Lord, let our souls be…
wide, sweet spaces kept for thee; where holy thoughts pass up and down
And fervent longings watch and wait thy coming.
― Julian of Norwich

I discovered the inimitable beauty of Dame Julian of Norwich in a rather roundabout way. My first job out of college was a mind-numbing affair as a receptionist for an Ophthalmologist, eight hours a day, five days a week. There were two quite civilized perks to this job, however: the doctors gave us a full hour for lunch, and the office was two short blocks from a bookstore. Not just any bookstore, mind you, but a bibliophilic wonderland called The Library Ltd. Each day, I ate my bologna sandwich en route at 12:05 so as not to waste time and arrived on the bookstore steps at 12:07. And a more pleasant hour of time spent, I even now would be hard pressed to find.

They had art books. They had a whole section with prints of Old Masters you could leaf through and feel the art of centuries slipping through your fingers. They had poetry – gorgeously illustrated. You could buy leather journals and fountain pens with a designed cache that made you feel like an actual writer. They didn’t mind if you made yourself quite at home and sat on the floor to peruse a new-found treasure. I loved this place. But by far the very best thing about this storefront bookstore was that it was so little everyone knew everyone else. I would see the same people in scrubs, in power suits, in workmen coveralls all milling about the aisles on specific days, each one absorbed in the transporting power of books. The owners of this store were two lovely eccentrics, who practiced the art of keen observation without being suspected of doing so. They made a mental note of what we asked about, what kinds of books pulled us in like lodestones; and they carefully eyed each and every book we piled before them at the check out counter. It was these two lovely women who made the gracious introductions to my future friend. “I think I found something you might like,” said the quiet one with the shiny eyes one afternoon. She handed me two slim volumes of daily readings written by a Julian of Norwich. I read a few sentences and slowly slipped to the floor. I was lost for an hour, and literally had to run the two blocks back to work. But I was now the proud owner of the magic that is Julian in a small paper bag, handed to me with a triumphant smile by the lady with the quiet eyes.

I did not know who Julian was back then. I was simply content with what she was saying and how she was saying it. That was enough for me. Only much later was I to discover her story, the marvelous stuff of Medieval legend really, which seemed to fit so aesthetically with her ethereal writings about the gracious love of God, who reassured her that He made “all manner of things well”.

Julian was not her real name. No one was ever to recall her real name. She was to take the name of the Church in Norwich, England where she was ensconced as an anchoress: St. Julian’s Catholic Church. But this is to get ahead of the story.

Julian was born in 1343 and thought to be the daughter of a well-to-do merchant who lived in the thriving port city of Norwich, England. Many historians believe she must have been a young wife and mother of only nineteen when she lost her husband and children during a devastating plague, especially virulent among children, that had ravaged the city of Norwich. She continued to live in the city, however, and at the age of thirty-one, she herself became gravely ill. For three days she lay in pain, with a strange paralysis creeping up through her body.

She sank into a delirious fever and the priest was sent for. He began to administer the last rites and blessed her with his crucifix clutched in his hand above her. And then a most mysterious thing happened. She gazed upon that crucifix and it came alive in the priest’s hands. All that grace stirred within and she received 15 visions in succession on that day. The last vision was to come on the next day. And when these visions were complete and began swimming in her memory, she slowly recovered her health, and began to write them down.

She wrote in a flurry trying to remember the voice and face of Jesus Crucified as He assured her that His sufferings united to the sufferings of all humanity are transformed into a kind of deep and lasting joy by His unfolding infinite love making all things suffering into all things well. That His love feeds and nourishes us and reaches down to comfort and carry our souls as gently as a mother carries a babe. It was a timely message for the world Julian inhabited. The poor beleaguered people of that plague ridden era knew great suffering: physical as well as emotional. They lost their husbands, their wives, their children. Life had become full of suffering and sorrow seemingly without meaning.

