Thank you, Susan Howatch

I spent time blog-hopping this afternoon and visited several I had not yet visited. One is written by a priest in the Church of England. She was writing about Advent, describing some of the meanings behind the use of certain symbols, colors, etc. and it took me back to my 12 uncomfortable years in the Episcopal Church here in the U.S.A.

I actually liked many things about "The Middle Way." The "Church Year" was one of them. It is arranged in such a way as to tell the stories of our common faith during the year. I'm a story person. In the liturgies of the Prayer Book we can, if we choose, enact the stories. Each week, we would enact the sacrifice -- not because we might drink and eat the actual Body and Blood, but that we might, by re-enacting or rehearsing again that Last Supper, call to mind, remember, what our Lord has done for us and how he does feed us, daily, if we would but come to His Table. And it was, so our Rector once explained, not just a Remembrance. Something happened. He didn't know what, exactly. But Something did.

I miss that part of it. The services of Easter Week. The stripping of the altar and the darkening of the church on Maundy Thursday, after which we all filed out silently -- that one always got to me. The Great Vigil. The celebration -- all those bells on Easter Day.

I was a Lector. I miss that too. Lectors in the Episcopal church get to read the scriptures at services. So I sometimes got to read the stories, and I took it very seriously. I tried to read them in a way that people would "get" the story, that it would live for them.

All that put me in mind of some great stories of a related kind that have been my faithful companions for the last 10 years.
In my list of books I like (at right) are the Church of England series, by Susan Howatch. The series is now nine books. Howatch says she's not going to write another one, so the series is now complete. That's too bad, because when I read them, Something happened.

The first six books are a set, which looks at the Church of England from the inside, and tell stories of mostly church insiders. A collection of all-too-human abbots, monks, priests, their families and the complex world of Light and Shadow they inhabit. The three most recent novels look at the church from the point of view of three outsiders, those not yet "of the faith" but drawn to it, often unwillingly, by crises in their lives. They are not, I must warn you, pretty stories of faith and virtue. (Book nine, in fact, is about a male gay prostitute.) First time I read them, they often made me squirm. Along the way, Howatch examines very unflinchingly, the best and worst about the English church, its clergy, its governance, it traditions, its internal divisions, its failings and, despite the forgoing, its use by God in his plan of redemption. They are stories filled with all-too-human characters whose exploits make you flinch because you have the uncanny feeling you're looking in a mirror. (That's the squirmy part.) I have read the first six three times, and each time, I see more of me in the stories -- greet more of my Shadow -- and I see more of what God has done and wants yet to do in me to redeem what the locusts of my errors have eaten. When I read them for the third time around, earlier this year, I was delighted to be able to greet many of these fallen but redeemable characters as old friends. I still shake my head at them. But I love them, and know them to be parts of me.

They (the books) have been beacons of Light. I'm feeling the need to take them in turn, again, and let them drag more darkness out into the light where it, too, can be illumined. I recommend them to "story people" out there who want to look in the mirror (or are at least willing to look) and Embrace the Shadow.