extraordinarily difficult task of admonishing a pope, the Vicar of Christ and her spiritual father. In doing so, she toppled a political regime and changed the course of history. No small feat for a mostly illiterate single woman and cloth dyer’s daughter.

So she’s a hero, a strong and faithful woman who broke the mold in every way. You go, girl. Smash that patriarchy…

…except that she didn’t.

In holding her up as a model of feminine genius, we can easily miss the point—and until now I had missed the point. Yes, Catherine was quite the woman, but we ought not interpret her life and especially her dealings with Gregory XI through a Girl Power paradigm. Why? Because admonishing the sinner is a spiritual work of mercy. And works of mercy demand self-abnegation.

Sacrifice, not power.

Spouses, children, employees, our rightful authorities—having that conversation with them is painful. Think of Queen Esther praying and fasting three days before approaching Xerxes without permission. He could have executed her. Think of Mr. Knightley calling out Emma for her treatment of Miss Bates. He said what justice demanded, assuming she would be lost to him for having done so. In admonishing sinners, we risk their misunderstanding, anger, counter-accusations, and rejection. But we have the conversation anyway because we love them, and because watching them hurt themselves and others is even more painful.

So admonishing the sinner is an act of kenosis—a self-emptying death, picking up the cross and following Christ. Anyone who derives power or pleasure from admonishing the sinner is doing it wrong. Such a person is likely addicted to righteous indignation. Or he is a tyrant. Or both.

Catherine loved Pope Gregory XI and respected the papacy so much that she wanted to see its integrity restored. She certainly would not have thought it her “right” to reprimand any churchman, much less him. Going against societal expectations was one matter; understanding this calling in light of her own humility was another entirely. And Gregory could have easily dismissed her as a cray-cray homegrown mystic and/or excommunicated her. These are high stakes, especially for a faithful daughter of the Church who subsisted on the Eucharist alone. For her to offer him correction would have come at the cost of great interior mortification.

Admonishing the sinner isn’t a power trip, and it isn’t fun. Let’s admire Catherine’s atypical boldness, by all means, and embrace God’s infinitely creative and unique vision for womankind. But let’s also avoid the power pitfall. You go, girl is grossly inadequate to describe Catherine’s saintly heroism.

I’ve never been one for adopting a “word of the year"—not because I’m opposed to the idea, but because I usually forget my assigned word. But when Jen Fulwiler’s Word Generator spit this out for me…

…I knew there was something to it.

Fall has ominous overtones. No one likes to fall down, and the word is visually too close to fail for comfort. But the two words have different etymologies: the first is Germanic, the second Latinate, and their Proto-Indo-European roots are different. To fall is not to fail—not when the landing is exactly where we need to be.

The past several days have been rough. Parenting struggles, author struggles, and mental health struggles have converged into a perfect storm, and I would be lying if I said I was handling it well. No, I owe a visit to my old friend, Mr. Confessional. He’s always happy to see me, even if I’m not always happy to see him.

Molteni Giuseppe, La confessione. Wikimedia Commons.

“I do not understand my own actions,” St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (7:15). Not only am I powerless over other people and external circumstances, but I am powerless over my own carnality.

I cannot fix others. I can’t even fix myself.

But as St. Paul teaches and as we hear echoed in many places, powerlessness has a paradoxical relationship to hope. Powerlessness is the pivot point between willfulness and willingness. Almighty God can and does work miracles in my life, but He waits for my permission. God is a gentleman; He does not force Himself upon those who do not want Him. He will let me flounder until I realize I need Him. And when I do—when I fall—He works His miracles.

I have gravitated to historical romance fiction since I was a teen. Love stories resonate deeply with me as a reader, a writer, and in my spiritual life. And history itself fascinates me. Add a dash of suspense (I also love classic murder mysteries) and I am in my happy place.

Why do these two genres—romance and mystery—resonate so deeply? Maybe because they are a response to humanity’s fundamental brokenness, and therefore my own brokenness. In them we hear echoes of the Garden of Eden. The romance is concerned with union, love, wholeness, and the imago Dei. The murder mystery is concerned with life, death, and justice. These things are what we had—and lost—in Eden.

