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Anthropomorphism isn’t limited to the physical; it also encompasses the mental and emotional. It is as much a mistake to say that God thinks logically or feels emotion as it would be to say God stands or walks or folds His arms, or spits.
 After a few articles in which I have published the letters of Brother Jeremiah of the Order of Buile Suibhne (OBS). It occurs to me that you might like to know a little more about him. So I persuaded him, with some difficulty, to sit for an interview. We spoke this past November in the courtyard of the monastery.
The Monastery of the Order of Buile Suibhne is set in the Ozark Mountains about twenty miles East of the little village of Crawford’s Notch. About thirty years ago, the monks and nuns of the order purchased an old 1930’s era Tourist Court just off of Route 66 and converted into their monastery.
In the first interview with Brother Jeremiah we broached the subject of why it is necessary for some of us, but not all, to lose the faith of our childhood if we are to grow into an adult faith, one that is not based in fear, even at the risk of losing it entirely. We continue with the nature of faith and the need for a more Universal approach to our concept of God.
M: If one cannot come to an adult faith without losing the childish one…
BJ: It is not for everyone. Even Jesus knew that there was one message for “the three” another in lesser depth for “the twelve” and another entirely for the “seventy and seven,”each according to the limits of his understanding.
M: In other words, the great majority are going to miss the point entirely.
BJ: Not entirely, but their understanding will be rather simplistic and puerile.
M: You have spoken quite harshly against fundamentalist religions that you called, let me see if I quote you right, “primitive, altogether lacking in complexity and nuance.”
BJ: Don’t use the term fundamentalist; it has a very specific meaning that I think has gotten lost in the term’s over use and misapplication. I use the term “primitive.” And I only object to them when their believers act badly. Look, Carl Jung postulated that every person, and every group no matter how well intentioned, has a shadow, a negative side.
M: Every positive implies its opposite. There can be no light without…
BJ: A shadow, yes. Self interest is what makes us get on in the world, but self absorption…
M: Destroys all our good intents.
BJ: Precisely. Aside from that shadow aspect of their faith, they are quite well off in their beliefs and I will not criticize them.
M: How does the shadow manifest itself there?
BJ: When they assume, quite solipsistically, that their understanding of God is the only valid one, that there is but one true religion, and they press it on others with threats of hellfire and death. Well, you see, I cannot condone that. It is so easy, because of the fervor of our faith to act out of the shadow, but it never works.
M: There is a man downtown who stands on the sidewalk with a bull horn shouting at the passers by, “You can’t get to Heaven smoking them cigarettes, you can’t get to Heaven sinning.”
BJ: I wonder… I would like to see how many people he’s really convinced that way. I suspect not very many. You see, I think that to him it’s less about potential converts, in fact it’s less about God, than it is about him being “A Good Witness,” and whether or not he actually wins any souls is irrelevant. In fact, it’s probably better if he doesn’t because then he can feel persecuted. You can’t intimidate people into faith, and it really doesn’t help to annoy them. John Dewey once said, and I do agree, that practicing virtue to avoid punishment is not virtue at all, so I wonder what virtue there might be in a group ethos the main objective of which is fear of Hell and joy in salvation from it. We all, each of us, must come to faith, we must be drawn to it not driven to it by threats or the promise of avoiding punishment.
M: And if the faith they arrive at is atheistic?
BJ: So be it; they are still children of God even if it is a God they don’t recognize. “Atheist” is such a loaded word; it comes with a lot of social baggage, most of it negative. Atheists, I think, reject the kind of God they grew up with, the anthropomorphic God of childhood. In rejecting that God, they reject all notions of God, and some do it so vehemently, as if shaking off an early betrayal, that they’ve tainted the word.
M: Christopher Hitchens comes to mind.
BJ: Who has made a career of it, it seems. I think he mistakes belief in God for the shadow of religion, but that’s okay. It’s his right. I prefer the term, non-theistic spirituality.
M: What’s the difference? The “a” in a-theist means “non.”
BJ: It’s subtle, I’ll grant, and the difference may well be semantic, but I prefer it because, while atheists reject the very notion of God, non-theistic thinking redefines God in a way that is not anthropomorphic. Theism and anthropomorphism go hand I hand, you see?
M: We think of anthropomorphism in terms of ancient gods who took on human form: Zeus with a long white beard, Athena with a shield and helmet…
BJ: Yes, yes. But, anthropomorphism isn’t limited to the physical; it also encompasses the mental and emotional. It is as much a mistake to say that God thinks logically or feels emotion as it would be to say God stands or walks or folds His arms, or spits. If God exists at all, it is obvious that God’s so-called thoughts are so far outside our own manner of reasoning that we cannot comprehend it
M: God doesn’t think in complete sentences?
BJ: ‘Fraid not, no. Those skills are only needed by those of us “who will still carry our bodies around with us because of their sentimental value.” I quote, of course.* We developed these skills because our minds needed to communicate with other minds and the only way we could do it was through the clumsy media of our bodies: voice, gesture, attitude.
M: And God has no need of words?
BJ: Nor thoughts nor passions nor anything belonging to a man.
M: That reminds me of the line from “Inherit the Wind” that goes: “God created man in His own image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”
BJ: I think that pretty much sums it up. I will tell you this: if a society changes the way it thinks about God, it changes everything in it. If the way we envision god is non-anthropomorphic…
M: Then God has no emotions, and God does not love the one thing and hate the other as we have been told?
BJ: Not in the petty human emotional sense, only in the universal sense of forward movement in harmony with all that is.
M: Some say that God can hate the sin and love the sinner.
BJ: I don’t know that that means. If the container is the thing contained, if form and content cannot be separated one from the other, if we cannot tell the difference between the dancer and the dance, then it makes no sense at all
M: One of the great issues of the day, and one that touches on this, is the one of full and equal rights for homosexuals…
BJ: I try not to be political…
M: I’m speaking in terms of spirituality. Many in the church oppose homosexuality on the grounds that it is an abomination to God, one in particular goes so far as to shout, that, and I quote here, that “God hates fags.” What you are saying makes that an impossibility.
BJ: Oh, absolutely! When I heard what they were doing I was livid.**If God were capable of being insulted, those people validating their own prejudices by projecting them onto God would do it.
M. The objection, as I understand it, is based on the eighteenth book of Leviticus in the Bible. It goes, and again I quote “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”
BJ: In the 22nd verse, yes, after prohibiting your children being sacrificed to Moloch and fifteen other proscriptions; it was obviously not the highest priority, not as serious as, say uncovering the nakedness of your uncle’s wife, but just before the admonition against sex with animals. That close proximity may account for the fear in some circles that if we allow gay marriage people will then want to marry goats! HA! Look, you have to account for the context here. All of these sexual laws have one thing in common. Do you know what that is?
M: You’re the cleric.
BJ: Lineage. It was all about trying to keep the family bloodlines from becoming tangled and to make sure that no opportunity for reproduction is wasted. When Leviticus was written, the Hebrews were a tribal people, herders and farmers mostly. The social structure centered on the families. A patriarch’s holdings consisted not only of fields, vineyards, orchards, sheep and goats but of his “issue” that is to say, his sons. The more sons you have the more work gets done, the larger your herds and fields can grow and the richer you become. If a man’s wife was infertile, he took another woman who wasn’t; if a man’s brother died without issue it was the remaining brother’s duty to get children on her, all to make sure that there was plenty of issue and therefore plenty of wealth. That was the sin of Onan, you know. He was commanded to “go into” his brother’s wife, but instead of finishing the job, he “spilled his seed on the ground.” As punishment, God killed him dead. It was the first known example of a “substantial penalty for early withdrawal.”
M: That’s terrible. Shame on you.
BJ: Well, similarly, for a man to lie with another man created a drag on the economy since he would have no “issue.” He wasn’t pulling his weight, you see. No point in keeping him around.
M: So, you’re saying it was all about money?
BJ: Ain’t it always just? Essentially, these moral issues are rooted in human social considerations. Are we still Bronze Age tribesmen? No. So perhaps we need to rethink that.
M: You seem to be saying that morality is not really from God, but is rooted in the societal needs of human beings at any given time in history. “That was then; this is now.” You’re going to get a lot of push-back on that. You do realize that.
BJ: Oh, yes. But think about it. God is immortal. Of what value is morality to an entity that neither fears for the future nor regrets the past? It is our mortality, and awareness of our own death, that makes us think of those things. We may get sick ourselves and so we care for the sick. We will get old and so we care for the elderly even after their productive lives are over. We will all die and so we care for the dying and the dead. These impulses emerged in us at about the same time we began to think abstractly. We attributed them to our gods to give them authority, but morality is and always has been a human construct, and it changes over time. There are a lot of other things in Leviticus that would make Americans’ skins crawl.
Interviews with Brother Jeremiah will continue next month.
*Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not For Burning.
**The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas has as its motto, “God Hates Fags.”
This is real Frank Capra stuff, real “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” stuff. I defy anyone, regardless of what they may think of Obama, to walk away from this book not saying this is the way the American political system is supposed to work. All politics is local.
Many books are likely to be written about the historic presidential election of 2008 when Barack Obama became the first black President of the United States, most of these books will be either by objective observers or by high ranking Obama campaign insiders. As valuable and indeed essential as these works are to the student of American politics, none will be as intimate or as passionate as John Presta’s Mr. & Mrs. Grassroots: How Barack Obama, Two Bookstore Owners and 300 Volunteers did it. If all politics is local, it doesn’t get any more local than this.
