“‘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.

I’ve been quiet online, other than scheduled social media posts of an authorly nature. The past few weeks have been difficult, for reasons that some of you know well. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

We are blessed in our family and friends. Truly blessed.

Yet these past weeks have been challenging for others besides ourselves. Several friends have lost loved ones. One friend lost her grandmother last week, and now her mother is actively dying from cancer. Other friends are in the midst of difficult family situations, walking by faith as they search for the best path forward. And so on.

I’m reminded of a scene from In Pieces (you knew I was going to mention my writing, but my writing is deeply personal, so bear with me) in which Molly challenges the idea, articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, that:

We pray not to change divine disposition, but to gain what God has decided will be fulfilled through the prayers of the saints. By asking, men deserve to receive what Almighty God from eternity wants to give them, as Gregory (the Great) says.

To this, Molly replies, “I asked God to help Papa, not condemn him to an unholy death. He chose not to answer my prayer. Would Thomas Aquinas say that God willed my father’s suicide from all eternity?”

Josiah’s answer (“No, but he would say God allowed it because He would bring something greater out of it”) is the right and faithful answer. Yet Molly tells Josiah his answer is not comforting. Sarah Robb picks this up later on, when, during a sermon on the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, her pastor argues that their deaths proved God's providence, as David became king after Saul, and the Messiah came through David's kingly line. A valid point, Sarah thinks, except that

“...the argument did not address grief. David mourned the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. Trumpeting Divine Providence would not have lessened his pain.” (Ch. 21)

The ‘right’ answer isn't always the right answer.

When I drafted these scenes, I was working from intuition and conversations with friends who knew grief intimately. Now I'm standing alongside Molly. Changes my view on what I wrote, even if I wouldn’t change a word of it.

You are in my prayers.

2022 was an insane year.

We had a baby. Our sixth. And while the baby himself is deeply beloved, I could have done without the pregnancy and postpartum challenges. I’m in my forties. My pelvis torques with every pregnancy. The usual postpartum hormones are complicated by preexisting conditions. Et cetera, et cetera. Plus, one of our autistic children had several rough months in a row. Also, I wrote/revised all 138,000 words of Adrift in the span of six weeks, not long before Christmas.

Insane. Like I said.

I’m still dealing with hip pain, but otherwise things have calmed down. Our happy baby is now a happy toddler, my mental health is stable, the special needs situation has been addressed, I finished edits on Adrift, and I’ve begun writing the next Molly Chase installment. I also stepped back from some commitments. The storm has abated; the ship has righted.

And with that, I’ve discovered reading again. Yes, books. I had no idea how little I was reading until I turned in Adrift and all of a sudden had time and attention for other people’s writing. “I’m free to read…whatever I want!” And I am. And it is glorious.

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Post Captain (Aubrey/Maturin, Book Two)
Patrick O’Brian

I began my first “circumnavigation” of the Aubrey/Maturin series last fall with Master and Commander. (Read my cheeky reflections here.) I started Post Captain not long after, but owing to doing my developmental edits on Adrift, I wasn’t able to pick it back up again until March. So glad I persevered. While Master and Commander is an enjoyable romp, and not a middling or unthinking story by any stretch, Post Captain is a literary achievement. Adding the women to the mix does so much to develop Jack and Stephen as characters—I understand both men better, and I’m far more invested in the story now than I was after Master and Commander.

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Code Name Edelweiss
Stephanie Landsem

I’m a huge fan of Stephanie Landsem’s work (and of Stephanie herself). Code Name Edelweiss is based on the fascinating real life story of the Nazis’ attempt to infiltrate Hollywood and the amateur spies who stopped them. The novel’s central characters are fictional, but several historical persons make their way into the novel, including Leon Lewis, the Jewish lawyer and former Army intelligence officer who formed the spy ring. Plus, Code Name Edelweiss has a love story subplot. History + spies + romance = right up Rhonda’s alley.

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Works of Mercy
Sally Thomas

Works of Mercy is my favorite type of literary fiction: philosophic and beautifully written, yet also unpretentious, with recognizable characters and a recognizable world.

(Especially for us American Catholics. I know Janet Malkin. I may be Janet Malkin.)

No mid-century grotesques here: this is Jane Austen’s “bits of ivory,” the drama of ordinary life. Even the church cleaning lady has a story, and Sally Thomas tells it straight.