Julian, who had lost all she loved most dearly, felt her share of this devastating pain and seeming abandonment. In her visions, Jesus spoke to her in the most intimate and endearing terms. He assured her in these visions that He takes care of all and that He is in all and for all. It is not an empty optimism that she is asked to give, but is, as Dr. Rowan Williams, a Julian scholar, points out: “the steady gaze of God looking at her and saying, ‘Trust Me’ I will bring it all together.” Julian was to be, like St. Margaret Mary, and Sister Faustina in their times, a bearer of God’s mercy to the world. But for Julian, this message would travel the ages in as intimate and quietly familiar a manner as it had been received from Jesus. One soul to another, one friend’s hands to another down through centuries. But for the moment, in the secret certainty of her heart it lay hidden and guarded until the proper time was to reveal itself. She fittingly named it: Revelations of Divine Love.

Feeling now that her life had changed entirely, she made the singular decision to become an anchoress. To vow poverty, chastity and stability of abode for the rest of her life. This ‘abode’ was to be one room built into the side of St. Julian’s Church, where she was walled in and was to remain for the next thirty years. There were only three doors in this hermitage. The one most important to this story was a kind of window that looked out upon the busy main road leading up from the port of Norwich, where she would talk to pilgrims of all sorts seeking her wisdom and advice. But for the most part she lived in quiet solitude, and in this silent, prayerful place Julian was to spend those many years examining her revelations, praying over them and slowly developing her own profound theology from the words Christ had spoken to her from His cross of mercy. She added to her original writings and fleshed them out with this newfound wisdom. She no doubt shared them with the pilgrims tapping at her window, to give them comfort and hope. Julian admitted humbly that she was only, “a poor unlettered creature,” but, “just because I am a poor woman why can I not write of the goodness of God?” Indeed. Jesus was to help her in this task of sharing his love with the outside world in a most marvelous way.

Every legend worth its weight has its own beautiful mystery. Julian was to have hers. When she died in 1416, there was no trace of a manuscript in her cell. It had vanished. All her years in this holy bower, the reason for her life, the deepest thoughts of her heart were gone. Who had she given them to among her cherished friends? Whose hands were entrusted with this Divine message? What friend had she loved and trusted enough to pass on this message of mercy? Some say it was a woman named Margery Kempf an Englishwoman who had a penchant for making Pilgrimages. She often stopped at Julian’s window to pray and talk with her friend when she passed through Norwich. We know this because she herself wrote a book (perhaps inspired by Julian) and in it she describes her meetings with the anchoress. Margery took the manuscript and began to lend it to her closest friends to copy and they in turn shared it with other friends. These copies became part of their family libraries. It was also rumored that she entrusted Julian’s original Manuscript to the monks of Walsingham Abbey for safe keeping. No one was to know for sure.

Many years passed, into the reign of Henry VIII of England. It was he who would usher in the Protestant persecution of the Catholic Church. Monasteries were seized for the crown and their books destroyed. In 1538 Walsingham Abbey suffered this fate and was seized by the crown and the monks scattered. Julian’s manuscript was not heard of for many years after this. Had it been destroyed with the rest of Walsingham’s possessions?

Then, in 1623, during the reign of James I, a small group of nine young Englishwomen from wealthy Catholic families felt the call of God to be Benedictine nuns. Surely unwelcomed in a predominantly prostestant England they, with the help of a Benedictine monk, traveled to France to make a foundation at Cambrai. One of these girls, all of seventeen, was Helen More (who would become Dame Gertrude More), the great, great grand-daughter of St. Thomas More. Her father Cresacre More had provided the original endowment for this foundation. It is also thought he provided something more precious: Julian’s manuscript.

Had it wended its way to him through the years after the destruction of Walsingham? Had the monks smuggled it out under the nose of Henry all those years ago? Had perhaps Julian’s manuscript been held by the likes of Helen’s great, great Aunt Margaret, who had been so highly educated by her own father, Sir Thomas. It is a warming thought that St. Thomas might have known of this manuscript kept at Walsingham and traveled there to read it with delight before he died in 1534. In any event, it was certain these nine young nuns had it in their possession when they traveled the English Channel to their new home at Cambrai. At least five copies made from the original manuscript were written out in their scriptorium and are listed in the library’s ancient ledger of 1000 volumes that has survived until today.