John Presta has experience as a journalist, but do not expect journalistic objectivity here: he is unabashedly an Obama loyalist. In this detailed memoir of a remarkable political ascendency, he tells you why. Those who think Barack Obama is the Antichrist, then, may not like it much. No matter. They should read it anyway if for no other reason than to find out what all the fuss is about and how Obama came from nothing to capture the nation’s highest office. Presented here is a study in politics as is should be, politics as I imagine the Founding Fathers dreamed it would be, politics as local neighborhood efforts by small cadres of true believers.
The charge has been made that Obama is the result of the corrupt Chicago political machine. Presta says it’s just the opposite. Obama was the outsider, the impatient upstart who would not “wait his turn,” and was opposed by the Chicago establishment when he ran unsuccessfully against the entrenched incumbent congressman Bobby Rush in 2000. Again in 2004 when he came back to challenge the legacy candidate Dan Hynes in the US Senate race, the machine ignored him or treated him as no more than a nuisance. The outcome of that race was just understood as a given, Hynes would win. Hynes had the pedigree, Hynes had the “chops,” Hynes had waited his turn and had the support of the powerful Democratic establishment. But Obama had something even more powerful. Obama had the neighborhoods.
“The Democratic Regular Party organizations in Chicago were built on patronage and jobs as rewards for political favors. The group that Obama built was much more abstract. It was built on hopes and dreams.” (p.175)
While the Machine candidates had the Labor Union officials, the rank and file, the working class, went for Obama. He was one of them.
“These ordinary people had a lot in common with Obama. Obama and his wife Michelle were still paying off their student loans. Barack sacrificed much in the way of earning power by running for office. they, like many of us, were struggling to pay their bills. They also faced the challenges of raising two young children. We all came up the same way. Michelle and I had a special affinity with him because we were all community organizers.”
Anyone who met him then, Presta says, felt the connection; he treated each individual as if there was no one else in the room, he made eye-contact with each one of them.” As people got to know him, they grew to love him,” Presta says, and he surprised everyone in the Chicago Machine by winning.
This is real Frank Capra stuff, real “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” stuff. I defy anyone,  Neighborhood organization at a local victory party in 2008. regardless of what they may think of Obama, to walk away from this book not saying this is the way the American political system is supposed to work. All politics is local.
How he defeated the legacy candidates, the machine candidates, is simple: slowly and incrementally, one neighbor at a time, supported by a growing network of other neighbors, perhaps the most enthusiastic of whom were John and Michelle Presta of the Beverly neighborhood in Chicago, owners of a small independent bookstore called Reading on Walden located on the Walden Parkway, a bookstore that became a mini-headquarters for the Obama campaign.
So, how did Barack Obama get the reluctant but eventually passionate support of these two bookstore owners?
For John, the “Aha!” moment came during the 2004 Democratic Primary campaign during a candidates forum he’d organized at the Bethany Union Church on the south-west side. Congressman Bobby Rush, secure in the nomination and with the backing of the Chicago Democratic Party, could not at first bother to attend. But Presta put the word out to all the media that Rush would be represented by an empty chair, which proved to be a pretty good news hook, attracting cameras and reporters to the event that would otherwise have ignored it. The negative publicity surrounding “The Empty Chair” was what convinced Rush to attend, but he arrived late, telling everyone that he had been stopped by the police on the way, a race-card lie that no one believed. By contrast, Obama, refused to comment on Rush or in any way make him the night’s issue. He was deliberate, spoke persuasively about a new politics that did not rely on partisan “scorched earth tactics,” and his vision for a government whose chief function was not winning elections but getting things done for the people.
“He dazzled the crowd,” Presta writes, “and frankly, dazzled Michelle and me.” (p 42) From that moment on they became tireless foot-soldiers in all his subsequent campaigns.
Obama’s message, his core beliefs, Presta says, have not changed throughout his several campaigns; he does not tailor his message to the audience. Even when speaking on the subject of his disagreement with the Iraq war to the Southsiders for Peace, many of whom held that war is never an option, Obama said, “I do not oppose all wars…just dumb wars.” (p. 61) It would have been easy for him to leave that tidbit out and concentrate only on his opposition to the Iraq war, but that would have been dishonest. He’d rather lose a few votes than say the politically convenient thing that he might have to retract or spin later.
 Obama at a 2004 fundraiser at the World Folk Music store in the Beverly neighborhood. John and Michelle Presta, and many more people like them across the country, built a grassroots, and ultimately a “netroots” internet campaign for their guy that proved unstoppable. By the time of the 2008 presidential election, even the Chicago Democratic Establishment embraced Obama because he did what they most respect: he won. He caught all those who opposed them, the Clintons first and then the Republicans, by surprise. It was the passion, it was the faith, and it was the bone-crushing hard work that did it as well as the certain knowledge that elections are won, not through the endorsements of any PAC or party establishment, but one neighbor at a time. All politics is, indeed, local.
Obama emerges from this narrative as one of those once-in-a-generation historical figures, like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, who, quietly and with a minimum of drama, transcend politics and history, who “bestride the narrow world like a Colossus,” and become most powerful as part of the American mythos. We all recognize it, albeit begrudgingly; the Republicans recognize it also and it scares the bejeezus out of them for it may well signal the end of the thirty-year GOP ascendency which began with that other mythic figure, Ronald Reagan. That may explain why they are so intractably opposed to him and anything he proposes, even if the idea was originally theirs. Their aggressive antagonism might just guarantee what they most fear, though, because he will simply rise above them. It would be far better for them to work with him, for to do otherwise could result in their descent as a political force, at least in the immediate future. As it stands now, they appear to be doing everything necessary to acheive the exact opposite of what they need. That is a thing that even Obama does not want; it would weaken the governmental process. Obama is a politician in the best sense of the word, he sees his mission as one of caring for the “polity,” which is to say, the American people, all of them, Democrat and Republican alike.
There is much to be gleaned from this story that is applicable in arenas other than the political. It is, after all, drive, confidence and persistence that in the end create success. Enduring failure, ignoring the protests of nay-sayers, making that next phone call, talking to that next neighbor, planning that next meet-up, forging ahead in spite of all but certain failure and the inevitable disappointments and set-backs, enduring through sheer cussedness and a profound faith in the cause until at long last that faith is justified and you bask in the glory of “your guy” standing on a stage in Grant Park acknowledging the cheers of thousands and the tears of many upon his election as the first African American President of the United States.
Mr. & Mrs Grassroots is a must read. I give it my highest recommendation.
In the middle of recession there are invariably questions about how we got into it and what we can do to get out of it. Politically, it quickly devolves into a conflict between the market driven laissez-faire economists and the interventionist Keynesian ones. Television and radio infotainers yammer on using their own peculiar jargon leaving the rest of us, who are not economists, as much in the dark as we were before.
 I wanted to know more, so I picked up Liaquat Ahamed’s detailed history of how the world stumbled into the Great Depression, “Lords of Finance.”
When my wife, a fellow artist, glanced at the title, she gagged, “Aawch! Arrgh! P’tooey! What kind of man did I marry?”
“Easy, love,” I cajoled, It’s history; it’s biography. It’s about people, not the principles of economics.”
She felt better. But her reaction is one that may unfortunately be repeated across the country by those who either do not understand the intricacies of Central Banking, like me, or are highly suspicious of it like many of my friends who think of it as a vast conspiracy of international bankers, or who, like my wife, just find the whole subject distasteful, the province of tightly buttoned men in bowler hats and stiff collars. But, by-passing this book for any such reason would be a mistake.
Ahamed is a twenty year veteran of investment banking and some paragraphs have to be read over a few times, but generally it’s written for the layman. It comes in at 508 pages, without notes, but it reads like a well crafted novel.
The main characters, the “Lords” themselves, are Montague Norman of the Bank of England, Hjalmar Schacht of the Reischsbank in Germany, the American Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve, and Emile Moreau of the Banque de France. all of whom were well intentioned but ultimately flawed men who were not immune from the kind of gross miscalculations and unwarranted fears that led to the financial disaster of the Great Depression. While a great deal of information may be gleaned from their stories that is applicable to the present one must be cautious; 2010 is not 1929. As an old history professor of mine once said, “There are no historical patterns.” Yet there are some lessons that may be learned.
 Schacht, Strong, Norman and Charles Rist, Deputy Governor of the Banque de France in front of the NY Fed, 1927.
Some of the miscalculations early twentieth century central bankers made were over the conduct and financing of World War I. No one in financial circles believed the war would outlast the various governments’ ability to pay for it. They were all on the Gold Standard, you see, and the financial resources of each country were tied to their reserves of gold. It was hard to imagine Germany, France and Britain would be so foolish as to burden their countries with massive debt just to keep a war going.
These top-hatted and stiff-collared expert prognosticators, mired as they were in centuries-old financial traditions based on the availability of precious metals, completely overlooked the proclivity of wars (particularly wars between monarchies, empires and single-party republics) to be self-sustaining and self-fulfilling. If wartime governments run out of money, they borrow it, mostly from foreign banks incurring massive debt. If they don’t have enough currency, they print it, all to keep the war going toward ultimate victory, at which time all debts will be easily repaid. Or so they thought.
No lessons there that can be applied to today, right?