While I was immediately invested in Kirsty Sain, not much seemed to be happening, story wise…until something was happening. My husband likened the novel’s arc to the slow cracking of an egg. Crack… Crack… Crack, crack… Crack-crack-crack… Crack. BREAK.

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The Ghost Keeper
Natalie Morrill

Not entirely sure how to describe The Ghost Keeper except to say that it’s exceptional. One reviewer described it as “one long lyric poem, but never self-indulgent.” Like any story about WWII, it delves into darkness, but it also dares to hope. I loved the nuance, the love and care with which Natalie Morrill treats each character, including the antagonist. So well done.

The changes in narratorial point of view (first person, close third person, omniscient) interested me from a craft angle. Jozef questions his own reliability as a narrator several times over the course of the novel, and he also questions Friedrick’s, when we finally have Friedrick’s story. The war skews their vision of the whole, and the narratorial instability underscores this important theme.

Content warning for sensitive readers: In addition what’s obvious from the back cover copy, the book includes a few open door bedroom scenes.

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Next up in fiction:

• H.M.S. Surprise (Aubrey/Maturin Book 3), Patrick O’Brian

• The Metropolitan Affair, Jocelyn Green

• The Songs That Could Have Been, Amanda Wen

• Counterfeit Hope and Counterfeit Faith, Crystal Caudill (enjoyed Counterfeit Love, the first in the series; looking forward to numbers two and three)

• Dear Henry, Love Edith, Becca Kinzer

• And a ton of other titles from Catholic Writers Guild and Christian Mommy Writers authors. Now that 2022 is behind me, the world is my oyster!

Next up in nonfiction and professional development:

• Reach, Becky Robinson (almost finished!)

• The Genesis of Gender, Abigail Favale

• The Four Cardinal Virtues, Josef Pieper

• The City-State of Boston, Mark Peterson

How about you? What are you reading? Contact me here.

Pixabay.

They are strangely immature for men of their age and their position: though, indeed, it is to be supposed that if they were not, they would not be here – the mature, the ponderate mind does not embark itself upon a man-of-war – is not to be found wandering about the face of the ocean in quest of violence. For all his sensibility (and he played his transcription of Deh vieni with a truly exquisite delicacy, just before we reached Ciudadela), JA is in many ways more suited to be a pirate chief in the Caribbean a hundred years ago: and for all his acumen JD is in danger of becoming an enthusiast – a latter day Loyola, if he is not knocked on the head first, or run through the body. —Master and Commander, Ch. 10

“That pilgrim from the English sloop is mad,” the surgeon’s servant told the second cook. “Mad, twisted, tormented. And ours is not much better.” —Master and Commander, Ch. 12

“You do not rate post-captains and admirals very high among intelligent beings, I believe?” —Master and Commander, Ch. 12

Twenty-odd years ago, I attended college in Annapolis, Maryland. No, not that one—the other one, St. John’s College. St. John’s is a small liberal arts school known for its “great books” program, a four-year, nonelective curriculum consisting solely of Western Civilization’s greatest hits. Despite its name, St. John’s is nonsectarian, and between that and its unusual curriculum, the school attracts a motley crew.

View of Annapolis, 1800 (pre-USNA). St. John’s McDowell Hall in the far distance, behind St. Anne’s Church in the foreground. Wikimedia Commons.

Across King George Street is the United States Naval Academy.

Naval Academy Chapel. Those darn bells are LOUD. (Wikimedia Commons.)

Johnnies and mids (we called them middies, which they hated) rarely mixed. They thought we were misfits; we thought they were dunderheads. Our heads were in the clouds; their eyes were on the horizon. Occasionally mids would meander about our campus—perhaps because alcohol was available in abundance—and try their hand at asking esoteric questions. Sometimes Johnnies would meander about the yard: to go jogging, to visit the museum, or to attend Sunday services at the chapel (for the handful of religiously minded among us). And the annual SJC-USNA croquet tournament brought us together every April, forcing us to mingle. Otherwise, we thought of each other as alien species: odd, obtuse, baffling.

We were Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey, the Odd Couple, but with more detachment and less goodwill.

American privateer taken by H.M.S. Sophie, 1812. (Wikipedia.)