Also, each of these nuns had her own spiritual journal of sorts – much like we do now – filled with revelations they discovered in their reading and wanted to remember. Many of these thoughts had Julian’s name at the bottom. One of the nuns’ later chaplains, Serenus de Cressy had also made his own version of the text in 1670 after reading the nun’s copy. His translation was eventually published and had a following outside the monastery. It seems Julian’s manuscript had weathered the Protestant Reformation and was to remain safely ensconced with the nuns of Cambrai for the next 170 years, when they would face the terror of the French Revolution.

During the height of that revolution, the nuns were not spared. On October 18, 1793 there was a loud knocking on the door of the Monastery in Cambrai and the French soldiers told the nuns they needed to be ready in 15 minutes and could not take anything with them but a small bundle each. They were put in open carts and taken to prison in Compiegne. Mingled among them were the sixteen famous Carmelite sisters of Compiegne who would go to their death in Paris singing hymns of praise. The Benedictine Sisters thought this too would be their fate. But before they were called to the guillotine, they were able to convince the French to let them be exiled to England. And so this remnant of Benedictine nuns escaped to England dressed in the very clothes their martyred Carmelite sisters had left behind.

Stanbrook Abbey

They returned with nothing but their bundles and founded a new Monastery in England named Stanbrook Abbey. All the books in Cambrai had tragically been destroyed…their whole library vanished. Revelations of Divine Love was presumed lost forever. But God had other plans.
Many years passed and in 1901 a most unlikely young woman was to make a wonderful discovery. Grace Warrack, a member of the Scotts Presbyterian Church, somehow had in her possession a rare book called Revelations of Divine Love as translated by a Serenus Cressy. Perhaps she was drawn by its message of beauty and love. But she did not stop at this translation. She wanted to find the original manuscript written by the hand of Julian herself, so taken was she with this woman’s heart. She doggedly followed some clues that led her to The British Library.

There, in the reading room of ancient manuscripts, she came upon the collection of one Hans Sloane, a wealthy doctor, who had bequeathed all 50,000 books in his vast library to his country. Grace scanned the titles of this collection and came upon: MS Sloane 2499 which simply had this description: Revelations to one who could not read a letter. She discovers that this “one” is none other than Julian of Norwich, who in fact did quite well at reading “letters.” Grace had miraculously found the one existing copy of the original five made in France by the Benedictine nuns, sitting there in front of her. One of those nuns long ago had presumably put it in her bundle when escaping France. It was brittle and faded but Grace copied it down painstakingly for the next month, returning day after day to the library. It is through Grace Warrack, a Scots Presbyterian, that the world was to discover the beauty of Dame Julian of Norwich at last.

The story does have a bittersweet ending. The original copy of Dame Julian’s Manuscript was never found, although it is still searched for by eager historians devoted to Julian. Did the nuns hide it away? I think it would be so fitting if it is sitting quite happily on a simple bookshelf somewhere in the French countryside. Julian herself did not want to be remembered as anyone in particular – she called herself a simple, unlettered creature. She only wanted her revelations to be remembered, and God’s mercy to spread like a vine over a barren plain. And truly His mercy has taken an epic journey through hardships and human hatred and war and persecution and has testified down through the ages that the mercy of God truly endures forever. From England to France and back to England. On to Scotland and eventually across the ocean to a busy street in my hometown, placed in my own two hands by a woman with quiet eyes. She had a notion that I would like her. And it is thus that Dame Julian lives on.

Denise Trull is the mother of seven grown, adventurous children, and has recently acquired the illustrious title of grandmother. She lives with her husband Tony in St Louis Missouri where she reads, writes, and ruminates on the beauty of life. She is a lover of the written word in all its forms.