As a side note, I have often maintained that America should never have gotten into WWI, which was, if anything, a family spat among the various progeny of England’s Queen Victoria. The Royal Houses of Europe were doomed whatever the outcome of the war and for America to step in and help preserve one of them against the incursions of another, much less finance it, was a huge mistake. Nothing in this book has dissuaded me from that opinion; World War I caused most of the problems leading to WWII which is most accurately described as “Act II.” of the same tragedy.
The incipient catastrophes from financing the First World War in so unsustainable a fashion were exacerbated by the enmeshment of world financial interests. In the introduction, Ahmed explains, “Because financial institutions were so interconnected, borrowing large amounts of money from one another even in the nineteenth century, difficulties in one area would transmit themselves throughout the entire system.”
Ahamed stops way short, however, of ascribing this financial enmeshment to any conspiracy of central banking institutions. In retrospect it may read like a Dan Brown novel, but conspiracies require agreement, and the central bankers in the 1920’s could agree on almost nothing. Scrambling to force some post-war order on the economies of their respective countries, they formed alliances, made enemies, forced concessions, engaged in blackmail and all manner of intrigues eventually stumbled backwards into Great Depression through incompetence, a too rigid loyalty to ideological principles, and misguided policy.
The biggest blunder, on the road to the Great Depression was the N.Y. Fed’s decision to lower interest rates. It may have helped Germany’s cash-flow, but it caused massive speculation on Wall Street as investors borrowed more and more money to purchase stocks, further inflating the bubble that burst on October 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday.”
Ahamed writes, “Their goal is a strong economy and stable prices. This is, however, the very environment that breeds the sort of over-optimism and speculation that eventually ends up destabilizing the economy. In the United States during the second half of the 1920s, the destabilizing force was to be the stock market.” (p.280)
We are put in mind of the economic situation in America before the current recession: Overspeculation, easy credit, artificially inflated prices, and a protracted military campaign resulting in massive “bad debt,”* much of which is held by foreign banks, principally China.
In the Depression, as well as today, the main conflict on the road to recovery was, 
“Between those who believed that governments could be trusted with discretionary power to manage the economy and those who insisted that government was fallible and therefore had to be circumscribed with strict rules.” (p.230)
Traditionalists said Government should keep its hands off the economy and allow the “invisible hand” of the market to determine its course as proposed by eighteenth century economist Adam Smith. Others, principally twentieth century economist ,Maynard Keynes seen in the photo on the right, said the government must have control over the economy to keep market pressure from destabilizing it. His “A Tract on Monetary Reform” revolutionized economic policy and is still highly influential today.
“The real issue for the [Federal Reserve] governors was that many of the banks closing their doors…had sustained such large losses on their loans that they were … insolvent, [the governors] made it a principle to let them go under. They failed to recognize that by doing so they were undermining public confidence in banks as a repository of savings and were causing the U.S. credit system to freeze up.” (p. 391)
It is somewhat telling that President Franklin Roosevelt did not listen much to the same economic theorists who got the country into the mess he inherited from Hoover. After considering their opinions, he trusted his own instincts, injecting huge amounts of federal money into programs to create jobs and capitalize businesses, what he called “priming the pump.” This in spite of conservative objections that he was bankrupting the country.
What government aid did come, however, was too late. By that time, Ahamed writes “Banks, shaken by the previous two years, instead of lending out the money, used the capital so injected to build up their own reserves.” (p.439)
Ahamed seems to say that when a crisis looms, the injection of funds to shore up failing banks should come sooner rather than later and in sufficient quantity to capitalize the banks and allow them to begin lending. When Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” goes arthritic, Maynard Keynes is there to take over the heavy lifting.
Amid the chorus of our own contemporary “know-nothings” who spout partisan absurdities about the government not getting involved in economic policy, or how deficit spending to get the economy out of crises is tantamount to cultural Armageddon, Ahamed’s analysis is a voice of reason. “The Great Depression was caused by a failure of intellectual will, a lack of understanding about how the economy operated. No one struggled harder … than Maynard Keynes. He believed that … economists are the “trustees, not of civilization but of the possibility of civilization.” (p. 504)
That’s something even an artist like me can understand.
*Bad debt is, according to Robert Kiyosaki, debt that does not provide for a return on the investment.
The Sight is a metaphor for any number of things; among them are things like “hopes, dreams, and the childlike ecstasy of discovering the world as if for the first time, of finding out who we are and what we were put on this planet to do. Most of us rather stumble into the lives we lead.
 This second book in a series by author/illustrator Jeremy McGuire about the intrepid leprechaun, O’Shaughnessey, takes up where the first left off, that is, with the young protagonist Bobby Mahoney grown up and with children of his own. As is usual in the growing up, Bobby has lost the ability to see leprechauns and is only faintly aware of ever having had it.
McGuire says he didn’t intend to write a sequel to the successful O’Shaughnessey: A Boy and His Leprechaun but people kept asking about it. “I believe that if a sequel cannot be as good or better than the original, it’s best to leave it alone.” But despite his protestations the contrary, there was obviously the nagging suspicion that there might be more to the story. He knew that it would involve the children of the seven year old boy from the first book, and eventually he settled on only one of them, twelve-year-old Margaret McNiell Mahoney. “I Knew this much,” McGuire said, “Bobby had lost the gift of seeing leprechauns and I knew he would get it back but if he did, it would be through his own children.”
While the first book was intended for ages 6-12, The Faerie Circle is written for an older audience between 12 and 17 and is much more detailed and nuanced. “Margaret is twelve years old, in the between-time, not a child and not yet a teen-ager, just on the verge of womanhood,” McGuire says. As anyone can tell you, it’s in the between-times, the paradox times, when the invisible world is most accessible.
The title of The Faerie Circle comes from the main action of the story. Bobby, desperate to regain the Sight and having been told not to step into a circle of mushrooms, does, and is whisked away to the Court of the Faerie King, Finvarra, where he is kept as a husband for the princess. Circles of mushrooms, called Faerie Circles or Faerie Rings, have long been reputed to be gateways into Faerie.  Author/illustrator Jeremy McGuire McGuire says, The Sight is a metaphor for any number of things; among them are things like “hopes, dreams, and the childlike ecstasy of discovering the world as if for the first time, of finding out who we are and what we were put on this planet to do. Most of us rather stumble into the lives we lead.” Bobby has lost The Sight in the growing up and travels to Ireland with his daughter, to study folklore and to get it back if only he can put his finger on what exactly it is that is he’s lost. Losing and gaining The Sight is the main theme of the book.
“Of course, Margaret will have none of it.” McGuire says, “She is, after all “the brightest pupil at the La Madeliene Academy for (Exceptional) young Ladies and has no room in her life for such silliness as leprechauns and faeries’ The leprechaun O’Shaughnessey has persuaded a reclusive shenache (storyteller) named Moira McCarthy to take the visitors in, hoping that Bobby may eventually be able to see him again. Moira however, is, also, a “guardian of the Invisible World.” Many there are who want to have commerce with the faeries and it is she who either allows it or sends them on their way depending on their motives.
This is another of the themes in the story, McGuire says, how improper it is to demand what is not given. “It’s the difference between the American and the European way of thinking. Americans tend to be more commercial, even in the realms of the imaginative, the emotional or the spiritual. If they take the time, trouble and expense to go to Ireland to see faeries, then the faeries had darn well better show up or they’re going to want their money back. They might even sue.”
Moira is suspicious of the visitors…until, that is, she is introduced to Margaret. She recognizes in the young girl a kindred spirit with a latent Sight that is greater even than her father’s, for once having given up the Second Sight, it never comes back entirely. While Bobby is engaged in gathering folk tales in the town, Moira and Margaret tend to the farm. Margaret quickly adapts to the hard work and the total lack of modern conveniences like running water, electric lights and television. As time slows down, she is at first bored to death, and then intrigued as she begins to notice things that she had always been too distracted to see before.
McGuire says that is another point of the story. “How we distract ourselves with external entertainments, how we schedule and plan all our children’s time so they don’t have the freedom to explore who they are.” This theme is exemplified in a portion of the book that addresses Margaret’s status as the brightest pupil in the intermediate class at her school:
“Laureen had begun to notice something in her daughter that disturbed her. She seemed to have forgotten how to play. Headmistress Evangeline Drysdale was first to notice. ‘It isn’t easy being a Golden Child’ she’d said to Laureen, ‘When you are as smart as Margaret is, accomplishments are taken for granted that would be praised in other girls. Much is expected of her. She is afraid of being wrong, takes getting less that an ‘A’ on her assignments personally and that makes her less able to take chances. She needs to take it all less seriously. She needs to play.”
 Margaret argues against the exisence of faeries while Moira kneads the daily bread.
All the while they are working, whether hoeing cabbages, gathering eggs,or washing laundry in a hand cranked machine fashioned from a whiskey barrel, Moira McCarthy entertains the girl from her stock of faerie stories. Margaret is intrigued by the old woman who is constantly muttering prayers for everything from baking bread to making butter, and holds daily commerce, she says, with Maeve, the Faerie Queen for whom the McCarthy family has preserved a large area of woodland. When Margaret expresses skepticism Moira laughs, “The Five-Senses World is a small island in a vast ocean of all we cannot see and do not know. In that ocean, there may be faeries.”
As the two women, one near the end of her adult life and the other just at the beginning, grow to trust each other more, Margaret gains much understanding not only about the world of Faerie, but also about the troubles of her own life, the growing distancing between herself and her parents, as well as their fighting over diminished hopes and disappointed expectations. “Darlin’ girl,” the shenache tells her, “People fight because they have not chosen well. It’s not your burden.” Under Moira’s tutelage, Margaret learns the value of choice. “The marvelous thing about being a grown up is you get to choose what you want and what you don’t want in your life.”
