Controversial Subject Matter in Religiously-themed Books

SPOILER ALERT: In this blog entry I'm going to discuss a few things that are spoilers for the novels they take place in. All of the novels are 10 or more years old (except my Each Angel Burns), but this is a warning if you have not read them and plan to.

Last week a number of discussions began on various web sites about a controversial scene in my novel, Each Angel Burns. It began with a review on the web site CatholicFiction.net in which the reviewer took issue with one particular passage. The discussion spread to a few other web sites including Goodreads and Kindleboards (where it got locked), and even had a few threads on Facebook. For me all of this was very interesting (see: Critiquing the Critique: "You Catholics always focus on the sex...") and it made me think about other books with powerful religious themes that contained passages that I, anyway, was somewhat shocked by. I actually think it is a good thing to have ones moral/theological sensibilities shaken up sometimes. It is too easy to just accept dogma and not stop to think WWGD? What would God do?

In Ron Hansen's exquisitely beautiful Mariette In Ecstasy, he tells the story of a very young, very beautiful nun in a convent at the turn of the twentieth century. Mariette is a stigmatic and mystic but there are those who accuse her of being an attention-seeking fraud. The book is so beautifully written and so elegant that we cannot help but believe that Mariette is what she claims to be. Eventually, because of the controversy she is causing, Mariette leaves the convent but lives the life of a contemplative at home. From the outset we wonder if she is what she says she is or is something of a sexually-confused hysteric. I loved this book and fully believed in Mariette until the very, very last paragraph. I remember reading it, reading it again, reading it a third time and thinking, “Oh my God...” I honestly didn't know what to think but the last line left me with the distinct impression that Mariette was, well, crazy. Crazy for God...

I was so stunned that I even wrote to the author, something I rarely do, and asked him about it. Mr. Hansen very graciously wrote back and gave me his inspiration for writing what he did. I've thought about that a lot and I thought about it a lot when I was writing Each Angel Burns. Sometimes God will just surprise the heck out of you.

Another book that delivered a similar wallop was Mary Doria Russell's Children of God, the sequel to her science fiction novel The Sparrow which is one of my favorite books. In Children of God, Father Emilio Sandoz, the beautiful Jesuit priest who was abandoned on another planet, has been rescued after several years and brought back to the Vatican where he is being cared for. While he was a prisoner, Father Sandoz was repeatedly raped, sexually abused, physically abused, and subjected to unending physical and sexual humiliation. It has left him very angry and bitter and mad at God. When one of his fellow priests tries to comfort him he says, “Just think of what Jesus had to go through” to which Sandoz replies, “Yeah, well he only had to put up with it for three hours.” I remember gasping out loud when I read that.

I thought about that for a long time and what it stirred in me was that we, as Catholics, have always had Christ's passion held up to us as a model of what this innocent man endured but the truth is there are lots and lots of innocents who have endured far worse, for far longer, and for far less reward.

Recently, I re-read Regina McBride's shimmering, luminous The Nature of Water and Air, one of the most haunting books I have ever read. In it Clodag, the narrator, is a young Irish girl raised in a stark, remote, crumbling mansion by Agatha, her very young mother (she was only 16 when she gave birth to Clodag and her twin sister), following the death of her husband. Agatha was once a Traveller (an Irish nomadic culture similar to gypsies) who was rescued from her life by the very wealthy by physically frail Frank, who died before his children were even born. Clodag is a child filled with longing – longing for the father she never knew, longing for the mother who is emotionally incapable of loving her, and longing for her twin sister who dies when they are five. Clodag is sent to a convent school where then nuns recognize her talent for music and do everything they can to encourage and nurture her musical talent but Clodag longs desperately to understand why her life is like it is and especially to understand her mother's rejection of her and attachment to the Travellers and one in particular, a man who was once her lover.

Clodag eventually meets and falls passionatley in love with an older Traveller man and they begin an affair that takes her away from everything good in her life – the nuns who care for her, her music, her two elderly aunts who support her. Her lover is devoutly Catholic, keeps statues and pictures of saints in his caravan, and was himself raised by a nun to whom he is still a good son. What we find is that Clodag was wrong about who her mother's lover was and she is, in fact, sleeping with her own father. She is not shocked by this and wants the affair to continue but he is horrified and leaves her, pregnant, in the care of her elderly aunt and disappears.

All of this is painful stuff – shocking, controversial, disturbing. I can honestly say that I have spent hours and hours thinking about each of these stories and trying to decide what on earth the author was trying to do.

Then I remember, the very, very best literature makes us look at things we don't really want to look at, to think about things that shake the foundations of our beliefs, that make us wonder who this God-guy really is. And those are good things. They are not for people who want easy answers and simple rules. But they are important and, thinking about all this, I can only aspire to create the level of moral unrest those books created in me.

Thanks for reading.