My favorite task in the time I spent working in a cemetery was, by far, checking freshly dug graves. Full size graves for traditional burials would be dug by backhoe a day or two before, and I would arrive by seven the morning of the funeral to ensure everything had remained in good order through the night.

Late fall through early spring the sun was late to rise, so the grounds were dark. I’d angle my Toyota Corolla on the buckling asphalt road to stretch my high beams between headstones, bouncing their light off polished granite and rousing white tail deer that bedded down overnight on the graves. A shallow layer of black topsoil concealed clay beneath, highly prone to cave in. Lifting the plywood covering off the empty grave, I’d shine my cell phone’s flashlight around the sides and bottom and check for collapse or deep standing water in need of pumping out. My text to our gravedigger would either confirm that all was well for the day’s burial, or he needed to start his drive to our cemetery as soon as possible.

I’ve seen a lot of empty graves.

The dimensions assigned to a grave are four feet by eleven feet and each is mapped by three numbers corresponding to block, lot, and space. The grave is dug to specs of the vault a family chooses in which to place the casket, and the remaining area accommodates a headstone. Over months working with these numbers, my thoughts began to lend themselves to precise measurement and coordinates as well, in the form of poetry. It was a gradual but persistent inclination, at first unnoticed until I realized that the dark and solitary early mornings examining empty graves naturally trained themselves into stanzas in my mind.

I had poems for different circumstances, such as recalling memorized grave numbers, holding the rhythm of my stride to certain points in the cemetery, and my favorites for mornings I discovered a grave had in fact caved. Despite our gravedigger’s good nature and patience, I never texted him my little ditties. My morning report was either simply “Looks good, Gravedigger!” or a brief description of how advanced the cave in was. In my head, however, something akin to this is what was ringing:

Good morning, Gravedigger!
Grave’s south wall caved last night.
Wet clay gave way, neighbor
Exposed now on the right.

Adjacent walls sheer, deep.
Use our small backhoe’s maw.
Scrape the floor, quick clean sweep,
Won’t barely fill its jaw.

Our ravine’s edge is steep,
Its slope so slick with dew.
Careful, Gravedigger, keep
Safe. Let’s not bury you.

This is all to say working among the graves became an experiential form of logic, a principle of organization intuited through whiplash inducing ranges of spatial and temporal relationships from the dates, countries and lineages engraved on the stones and their sheer number, to accommodating the next death that occurred, to, in the morning, lifting the plywood and discovering the remarkable state of emptiness yawning at my work boots’ toes.

At the especially tragic death of one young man from our parish last year, those close to him and his extended refugee community gathered, with wailing, to entrust his remains to the grave I’d checked that morning. I do not mean crying, but wailing. Everything that morning seemed to proceed in haste as his grave was in the first lot nearest the road, and in only a few steps the pall bearers lifted his casket from the white hearse and set it on the vault rig over the grave. The mourners parked within feet of the grave and congregated near the heap of dirt at its side.

I stood back from the mourners, along the ravine’s timber at the heart of our grounds where fox and deer would dart for camouflage during burials. Fox hid deep, but deer lingered near me on its edge. What appeared to be attentive listening to the priest and prayers of commendation on the part of our does and fawns was really impatience. They were eager to eat the floral sprays thick with roses and carnations they’d grown to expect would be taken from the casket’s lid to be left on freshly mounded dirt, once the backhoe filled the grave and was driven back to the shed.

Although familiar with the culture of this community and how they grieve, I was caught off guard when the wailing began. Even from the other side of the road their wailing visibly shook me and I reverberated with it, just like harmonics in tuning strings to each other on an instrument. It grew to a crescendo as the vault setter cranked his rig’s handle, lowering the young man’s corpse into the ground. My body and soul shuddered in recognition, but it wasn’t recognition of the mourners’ sorrow. It was, rather, the pain I experienced giving birth to my five children, the shock and release of them no longer held in my body. The same as this young man in the act of being separated from us by death.