Interestingly, they are connected thematically in the person of Eve. From Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s Daughter Zion:

[Eve] comes, not from the earth, but from himself [i.e. Adam]: in the “myth” or “legend” of the rib is expressed the most intimate reference of man and woman to each other. In that mutual reference the wholeness of humanity is first realized. The necessary condition for the creation of mankind, to be fulfilled in the oneness of man and woman, becomes apparent here, just as previously Genesis 1:27 had portrayed mankind from the very beginning as masculine and feminine in its likeness to God, and had mysterious, cryptically, linked its likeness to God with the mutual reference of the sexes to each other. Admittedly the text also allows the ambivalence of this reference to be evident: woman can become a temptation for man, but simultaneously she is the mother of all life. In my opinion it is significant that her name is bestowed in Genesis 3:20 after the fall, after God’s words of judgment. In this way the undestroyed dignity and majesty of woman are expressed. She preserves the mystery of life, the power opposed to death; for death is like the power of nothingness, the antithesis of Yahweh, who is the creator of life and the God of the living. She, who offers the fruit which leads to death, whose task manifests a mysterious kinship with death, is nonetheless from now on the keeper of the seal of life and the antithesis of death. The woman, who bears the key of life, thus touches directly the mystery of being, the living God, from whom in the last analysis all life originates and who, for that reason, is called “life”, the “living one” (Ratzinger, Daughter Zion: Meditations on the Church’s Marian Belief, pp. 16-17, emphasis mine).

Eve is an icon of the themes proper to the romance and mystery genres—the one who, with Adam, images God in his wholeness, and the one through whom death came and yet also bears the key of life. Like Eve, these genres “touch directly on the mystery of being” through the art of story. Romances and mysteries poke and prod at fundamental questions, the inscrutable mysteries of God. And if Eve, “the woman,” is the one touches on the mystery of being, then the popularity of the romance genre with women comes as no surprise. We are trying to understand the Divine Mysteries as women, which necessitates grappling with being bearers of the key of life and the mutual reference of the sexes to each other. For us, these questions are inescapable.

Yet the romance genre is often a matter for controversy. As with the real life relationships they depict, love stories can easily veer the reader toward false ideals, emotional manipulation, or voyeurism. Shallowness is also a risk: we want the things we want without having to exert much effort. Love without sacrifice. Feelings without virtue. Catharsis, but no personal growth.

I’m sensitive to the genre’s pitfalls. During my prodigal daughter days, I was in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship. The topic of love is a deeply personal one; and thanks be to God, I have experienced much healing around this area of my life. But “hot and bothered” scenes stir up my yucky stuff, even after all these years. Triggering scenes will cycle through my mind on loop playback. I’m careful about my pleasure reading, but sometimes one of these stories sideswipes me and throws me off for days.

Yet I love to read stories that are bold in the telling. I want to write stories that are bold in the telling.

The question of how to be honest about sexuality without assaulting the reader’s imagination (or my own) plagued me as a younger writer. After a few years of hemming and hawing, I reached out to my college friend and historical romance author Roseanna White and asked her opinion. Not only is she equally interested in the theology of marriage, but she is equally concerned about the effect her stories have on readers. Roseanna helped me think around my scruples—my fear of leading my readers astray was an indicator that I had their best interests at heart—and directed me toward matters of writing craft. She brought up the matter of tension: story conflict can be set up in such a way that a story’s dramatic tension is built on something other than sexual tension. Sexual tension can play its part, but it need not the only point of a story, and it needs to be subservient to other, higher story goals.

Depending on where a scene’s tension lies, it’s possible to be “edgy” while minimizing the “hot and bothered.” But this requires a skilled hand and a judicious use of descriptive language. For example, I loved Lisa Samson’s The Passion of Mary-Margaret and Susie Finkbeiner’s Paint Chips, both of which delve into prostitution/human trafficking. Yet I was able to read both stories and gain something by them despite my own past trauma. The content was hard, but the craft made it readable—for me. I can’t speak to other people’s experiences; what bothers one reader doesn’t bother another.

My exchange with Roseanna set me on a path toward exploring love in my own storytelling in a prayerful, conscientious, soul-searching manner. Guess what? So much good has come from it. So much healing; so much freedom of spirit. I’ve seen its effects on my marriage. I’ve seen its effects on my imagination—I can ponder scenes and topics that I would have shied away from ten years ago. Most importantly, I’ve received spiritual consolation; the connection between marriage and God, especially its connection to the Eucharist, is no longer theoretical, but one that lives in my heart.

From this exploration came In Pieces, my debut novel and the first of my Molly Chase series—a series that is frank about sex while careful in its depiction. As I’ve bragged to friends and editors ad nauseam, I managed to escape the first book without the requisite “first kiss”—In Pieces fulfills that genre convention in a different and (I think) entirely satisfying way. Is there sexual tension? Yes. Does it overwhelm? I hope not. Does it serve character development and the plot itself? I hope so. The reader must be the judge.

Human love serves a higher purpose: to be a sacrament. To touch directly the mystery of being. Let the romance genre follow suit.

Further Reading: Memento Mori, the Romance Genre, and the Catholic Imagination (Chrism Press blog)