But there are always exceptions, and my roommate was among them. She loved USNA dances. And I allowed her to drag me to a few. I was a traditional girl who wanted to get married, but I had exhausted my prospects among the least ‘mad, twisted, tormented’ of pasty-faced, priggish Johnnie pedants. Another girlfriend of mine was engaged to a mid, and he was a great guy. Maybe I would be so lucky? (Though they had met in high school, and he entered the Corps after graduation—and became a pilot, no less—so does he really count?) For all my surface disdain, I was not immune to the romance of dancing with officers in uniform. So my roommate and I would get dolled up and head toward Gate One for a night on the yard.

I quickly learned that for some—not all—midshipmen, not only were Johnnies an alien species, but women were alien too. No one has ever confirmed this, but I swear USNA must offer a class titled, “How to Talk to Women Who Are Not Your Fellow Officers and Classmates,” because every dance conversation followed the same outline:

(1) Introduce yourselves.

(2) Ask your partner where she’s from.

(3) Ask her what school she attends. (One question behind this question was, “Are you legal?” High schoolers often went to Navy dances.)

(4) Ask her about her favorite subjects.

(5) Ask her what she wants to do after graduation.

(6) Thank her for the dance.

Which isn’t a bad formula. But with Johnnies, the script always failed at Question Three:

Mr. Midshipman: “What school do you go to?”

Me, after a fortifying breath: “St. John’s.”

His eyes grew so wide that you could read his internal dialogue: “Marxist! Bluestocking! Feminazi! Weirdo! HARD-A-LEE!” Which tells you a lot about my alma mater.

Once he had recovered (“she looks normal”): “Is it true that…?”

I assured him that whatever rumor he had heard was only half-justified.

Awkward pause.

Him: “What’s your favorite class?”

Me: “Honestly, junior year readings are a real drag. Too much Age of Enlightenment flapdoodle—monads, ‘nasty, brutish, and short,’ blah, blah, blah. I can’t wait until we get to Jane Austen, but we have to survive six weeks of Kant first.”

Look of horror.

“I feel the same way. And you?”

“Ship Hydrostatics and Stability.”

My turn to be horrified.

“It’s hard but really interesting.”

Think, think, think, think. “We’re studying Newton’s Principia in our mathematics tutorial.”

Silence.

“Galileo? Descartes? Franklin? Faraday? … Aristotle? Mind you, I understand very little of it. Not a science person.”

“And you’re paying how much for this education?”

“I can’t talk about tuition or school loans while dancing. Moby Dick?”

“I took a literature class once.”

Silence again.

Him: “What do you want to do after graduation?”

Me: “Still figuring it out. Probably something impractical that pays nothing. How about you? What’s your goal?”

“Not to end up on a submarine.”

Pause. “I can respect that.”

Needless to say, I was never asked to dance twice. I did date one midshipman for a few weeks, but we ran out of things to talk about, and his backup plan met with more resistance than he anticipated. So that was that. Still, I wish him well and hope he’s somewhere not-a-submarine. I instead married an academic, had a bunch of kids, and became a novelist. Stephen won, while Jack was left to the annals of, “Mistakes I Wish I Hadn’t Made in College.”

If we had read Patrick O’Brian at St. John’s, now—we would have known to ask Messrs. Midshipmen if they were musical! USNA and St. John’s, sawing away on our violins and ‘cellos, thumos converging with dianoia. Would have been a point of commonality, growth, and friendship.

I took Molly to the beach.

I’ve been avoiding a full reread of the first book. For many writers, myself included, reading one’s past publications can be emotional, weird, cringe inducing, depressing…you get the idea.

However…

However.

“When is the next book coming out?” is a question I hear at least once a week. It’s flattering and encouraging—that readers like Molly and Josiah makes me happy. But the question has yet to shake me from my writing malaise and frustration with the several times revised but still not solidified Book 2 manuscript.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I called my grandma. It had been a while since we’ve spoken. She and Grandpa are in their mid/late eighties, and her health is not great. I should call more often.

Grandma told me she loved my book. She said it kept her engaged and wanting more. And then she asked me the question:

“When is the next book coming out?”

After nearly a year and several frustrating revisions, it’s time to be brave and face my own writing. Get my bearings on the story, and get it done. My grandma is waiting on me.