And how about the title character, where in this story does O’Shaughnessey fit in? McGuire says, “O’Shaughnessey, has a little less to do in this book; it really is about the growing relationship between Margaret and her mentor, but what he does do is critical. He takes her, as he did her father before her, into the land of Faerie, but only in twilight dreams, half-sleep dreams, the ones that occur only at the point that no one remembers the next morning, the exact moment of falling asleep. In these dreams, O’Shaughnessey shows her the world the way the shenache sees it filled with wonder and magic and divine energy.”
 O'Shaughnessey tried to persuade the crusty O'Sullivan to help save Bobby from the faerie circle.
The leprechaun comes to Margaret in dreams because her rational mind refuses to believe in faeries so she can’t see him otherwise, which is one form of the kind of faerie glamour that hides them from our sight. O’Shaughnessey’s mission is to get humans to believe again, for, as he tells his friend O’Sullivan, “We need them to believe in us…It’s their belief in us that sustains us, protects us – yes I would go so far – protects us from the poisoning of our world.”
“Yes,” McGuire laughs, “O’Sullivan, the cranky misanthropic, shabby leprechaun is back in this adventure…reluctantly.”
In addition to writing the story, McGuire also drew the 24 pencil illustrations that are inserted throughout the narrative. In the previous book, he adopted the pen and ink styles of nineteenth century illustrators that he most admires. In this one, he went to pencil drawings. “I thought the subject a little more nuanced than what I was capable of in ink. So I reverted to the softness of graphite.
“O’Shaughnessey: The Faerie Circle” is available on
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Liz has an uncanny ability to detect what my intentions are and then suggest changes and modifications that will better communicate them.
 Thank God for editors! They keep us poor ink-stained wretches from making fools of ourselves in print for the entire world to see.
All authors must at some point admit that it is their editors more than anyone else who make them good writers. Not only do they correct punctuation and spelling, not only do they suggest narrative changes in the manuscripts, not only do they offer encouragement and oft needed praise, but they also tell them when an idea probably isn’t worth the effort to develop it before too much time and energy is wasted on it.
Creativity, as I have maintained many times, must have obstacles to get over around and through, obstacles that force the author to hone his writing and sharpen his ideas. Having a congenial and knowledgeable editor is the greatest gift that an author can possess. Well, of course, aside from getting the first copies of the book itself, that is.
If here is anything in the world that matches the feel of a book that you have penned and had published, I don’t know what it is! It’s the sensuality of holding the hardcover in your hand, cracking it open and getting your first whiff of that “new book” aroma, coupled with the knowledge that it’s is not just any book, it’s your book; the words imprinted here are your words. But, aside from the very real sense of accomplishment, there is, I must tell you, another somewhat weirder feeling. It’s a bit surreal, you know, because the words no longer seem like yours. The transfiguration from the manuscript into the printed page, creates a distancing between author and text. No matter how familiar you are with it, in the final printed book it becomes reborn and you read it as if for the first time, and as if someone else wrote it.
Having a play produced is similar but not the same. I think it might have something to do with a sense of permanence. Writing and producing plays was once described as “writing your life in sand.” At the end of a play the only thing you have left is a marked up script and photographs. A book is as near to forever as we are likely to get in this life, and at the end of the process when I am actually holding the book on my hands, I am tempted to believe, quite hyperbolically, that it justifies my existence on this planet. I remember saying something like that about the first book, O’Shaughnessey: A Boy and His Leprechaun. “Were I to die tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll be satisfied in my mind that my life has been lived well for having written this.”
But, here am again holding the second in the series, The Faerie Circle and anticipating the third, The Changeling. I am no longer satisfied with that one book, and hope I am granted enough time and energy to complete the trilogy. But, no author does it alone.
 Editor Elizabeth Zorko busy improving me.
Most writers will admit that without their editors they would be nothing, I am, however, such a pig-headed, self-sufficient cuss that I bristle at anything hinting at “collaboration.” this even though I know from my experience in the theatre the value of that “second pair of eyes.” When my play, From All Things Evil was produced I scrupulously avoided providing any input to the cast or director in the early stages of rehearsal because I wanted that “second set of eyes.” I knew what I wanted to write, but I had not the hint of an idea what I actually did write. “If it isn’t in the words, it isn’t there,” I said. As it turned out, the actors found things I didn’t know I had written and I was pleasantly surprised. I learned a lesson then that has served me ever since.
The disconnect between what the author thought he wrote and what is actually on the page is called “the Intentional Fallacy.” We err in thinking that if we choose our words well, our unspoken intentions will be immediately evident to anyone. This is nonsense. I know it. Yet I still balk at anyone else telling me how to write! I am so aware of this territorial instinct that I have to actively work against it when working with editors to the point that I sometimes become a passive observer taking any and all suggestions. When this happens, it is well to have an editor on hand who does not think of herself primarily as a writer, or who can differentiate and categorize their work so the writing and the editing disciplines to not become commingled. A good editor is, as Conan Doyle wrote, “not luminous…but rather a reflection of light.”
I am particularly fortunate to have found just such an editor in Elizabeth Zorko. Liz has an uncanny ability to detect what my intentions are and then suggest changes and modifications that will better communicate them. She is able to tell me when I need to say more and when I need to shut up, all while focusing on the intended audience of early teens. In one section, for example, regarding a full two pages of material that seemed more self-confessional than anything else (authors sometimes do that, you know, if you don’t watch them closely), she was quick to point out, “Your intended audience, teenagers, won’t care about that stuff. If you choose to leave it in, you’ll be writing a different book, a more adult book.” I cut the pages and the book is better for it.
Liz is also a talented musician. I have often maintained that the music of language is every bit as important as denotative meaning. She is able to detect tone, rhythm, harmony and melody, and is not averse to telling me when a note sounds a sour or when the rhythm seems a little clumsy. Liz’s sharp ear for sound is invaluable in helping me stay in tune.
 Gina and the finished illustration. If good writing must be rooted in the sounds and rhythms of the environs in which the story takes place, then the illustrations must also be rooted in life. Drawing a twelve-year-old girl that looks and moves like a twelve-year-old girl without a model is difficult to impossible. I did not want to produce a series of cartoon caricatures; yet, one really shouldn’t follow young girls around gaping at them. It was a happy accident, when I was beginning the illustrations in earnest, Liz introduced me to a young girl named Gina and her parents who kindly consented to my observing her closely and taking photographs to use in the drawings. Gina also consented to read a portion of the manuscript from the locus of the targeted twelve-year-old audience and tell me what she thought. Her comments were exceedingly valuable.
I did not know at the outset that observing her would also result in two additions to the text. Gina has that quality that directors most look for in child actors: no matter what she’s doing, even if she’s doing nothing, it’s interesting. Her expression, even in repose, seems active. There is something always going on behind the eyes.
There were two passages in the book that directly resulted from my observations of Gina. The first is a rumination about young Margaret Mahoney from the shenache, Moira McCarthy, the girl’s mentor:
The mental picture she had of Margaret made her smile. “Grace is not something that can be learned,” she mused. “One may learn deportment…but not grace.”… Deportment is external and stiff, like a coat that doesn’t quite fit right. Grace is inborn, and no matter how awkward adolescence is, that grace still shines through. The girl had it, of that the old woman was sure. The smallest gesture seemed to come quite naturally from the center where the heart lies, up through the shoulder, along the arm and finally rolling off the fingertips. That was true even when she was slouching in the wicker chair or stumbling out of the bedroom. Moira laughed warmly.
The second passage Gina inspired is Margaret’s dance just before she makes her first direct contact with Faerie. My wife and I were in the kitchen, when we saw this wild mop of blond hair bouncing along past the window and continuing on for the full length of the deck. We both laughed at the impulsiveness of Gina’s dance and agreed that it had to find its way into the book:
From some small remote corner of her came the irresistible impulse to dance. She started slowly, stepping lightly through the mist-covered grasses and waving her arms like tree branches over her head and around her shoulders. She thought she heard music rather like the sound of a violin welling up inside her; it had to be from inside her because she could not otherwise place its origin. She began to sway her shoulders and back to the strange rhythm of that music, which rose from her, seemed to be inside her and around her all at once and she gladly gave herself to it. She jumped about, her arms waved, her hair whipped around her face and down along her body as she whirled, leaped lightly and kicked her feet out in front of her. She had danced before, of course, but always hesitantly as though afraid to make the wrong step or an awkward move. This was the first time she felt herself one with the dance, felt the power grow from her center where the heart lies, up through her shoulders and arms, and down through her hips, knees, and toes, and she understood how Fionna Donnelly felt. “They couldn’t tell the dancer from the dance.” She didn’t know how long she danced. Here was no time, here was no place. Here she was alone and free, and touching eternity. A voice said, “The moment had to have been born in Faerie!”
And she stopped dancing. The world came back to her as she knew it and she looked around to find if anyone had seen her acting so foolishly.
No author ever does it alone. Writing a book may not be as collaborative as writing and staging a play, but it is not quite the isolated and solitary effort that one may think. Taking a book from the first draft to the finished book takes many hands. I have presented here two of my most valued ones without whom the O’Shaughnessey series would be much poorer.