The funeral director joined me, and together we watched as mourners took turns shoveling clotted clay and throwing fistfuls in bare handed, their wailing now resolved into song as they did the heavy work of filling the entire grave themselves. Deer would not wait for the backhoe that morning. “Have you ever been in the room with a woman in labor?” I asked the funeral director, struggling to regulate my breath as we watched the heap of dirt next to the grave grow smaller and smaller. “It feels like the exact same thing. It’s the same thing.” He had, at the birth of his own children, and he agreed.

I apologized for what I was afraid he’d take as a lack of professionalism, holding my lower abdomen with one hand, pressing the other against my heart. But his response surprised me: “Never get used to it. I’ve never gotten used to it.”

Because of my time at the cemetery I take deep solace in Holy Saturday, in Jesus’ sanctification of the graves of all who have gone to their deaths marked with the sign of faith. The earth received her King with joy in Christ’s incarnation, and again in scandal and sorrow on Good Friday when he was laid in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, but the earth will receive him yet again on the Last Day when all the dead will rise from the graves we bury them in. I hear this hope extended to those gathered for prayers of committal each time they are recited in our burial rites and I experience an overpowering longing for that Day, much like the deer peering through the underbrush of the ravine hanging on the same words. There is nowhere Christ has not been, nowhere he hasn’t gone in search of us, and nowhere we aren’t meant to follow him. This is the promise of the Resurrection.

I want to offer this reassurance to those I’m close to who mourn, but know better than attempting to infuse them with my weirdly conditioned joy at the sight of an empty and intact grave, or to share an odd bit of verse developed through months spent walking over consecrated ground. Rather than sharing anything like this, all I ever say to those who have lost someone they love is “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

What I really want to tell them is as we witness those we love being born to eternal life, our grieving can be as intense as the agony of childbirth, just as it racked me that morning along the ravine. I want to reassure those mourning that through the corporal work of mercy of burying the dead you deliver your loved one’s mortal body to the embrace of the earth, which cradles your beloved in the grave’s dimensions, until the day we all rise and face the East to hail Christ’s return. I want people to experience the mystery of how our birth and death, in the manner of Christ’s, share form and logic as stanzas in a poem do meter and rhyme. I especially want those of us who profess the Catholic faith to tune ourselves to the Life we find in Christ through scripture, sacraments, and the prayer of the Church and allow that harmonic to resound in us when it is struck elsewhere, most strongly in the face of death.

Every grave is meant, ultimately, to be as empty as Christ’s tomb was Easter Sunday. I had the great gift of experiencing this hope in the emptiness of each grave I inspected, during the same early dawn hour the myrrh bearing women discovered Christ had risen from his. While we wait for the fulfillment of that hope and especially as we commemorate the Triduum:

Lord Jesus Christ,
by your own three days in the tomb,
you hallowed the graves of all who believe in you
and so made the grave a sign of hope
that promises resurrection
even as it claims our mortal bodies.

Grant that our brothers and sisters may sleep here in peace
until you awaken them to glory,
for you are the resurrection and the life.
Then they will see you face to face
and in your light will see light
and know the splendor of God,
for you live and reign forever and ever.

“Icon Myrrhbearing Women” by bobosh_t is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Ann Thomas lives in Iowa City, Iowa with her husband and five children.  Her essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Image Journal, Forma, and St. Austin Review, as well as many others.  She serves as managing editor of Dappled Things. 

If I had to choose two ills at the heart of our present American moment, lack of regard for both Mystery and humor would be high on the list. National dialogue suffers from a high degree of cheerlessness. To make a joke is to risk being canceled. And mainstream discourse is insufferably materialistic, concerned only with human capacity to perfect the world. Perhaps the absence of mystery, wonder, and transcendence is causally related to the dearth of laughter?