To say that I am old fashioned would be an understatement. If I could work my will, the automobile would go the way of the dodo, and we would return to those thrilling days of yester-year when the air and streets were thick with horse by-product and its attendant cholera and lock-jaw.
 Seven years ago we moved into a Victorian Queen Anne home built in 1883. No painted lady, this, but a sturdy working class home rather like the ones sold by Sears in the late 19th Century. The house needed a lot of work and we’ve been dutiful serfs in its service ever since we closed on it in August of 2003. We plod along doing a floor here, a wall there, getting her in shape just in time to trade her for a one story retirement home in the sticks. (Shhh! don’t tell her. She thinks this relationship is forever.)
Now, if it were just the involuntary servitude, I wouldn’t mind, but I do believe she’s haunted. Not with any specific entity that I have actually discovered, it’s more like a general “spirit” of the time in which she was built. I’m finding myself slowly but inexorably drawn into her matrix. I am becoming more and more “Victorian.”
For example, we do not, if at all possible, purchase things that are intended to be thrown away. The late 20th Century word “disposable” is treated as a curse requiring us to hold two crossed fingers in front of our faces as though averting the “evil eye.” It is a manifestation of the Victorian working class ethic where Benjamin Franklin’s admonition, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” was a mantra.
We do not purchase paper towels, but use instead soft, strong and absorbent kitchen towels for everything. Paper towel advertisements are always comparing their products to cloth, so why not just go ahead and use cloth? Yes, they get dirty, but they can be rinsed after use and thrown into the laundry.
I have bought a fountain pen that has to be filled with ink from a glass bottle just so I will not throw away any disposable plastic ones. One pen may not seem like much, but multiply that by all the residents and businesses in any large city and the volume of non-recyclable plastic is immense.
Same with disposable razors and, I must say, even the disposable plastic blade cartridges for the “Ultra Macho Super Torque Testosterone Mach 2000 Shaving System” (or whatever they’re calling a simple razor these days). I have gone over, much to the apprehension of my wife, to the old fashioned carbon steel hollow ground straight-razor, what they used to call a “throat-cutter.” The first time I used it she had her finger poised on the telephone ready to call 911, but I figured, “Men used these things for thousands of years before King Gillette got clever, so what could be the danger?” I accomplished the task, amazingly, without any major loss of blood. It took about twice as long, but was, in fact, an unusually pleasant experience rather like being pampered in a spa. Of course, if I’m in a hurry, I will use a forty-year-old Gillette doubled-edge, so I only toss out a thin piece of metal that rusts away.
We have, as a result of these and other steps, reduced our landfill-bound detritus to one very small kitchen bag per week. The rest is composted or recycled.
As a further sign that I am possessed by Victoriana, I have acquired a collection of oil lamps to supplement electric light. I take my own re-usable shopping bags to the store (one is always folded, no larger than a kerchief, and placed into my back pocket) just as they did before the invention of the foldable paper grocery bag or that most evil of modern contrivances, the plastic shopping bag!
Okay. That’s what we should be doing in these most ecologically conscious days and is not sufficient evidence for possession by the spirit of this old house.
We also plant a garden. When Spring comes, I order organic heirloom seeds, plant them and watch them die. (So much for channeling the spirit of my grandfather who was an excellent gardener, having been reared on a farm near Pleasant Plains, Illinois.) On the rare occasions when something survives to harvest, I have begun to “put by” some of the produce through canning, the results of which are mixed (let’s not talk about the green beans). That also is not cause for alarm. Home grown food (if you can manage not to spoil it) is much, much better than that purchased in the store, or so I have been told. We also bake our own bread, two loaves a week usually is sufficient, and I also supplement that with Irish soda bread as a special treat.
My dear wife has gone to wearing long skirts and a very fetching wool shawl around her shoulders to ward off the chill. We keep the house at about 60 degrees in the winter and dress warmly even indoors to cut down on our fuel consumption, just as they did in 1883 when nobody expected to be toasty in January. If we want a jolt of heat, we light a fire in the hearth. Long housecoats and slippers are the norm here. That too might be seen as the responsible thing to do in an era of rising fuel costs and depleted supplies.
I am also addicted to the books on early American implements by Eric Sloane (see accompanying illustration). I subscribe to Mother Earth News and Natural Home magazines. I drool over articles detailing how to live “off-the-grid” in self sufficient independent homesteads. (Hence the reference, above, to a home in the sticks.) I have dreamed up a system of water-generated electricity based on my observations of a gristmill in North Carolina, a plan which I will detail in the third O’Shaughnessey book. Basically, it is a 30 foot tall cistern 15 feet in width (half above ground and half below) filled with water via a windmill pump. The water pressure at the bottom forces water through a turbine that turns a generator. How much electricity would be generated, I do not know, but the concept is, I think, a sound one. I’m fascinated with the thought of everyone’s home being an independent and self-sufficient unit as in … oh, I don’t know, say… in the Victorian period.
Now, each one of these things might be excused. There is no need to ascribe them to any untoward and mysterious influence from Victorian architecture. But when I buy a flannel nightshirt, and a wind-up mechanical alarm clock, that’s IT! My tastes in clothing lean in the direction of frock coats and homburgs, walking sticks and pocket-watches and I would grow a handlebar mustache were I not so testosterone challenged in the facial hair department that it would just look silly. I consider a day spent perusing the pages of Lehman’s Non-Electric Catalog and the Farmer’s Almanac a good day. To say that I am old fashioned would be an understatement. It’s only a matter of time before I buy a horse.
I sometimes imagine that If I could work my will, the automobile would go the way of the dodo, and we would return to those thrilling days of yester-year when the air and streets were thick with horse by-product and its attendant cholera and lock-jaw. (I often wonder why western movies never depict horse-apples in the streets; you know they had to be there. The town drunk charged with pushing the honey-bucket around and shoveling the stuff into it couldn’t have worked all that fast.) Okay, okay, okay, so I admit some things about the horse and buggy days weren’t all that great. We often forget that the automobile was, at the time, considered a clean alternative to the horse.
But on thinking about the Victorians, we probably should not be all that haughty. Yes, they were exceedingly formal and structured and there were institutionalized prejudices and oppressions, but at the same time, there were some things that were not so bad: good manners, for one. Who would not enjoy once again being treated with courtesy by shop-keepers, co-workers and service providers instead of being dismissed as annoying interruptions? I don’t expect that they will bow and pull on their forelocks, but a little bit deference would be nice. And, who would not relish a world in which we were not regaled with strings of casual profanity in public?
Another thing that might be useful to resurrect were courtship and marriage rituals under which women were treated, generally, with respect and a man would never consider marrying until he had “made something” of himself, become established on a career path and was seen to be moving up in the world. The ethic was that if he could not take care of himself he would not be able to take care of anyone else. Women were also very choosy and tried very hard not to align themselves with men who were not so established. Yes, yes, of course I know women were not allowed to work outside the home,* but with a little tweaking the same principle might apply to people today getting married only when both are self sufficient.
In the Victorian era Marriage was less about the heart and more about making one’s way in life. It was more practical; it had to be. The heat of youthful passion may seem wonderful in the first year, but unless one is prepared for marriage it soon fades and often becomes contentious and hateful. Victorian parents, would customarily stand in the way of marriages they perceived to be “ill-favored.” To us that seems dreadfully repressive, and it was done away with in the 1920’s, but what has the alternative gotten us? Lots and lots of ill-favored matches, a 50 percent divorce rate and a declining faith in the institution. Maybe it’s time to dust off “parental consent” customs. How incredibly Victorian of me to say so!
So, the question remains, is the house making me more Victorian or did we choose the house because I already was Victorian in spirit? I think by now we all know the answer. I have been a devotee of Nineteenth Century literature since I could read, and the illustrations of John Tenniel and Sidney Paget are objects of idolatry. I have always been a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and Jeremy Brett’s interpretation of the character is top drawer largely because it is true to the Victorian environment in which the stories were written. I have already bought a homburg hat am looking seriously at a frock coat, and I may, in spite of the probable torrents of incredulous laughter, attempt a handlebar mustache. Maybe even a goatee to go with it. It’s terribly hard to shave those parts of my face with a straight razor, anyway.
*This is mostly a concept of late-Twentieth Century political rhetoric, but it applied mostly to those classes that had the luxury of a one income household, which is to say the upper-middle class and upper class. The rest weren’t that lucky and both partners as well as the children had to work to survive. The single income household was not a norm for the mid to lower classes, except in movies, until the late 1940’s and 1950’s when it became institutionalized and the children growing up under the influence of the institution applied it retrospectively to “all of history.” But, this is a subject for a future article. The perception of truth depends upon one’s locus.
One comes to simplicity through a rather tangled forest of complex and sophisticated thought processes.
I have, from time to time, relied on my friend and persona Brother Jeremiah of the Order of Buile Suibhne (OBS) to write on subjects of a spiritual nature or on observations regarding the practice of religion in America, one of which was quite critical and caused a bit of a dust-up in the monastery. After a few such articles, it occurred to me that you might like to know a little more about him. So I persuaded him, with some difficulty, to sit for an interview. His natural diffidence would at first not allow him to think he was worthy, such things being reserved to mostly men of some accomplishment, but after much cajolery and the promise that I would make him my signature chili with southern corn bread, he agreed, but only if I replaced the southern cornbread with northern corncake. I may be from the south, but Brother Jeremiah is quick to point out that he is a native of New Jersey, southern New Jersey to be sure, but still decidedly above the Mason/Dixon Line.
People have remarked that we strongly resemble each other, some going so far as to suggest that I have a “costume closet” in my house. I can’t see it myself. I wear glasses; he doesn’t.
 Anyway, we sat down this past November in the courtyard of the monastery for a chat. They were in preparation for the Thanksgiving celebration and I asked him how the monastery celebrated since I saw no turkeys or pilgrims among the decorations, just autumnal draperies and dried flowers.
He said “We observe it as a day of fasting. The Harvest Feasts are over by Hallowe’en so we reserve this day as a remembrance for the sacrifices of the Lenni Lenape Tribe on the East Coast who, of course, don’t see the coming of the Puritan Pilgrims in quite the same was as we do. We light candles and pray that we will be worthy of their sacrifice.”
He pulled a chair out for me and sat on the other side of a square table handsomely tiled in green and white, inlaid with green glass stones.
The Monastery of the Order of Buile Suibhne is set in the Ozark Mountains about twenty miles East of the little village of Crawford’s Notch. Thirty years ago, the monks and nuns of the order purchased an old 1930’s era Tourist Court just off Route 66 from the people who built it, and converted it into the present monastery, thus saving the vintage structure from the fate that has befallen so many others along the “Mother Road.” The main building houses an office, a lobby and a restaurant which were converted into the offices, chapel and dining hall of the monastery. Behind the main building is a courtyard that once was a gravel parking lot but has been converted into a grassy park around which the 30 cabins, faced with the native stone of the Ozarks, are arranged in regular rows. Behind the court are gardens and orchards.
M: Tell me about the monastery. What is Buile Suibhne?
BJ: Ha. In the first place, you pronounced it all wrong; it’s “Bill-ay Siw-nay.” It translates as “Mad Sweeney.”
M: Why would you name a monastery after a madman? Isn’t that…
BJ: Why not? Isn’t madness traditionally associated with divine revelation? Shamans the world over enter into a state of madness to prophesy. John the Baptist, some say, lived in the wilderness in a state of divine madness. In the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar went insane for seven years before he was restored to his senses and became a great seer. Then, there is the Welsh tale of Merlin who lived as a madman in the forest as part of his initiation into magic. There are many examples.
M: And Mad Sweeney?
BJ: Was cursed with madness for a great sin he committed and never fully recovered his wits, but in moments of lucidity he spoke profound and prophetic poetry. Anyone who devotes himself to the spiritual life, it seems, goes back and forth into and out of a divine madness. Ha! We’re all borderline lunatics!
M:Well, in that you don’t differ from most of the rest of us: artists, musicians, poets…
BJ: Financiers, politicians…. The difference is, we know we’re mad. Ha!
M: I see you have women here.
BJ: We’re not Catholic; we are Celtic Christian Universalists. Certainly, women are allowed in the Order and do live together with the monks in the monastery …er … not together-together you understand, they have their cabins and we have ours, unless they’re married, and then, well, obviously they’d share a cabin, if they like, but most move away.
M: But they still remain members.
BJ: Oh, goodness yes, we can’t boot them out will’e- nill’e, now can we? Spiritual journeys are not adversely affected by such unions and may be helped by them. One tends to become less insular in one’s opinions, you know.
M: How many to a cabin?
BJ: Two. We usually like to match pairs of monks with those who are of similar temperaments. Same with the nuns. How I got Brother Seamus as a cabin mate, I do not know. Either there was a tremendous error in the front office or he’s being imposed on me as a penance of some kind. Karma, you know.” (He laughed in a peculiar nasal snort.)
M: And the joined cabins in the back there?
BJ: For the hermits. My good friend Sister Katarina of Värnsgarth is one of those.
M: You have a good friend who is also a hermit? Isn’t that…
BJ: Not at all.
M: I see her around and about the monastery as sociable as can be.
BJ: As sociable as she needs to be, actually. Given a choice, she’d much rather be in her cabin or in Värnsgarth.
M: Värnsgarth is an odd name; it’s like no place I’ve ever heard of.
BJ: Well, I shouldn’t wonder. (He leaned forward and whispered.) She is convinced that she can trace her ancestry back to a mythical country called Värn. She spends all her free time rummaging about in the attic of her collective memory for signs and artifacts of that lost civilization, and I pity the poor monk who dares call into question its existence. She has reserved a small grotto on the grounds and called it Värnsgarth after the legendary gardens of Värn. I think they’re legendary, I’m not quite sure. Anyway, she is convinced that they were and will hear no argument against them.
M: I see.
BJ: It’s very important to her.
M: Of course. Marvelous thing, the imagination.
BJ: Well, it has its own reality and who am I to say it is not more real than that chair you’re sitting on or this sun under which we poor creatures circumambulate?
M: I would never question it.
BJ: Best not.
M: So, she’s a sociable sort of hermit.
BJ: There are two kinds of hermits, you see, There are those who just really dislike people, who consider the species no damned good and want to live apart from all commerce with it. Then there are the progressive hermits who simply want to be in a place where there are no distractions and they can be “fully in the presence of God.” Sister Katerina is one of that sort, and so, when not in ecstasy she is a most cheerful and gregarious companion.
M: Is she in ecstasy often?
BJ: Not as often as she’d like, but I do warn her that one cannot be in ecstasy always; sometimes one must replant one’s feet back on terra firma, if you know what I mean. People have been known to perish from being too long in ecstasy.
M: Really?
BJ: Oh yes, the legends are full of them. You know of course, the tales of the fortunate Hebrew who laid his hands on the Arc of the Covenant and immediately died.
M: Fortunate? We were told it was a punishment from God.
BJ: Well, you would be, wouldn’t you? That point of view is from this material world. If viewed from that other, the event becomes less dire.
M: I suppose, then, it’s the same thing as Sir Galahad looking into the Holy Grail and being relieved of his life.
BJ: Of course. I see we are of one mind on this. In both cases they were transmuted out of the flesh and into a state of the most intimate communion with God. Ecstasy. Once you have seen the Face of God, what else in this world is there left for you to accomplish? In those cases, death is a reward for fully and directly embracing the eternal! Those who don’t die live as madmen.
M: The way you look at things turns everything I have been taught on its ear.
BJ: Yes, I know. We have for far too long been obsessed with punishment. I say we have an adversarial and punitive society precisely because we have an adversarial and punitive religion. Brother Seamus is like that. He’s all about the detailed list of infractions and appropriate punishments. “To restore balance” he says, “To serve justice,” he says, but I think rather it’s because he likes to assert power. It isn’t even about revenge for him, it’s about power. That’s what a too strict adherence to rules will do you.
M: Were you always religious?
BJ: Oh, no, no not at all.
M: Not even as a child?
BJ: Oh, yes, of course, as a child. But when I went to college, I lost the faith of my childhood. Turned into a right proper atheist, if you want to know the truth.
M: You? I can’t imagine!
BJ: True. Quite true.
M: What was the faith of your childhood?
BJ: I won’t tell you that; I will only tell you that it was quite primitive, altogether lacking in complexity and nuance which is what one expects from one’s spirituality as an adult, you know?
M: Really? But, haven’t you said simplicity is the goal of spirituality?
BJ: Yes. Well, one comes to simplicity through a rather tangled forest of complex and sophisticated thought processes. In a way, losing the faith of one’s childhood is an essential step toward gaining positive simplicity, the kind that is yours alone, the kind that means something and can motivate you to your highest self.
M: So the faith of our childhood…
BJ: Is untested. It is pure simplicity based on the perceptions of a child. The God I could understand then is not the God that is at all useful to me now. My “atheist period” was a rejection of that God. One really has to move through that, to slough it off, as it were, step outside of it to see it for what it really is. “When I was a child I thought as a child…”
M: But now I am a man and childish things must be put aside?
BJ: To paraphrase St. Paul, yes. We have to lose for a time, the faith of our youth, even at the risk of becoming an atheist and losing all faith. Some even risk losing their reason, going through a period of madness, like Sweeney. Without that risk, that initiation into adulthood, we remain children with a very primitive faith. There is more rejoicing in Heaven over the recovery of a lost soul precisely because of that! They are more valuable for having risked everything.
M: Does everyone take those risks?
BJ: It … it takes courage, you know? A great deal of courage to risk Hell. No, not everyone does, not everyone can. Not everyone should.
The Interview with Brother Jeremiah will continue in a later article.
“Assume a virtue if you have it not
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this.”
–W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III:4.
 Oh, that monster custom! It is so insidious and difficult to vanquish particularly when it comes to the issue of race which was described as “America’s Original Sin” by the fictional Lord John Marbury in the hit series The West Wing.
We do not yet live in a post-racial society as President Obama would wish, and we will never get there if we do not, as he seems to be doing, “assume the virtue” that is not yet a reality and may indeed feel rather like an ill-fitting coat that we will need to grow into. President Obama refuses on principle to involve himself in racial politics, so much so that, according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, his popularity among the black population, while still high, is slipping because many do not think he’s doing nearly enough for them, or rather not doing what they expected of him.
There are those, both black and white, who have a vested interest in keeping the racial divide open and functioning. Among them are politicians who pick at the wounds to either curry favor with one constituency or play on the fears of another, religious leaders who preach distrust if not hatred of other races, as well as artists who “tell it the way it is” and serve only to perpetuate the way it is, and academics or social commentators who have made their careers from studying and sometimes advancing racial politics. Then there are those, again both white and black, who, without a moment’s thought, see every aspect of their lives through the filter of race.
These must no longer be listened to.
Consider the reactions of those of all political affiliations to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s 2008 observation about then Senator Barack Obama, that he had a good chance of being elected president because of his lighter skin and lack of a “negro” dialect. What a tempest in a teapot that response is! Quite rightly, that tempest has been reduced to a rather inconspicuous burp, significant only in the response to it and the cultural climate that feeds that response.
Reid’s was not a racist statement; it was intended as a compliment. Reid is a vote counter. It’s what he does. He has been described as the best vote counter in Congress. Ried was only guilty of giving voice to this political truth: Because of his ability to appeal to the broadest segment of the American populace in a still racially divided country, Obama had a better than average chance of being the first black president.
Fact.
Period.
End of story.
Oh, but it wasn’t, was it?
No matter what you say there will always be those who are offended; it is their function. It is their job to keep the racial divide open. I speak primarily of the right wing broadcasters and bloggers who have only in the past week become racially sensitive. I tell ya, they’re a lot funnier now that their guys are out of power. It is so very obvious what they are doing that they may as well just shout, “We’re gonna do anything we can to wound the Democrat Party no matter how silly and hypocritical it is!” This, of course, while Reid is gingerly moving the Health Care Bill through Congress. Any connection, do you think?
Some have asked what difference there is between Reid’s “racist” statement and Trent Lott’s praise of Strom Thurmond’s bid for the presidency which cost Lott his Senate seat. Okay, here it is: In the 1948, Democratic Convention, Hubert Humphrey introduced into the platform a strong civil rights plank. In response, Delegate Handy Ellis of Alabama, famously shouted, “The South is no longer going to be the whipping boy of the Democratic Party,” and led most of the Southern Delegation out of the convention; the Mississippi Delegation, including Strom Thurmond, left in its entirety. The Dixiecrat Party was formed and it nominated Thurmond as its presidential candidate. Mind you, it had only one plank in its platform that differed from those of either of the other parties: segregation. Segregation was the only issue. Now, for Lott to say that Thurmond should have been elected in 1948 does inevitably imply, intentionally or not, an endorsement of the Dixiecrat platform. Tsk, tsk. He should have known better.
There! Will that suffice for an answer? Well, I suppose it depends on whom you ask.
As I write, Fox News is reporting that there are ”cracks in the support for Reid in the Democratic Caucus!”
Really?
Not surprisingly, Russ Feingold is mulling over his response as any thoughtful man would. They also quote Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King, who called the remark “sadly outrageous.” Not only is she a conservative pro-life activist who linked the Senator’s comment to her unrelated opposition to his stance on abortion, but her response is hardly the ringing denunciation that the Fox folks imagine. It does not indicate any loss of support for Reid because she doesn’t support him anyway! Come on! You guys aren’t even trying to be objective any more. Even most of the Republican leadership, including Sen. John McCain, is letting the dust settle, willing to let the voters decide in the upcoming election. But, the right wing sycophants at Fox, still gleefully announce a “crack” in Reid’’s support.
Oh, I am so sorry, but it is nothing of the kind.
Actually, despite all the rant from the Right, Reid was being a political realist. By “light skinned” he was referring to a hierarchy of skin color that we all know exists not only among whites, but also within the black community here in America as well as in Africa, India and even now in Saudi Arabia where skin bleaching has become the new thing. I am not a sociologist, so don’t ask me why, but it is so.
Was it the term “negro dialect” so very offensive to the Right?
The word negro in Spanish, as we all know, means nothing more than “black” but we also realize that it is offensive because of its connotations, its association with slavery and Jim Crow and as the root word for “That-Which-Must-not-Be-Uttered.” Of course we must remember that it was also used in the early 1960’s by civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King whose holiday we celebrate Monday, to describe themselves, and that with some pride. Since then we have gone through a plethora of adjectives as the black community sought an accurate and ennobling way to express a racial identity, finally settling on “African-American.” For a time, it sufficed, but even that term isn’t entirely accurate as evidenced by the woman who was quoted as saying that her mission was “the empowerment of African-American women all over the world,” or the white student who emigrated from Africa to America who was barred from submitting a work of art to an “African-American” exhibit because it was common knowledge that African-American meant black.
You do see the problem, do you not?
However, if we abandon African-American as inaccurate, what does that leave us with? “People of Color.” It will not do. It’s too inclusive of all “non-white” persons to be a description of those specifically of black African descent. From a purely linguistic point of view, the only term that comes even remotely close to being geographically inclusive of and still specific to the demographic in question is … “Black.”
Remember “Black Power,” and “Black is beautiful?” Ah, weren’t those the days!
That Reid used the archaic “negro” can be forgiven. We are all products of our enculturation. Let me explain something: When he and I grew up mid-twentieth-century it was common knowledge, based on what was called “craniofacial anthropometry” (thankfully discredited), that there were three distinct recognized races: Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid. These are the terms we who are of a certain age learned and used as boys and young adults; the term “negro,” for those if the Negroid race, was accepted and customary and no one saw any insult in it. We need to be especially mindful of the tendency of those historic influences to bubble up from time to time and we need to be forgiven if they do, because they do not truly express our current beliefs.
“Negro” is not even offensive to every black person, and I’m not just talking about the older ones who grew up with it and are accustomed to it. Ta-Hasisi Coats writes in TheAtlantic.com, “For years I have been labeled a ‘black writer’ with all the degrading connotations of pretentious turtle-necks, spoken word events and boring conferences attended solely by professors of African-American history. Now…I can finally be a ‘Negro Writer’ in the mold of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. BuBois. I’m talking about tweed and sepia sonnets which trade in words like ‘Inglorious’ and ‘O kinsmen’.” There’s something “undeniable epic about the word,” Stanley Crouch writes in the New York Daily News, I can’t hear it without recalling the “magnificent people who used the word to describe themselves” while they were fighting for their and our civil rights. They took the word and “gave it majesty and made it luminous.”*
So, as offensive as “negro dialect” may be to those whose job it is to be offended, Reid was only making a simple political projection, describing a certain manner of speech that is traditionally associated with a specific sub-set within the larger black community, one which has been celebrated in poetry and literature for its beauty and grace, but whose appeal is too limited, in today’s America at least, to produce a viable presidential candidate with mass appeal. It is a truth tacitly acknowledged by two previous black candidates for president, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, both of whom seem to have accepted the role of “forerunner.” They got the public to speak the words “black” and “president” in the same sentence.
Truly, truly I say unto you, however, that all of these terms would be rendered politically moot if we really did live in a race-neutral or post-racial society. Would that we did! Would that we lived in a world where a man like Obama could be elected to President of the United States and we would see nothing very remarkable in that. We’re not there yet and perhaps won’t be for another generation. And so we, like Barack Obama, need to “assume the virtue” of a post-racial society where differences are recognized and celebrated but not used to degrade or demean or to gain political advantage, even while we allow that such a society has not been achieved.
*These quotes, edited, appeared in the 22Jan2010 edition of The Week, p17.
As usual, I am so ahead of the curve that I have only recently become aware of the MTV series, Jersey Shore. Normally I don’t, with a few exceptions, get involved in series TV, so I have no intention of allowing myself to become addicted to this show. What little I have seen of it, though, does make me a little nostalgic for my “not so misspent a youth as I might wish.”
 I’m reminded, inevitably perhaps, of the heady times all us Baby Boomers spent at the New Jersey Shore in the sixties before they became The Sixties. I may well be a native of the South, but I was also a four year sojourner in South Jersey, during the entirety of my high school years. I lived one fifth of the way along State Highway 70 between Philadelphia and Atlantic City on the second traffic circle where Olga’s Diner reigned like a vintage dowager duchess, in a rural settlement called Marlton, so named, I was told, because of the viscosity of its soil which was almost entirely composed of gray clay, or “marl,”of the kind from which bricks and ceramics are made. Most of the Colonial buildings on the upper east coast have a bit of Marlton clay in them.
We were frequent visitors to the New Jersey Shore, which we called just “The Shwah” as if there were only one, but in fact there were many, chief among which in my memory are Ocean City and its big sister, Atlantic City, although, as the show illustrates, there were many communities along that particular stretch of the Atlantic that also boasted their own boardwalks. It has all changed now, of course, the casinos have pretty much taken over, but in the mid-sixties the Atlantic City Boardwalk was filled with open fronted jewelry stores, kitchenware stores, salt water taffy booths, miniature golf courses, carnival rides, soft pretzel stands, bars and pizza shops. I swear there might even have been insurance and real estate offices in residence there and why not? It was all about hucksterism. If it was cheap and gaudy, loud and bellicose, it was on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, the epitome of the Latin phrase, caveat emptor.
Oh, yeah! There was ocean, sun and sand there, too.
My most memorable trip to the New Jersey Shore was with a group of cast members from the Lenape Regional High School Class of 1965 Senior Play, an innocuous little pastiche called “The Boyfriend,” in which I was fortunate enough to have won the leading role of the shy, bumbling boyfriend himself. It wasn’t much of a stretch, for the words shy and bumbling seemed tailor made to define me throughout my tenure in high school for most of which I was all but invisible. The Senior Play made me visible. And for the first time, I started gaining respect, not only of the gangster kid who in my Freshman year terrorized me, but also of a number of attractive young ladies. The upshot, of course, was that I was suddenly one of the cool kids and was invited to things like a day-trip to the shore.
The play was over and it was early spring, far too early for the crowds; there was still a cold gray bite to the ocean breeze. It was obvious to me that the other kids had done this before and pretty much knew what was expected of a day-trip to a beach-house at the shore that belonged to the parents of one of them, very similar to the one in the TV series. I was invited because of my new status, but it was all very new to me. I didn’t drink so I had to turn down the beer that was offered. “I respect you for it,” the boy said, but I heard, “What a nerd!” Also, I wasn’t inclined to snuggle with the girls inside the several sleeping bags brought along specifically for snuggling in something resembling privacy. So, I found myself walking alone toward one of the rock jetties and contemplating my immediate future after graduation.
I had been accepted to college and would at the end of the summer be heading off to the Mid-West and uncertainty, for I must say I wasn’t the most promising of students and was less than confident about my prospects. I entered high school as a General Education student and so was not really prepared for college. In those days, you see, high school students were divided into categories; those who were talented and smart would be guided into the College Preparatory program where all the Honor Students came from. The Gen Ed program was for the guys who would end up pumping your gas and hawking pizza on the Boardwalk.
For those who have never been to the New Jersey Shore, about every mile or so, there are long piles  of huge grey boulders piled up about ten feet high on the beach and extending out some hundred yards into the surf, long arms of rock that are intended to break up the tides and keep the sand in place on the beach as God and the Chamber of Commerce intended. I sat on one of the rocks and looked out to the sea which was churning and heaving with an approaching storm. Dark clouds hung low in the sky and wave upon wave rushed toward the shore, breaking on the jetty and sending fountains of spray into the air. Somehow the whole atmosphere fitted my mood. Every wave that broke upon the jetty seemed to me a metaphor for my doomed ambitions.
“You’re sitting in the wrong place!” a voice from behind me laughed. I turned. It was Roger, the guy who had played my father, a rather large fellow with a sharp look about him and a biting wit. “You need to be out there,” he said, pointing his chin to the end of the jetty where the biggest waves were breaking.
“Isn’t that illegal?” I answered.
“Probably!” He replied and mounted the first boulder.
“You could get swept off the rocks and pulled into the ocean.” I said.
“Yep. Come on. Try it. I guarantee you won’t regret it, unless of course you fall between the rocks. HA!.” He clumsily leaped from boulder to boulder until he got halfway along its length, about where the sand met the water, turned and motioned me out. I followed, slowly and cautiously, carefully jumping rocks so as not to slip on the wet surfaces. In the spaces between the rocks ,the ocean surged and foamed under me. If I fell between the rocks I was lost for sure. Still he beckoned me, turned and continued on.
Not to be outdone, I threw my fate to the tempestuous tide and followed him until we got to the end of the jetty, the very last rock, the one that bore the full brunt of each wave. There, he spread wide his arms and breathed deeply. “Come on, get out here. Don’t look at the rocks; just look at the ocean.”
I stood with my arms spread wide like Charleton Heston parting the Red Sea. I looked out over the vastness of the ocean which melded with the squall-line of the clouds on the distant and almost indiscernible horizon. The wind whipped around me and the salt spray stung my skin as wave after twenty-foot wave broke over the rock I stood on, sometimes almost washing me off. But, I kept my balance, albeit with some difficulty. It was horrifying and at the same time, almost with the same breath, painfully exhilarating. My friend and I looked at each other and we both laughed wildly, a deep and loud laugh that still echoes in my memory five decades later.
An excerpt from “O’Shaughnessey: The Faerie Circle”
After her father, Bobby Mahoney, is taken by the Faerie King Finvarra and held prisoner under Knockmaa in Galway, twelve-year-old Margaret is made to confront the possibility that everyone in the world is not dotty, and that there really might be an “invisible world,” that Moira McCarthy might be right in saying that “The five-senses world is a small island in a vast ocean of all we do not know and cannot see; in that ocean, there may be faeries.”
 As she walked toward the hilltop, she removed her glasses and intentionally blurred her vision. To the young girl’s mind, the tree trunks and twisted limbs looked like ancient warriors dressed for battle. The fallen limbs and stones did resemble misshapen creatures and it occurred to her that perhaps these natural formations suggested to her the things she saw in her dreams, much the same way that the shape of a stone formation high above the port of Sligo gave rise to hundreds of stories about an old woman sitting there looking out to sea, who in the popular imagination became the Watcher on the Rock.
From some small remote corner of her came the irresistible impulse to dance. She started slowly, stepping lightly through the mist-covered grasses and waving her arms like tree branches over her head and around her shoulders. She thought she heard music rather like the sound of a violin welling up inside her; it had to be from inside her because she could not otherwise place its origin. She began to sway her shoulders and back to the strange rhythm of that music, which rose from her, seemed to be inside her and around her all at once and she gladly gave herself to it. She jumped about, her arms waved, her hair whipped around her face and down along her body as she whirled, leapt lightly and kicked her feet out in front of her. She had danced before, of course, but always hesitantly as though afraid to make the wrong step or an awkward move. This was the first time she felt herself one with the dance, felt the power grow from her center where the heart lies, up through her shoulders and arms, and down through her hips, knees, and toes, and she understood how Fionna Donnelly felt. “They couldn’t tell the dancer from the dance.” She didn’t know how long
she danced. Here was no time, here was no place. Here she was alone and free, and touching eternity. A voice said, “The moment had to have been born in Faerie!” And she stopped dancing. The world came back to her as she knew it and she looked around to find if anyone had seen her acting so foolishly.
After assuring herself that she was indeed alone, that Moira McCarthy was nowhere in sight, she continued walking toward the stump where Moira had sat earlier in the day and where Bobby had sat the night he disappeared. Curious, she gazed at the stump, which seemed to her not at all unusual. It had been carved into a chair by Liam McCarthy and polished smooth over the years by a number of well fed backsides. …
She wanted to sit in it, but was hesitant, afraid of being herself taken away to the underground court of Knockmaa.
“Oh, piffle!” she said, shaking her head. “It’s just an old hunk of wood, nothing to be afraid of.” She turned and sat, holding her breath, scooting back until she sank into the embrace of the hard wood. It occurred to her, looking at it from the inside, that is was rather like a throne, and she allowed herself to pretend, for a moment, that she was a queen. “Off with her head,” she said, remembering the Queen of Hearts’ favorite phrase. She laughed and leaned further back into the stump.
A light breeze blew the mist around her and she watched as it encircled her ever closer until she thought she heard in the wind the sound of a voice … no, voices, whispering to her, or to each other, she couldn’t tell.
“Pretty human child.”
“So young and sound.”
“Just right for a King.”
“Pity she’s bound.”
“Pretty child, take the bar of iron from off your neck and come with us.”
“Pretty Margaret of the auburn curls, come.”
“See the delights awaiting you in the forest.”
“Follow us under the lake, into the earth.”
“Lord Finvarra wants to speak with you.”
“Come away, oh human child.”
Margaret was startled. She remembered that line from the William Butler Yeats poem she’d read before the trip, an assignment from Mrs. Crumb, the librarian at school, “to prepare you for Ireland.” And, now, Margaret wondered if the poem she’d read suggested those words to her, or did Yeats, having heard the voices himself, put them into the poem in the first place? It was a puzzle, and Margaret did love puzzles. She began to recite it:
Come away, O human child!
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
Than you can understand.”
And, that was all she could remember.
She wondered why, of all poems, Mrs. Crumb had shown her that one. Margaret had told her she was going to visit a shenache in Ireland, and the librarian had gotten a strange mischievous glint in her eye and took from her shelf a book of Yeats poems.
“Then, you’ll want these,” she’d said with a giggle and a wink, “and, pay attention when you’re there.”
Then Mrs. Crumb had read her the poem very dramatically in a voice that sang while she’d gestured wildly with her hand as though clearing away cob-webs and almost knocked her glasses off her nose:
Come away, O human child!
To the woods and waters wild,
With a faerie, hand in hand…
And Margaret finished it out loud. “…For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand…” The breeze stirred the hazel trees and she sank further into the oak stump.
Yes, she was tired of weeping, tired of understanding, tired of her parents unreasonable expectations of her, of La Madeleine Academy for (Exceptional) Young Ladies and its rigid standards and its constant pushing to “compete in a man’s world,” tired of Aunt Maggie’s flakey friends and their pressures on her to “free yourself from conventional and patriarchal linear thinking.” She was tired of everything. If only she could just go away like Daddy.
The voices still called to her and she felt herself dozing. Her head nodded and her hand lifted to the collar where she had placed Moira McCarthy’s steel needle.
“Come away, O human child … for the world’s more full of weeping … weeping … weeping …”
She started to pull the pin out.
“Come away …”
Her eyes closed, a sweet smell of jasmine and sage floated to her nostrils, and she smiled contentedly. She felt the damp mist closing in on her. She heard a buzzing in her ears and gentle music like reeds and bells and the sound of tinkling laughter.
“Come away.”
In all her life, she had never felt so peaceful. She didn’t know how long she’d sat there; time seemed to stand still. No, it disappeared altogether.
“With a faerie hand in hand.”
She felt the gentle pull of hands, soft and subtle as a kiss, stroking her shoulders and arms, lifting her out of the chair, and she was glad to go with them wherever they led. Her head was filled with color and light and the sweet sounds of unearthly music, and she laughed with the sheer delight of it. Tears of pure joy squeezed from between her closed eyelids.
“Come away, oh human child.”
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