In light of the preceding, it was with utter delight that I came across novelist Daniel Taylor recently and his Jon Mote mystery series, published by Slant. For not only does Taylor take Mystery and Big Questions seriously, but he is laugh-out-loud funny. The three books in the series thus far (Death Comes for the Deconstructionist, Do We Not Bleed?, and Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees) follow narrator Jon Mote as he, sometimes unwillingly and unwittingly, investigates and helps solve a series of murders that pop up in his life. While these books are real page-turners that tell compelling stories, don’t be fooled by their classification as “murder mysteries”: the books defy genre. Equal part bildungsroman, psychological thriller, existential exploratory, family drama, and Homeric quest for the meaning of life, Taylor’s series is all parts humorous.

And so it was with deep gratitude that I found these books this summer as my beloved Twin Cities went up in smoke after George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing riots. I soon turned to Jon Mote to help make sense of it all. I followed him as he traveled from Saint Paul to Minneapolis to the far Minnesota North country, seeking the same answers that Jon sought: why do terrible things happen to good people? Where does this human capacity for great violence and evil come from? Can unity, joy, and peace ever be experienced on earth? Why do we feel so alone, so unable to experience human connection, relationship, and community? What is truth? If Christ is King, why does Satan seem to sit on earth’s throne? And while Jon hasn’t yet provided me all the answers, I am deeply grateful for his company this past challenging summer, for taking some of the weight off my back, and for making me laugh.

Because I couldn’t get enough of Jon Mote, I recently reached out to Daniel Taylor to ask when I could expect more! In his characteristic wit and wisdom, Taylor generously answered this question, and the many others, I asked about faith, fiction, humor, and our need for stories. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

– Jeffrey Wald

JAW: Who is Daniel Taylor? What, if anything, should a reader know about you before diving into your fiction?

DWT: I was educated as an English major in the last days of the New Criticism hegemony, many years ago. The New Critics said you don’t need to know anything about the writer when reading the work. In fact such knowledge might get in the way of understanding. Nevertheless, here are a few random biographical details: old, white, male, raised in California with five formative years as a boy in Texas, raised Protestant fundamentalist and not sorry about it (though they would no longer find me a kindred spirit), believe in the centrality of the virtues (both classic and Judeo-Christian), also believe in the continued reality and relevance of the good, the true, and the beautiful, a Dodger fan (a competing religion in my childhood), usefully and contentedly married (four adult children, eleven grandchildren—ten of them girls), and on and on. Lean toward a somewhat satiric but not jaundiced take on life, rescued from cynicism by God’s work in human history.

JAW: We love the idea of the precocious novelist. Your fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald was 24 when he wrote This Side of Paradise. Mary Shelley was under 20 when she completed Frankenstein. You, however, did not begin publishing fiction until later in life, the first of your Jon Mote mysteries coming out in 2014, after publishing nearly a dozen nonfiction books dealing with faith, doubt, and the importance of stories. Have you only recently begun writing fiction? Or have you always been a fiction writer and only recently begun publishing? What propelled you into fiction writing?

DWT: After quitting a job I didn’t like in my twenties, I spent some time writing short stories. Published two or three later but knew them not to be all that good. Put fiction writing on the shelf for around twenty years and took it up again in the early 1990’s. Worked on a novel on and off (mostly off) for twenty years, give or take, but hadn’t touched it for maybe four years when I got a call from an editor, Greg Wolfe, who knew I had a novel in some form and asked to see it. That eventually became the first in the Jon Mote series, Death Comes for the Deconstructionist. I guess I was “propelled” into writing longer fiction by a few decades of teaching great novels and deciding to try my hand. And I was propelled into actually publishing fiction by a phone call.

JAW: I recently read a fantastic little book called Avenues of Faith. I loved the premise of the book: an interviewer asked Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor to name and discuss the five books that have most impacted his faith. So, taking a cue from that playbook, what are the three fiction books that have most impacted/influenced you as a novelist?

DWT: “Most” is asking too much on short notice, but three that come to mind are Moby Dick, Wise Blood, and The Lord of the Rings (maybe). I could say a lot of about each one, and I’m less sure about Tolkien than the other two, but a long explanation of the choices would include things like narrative voice, moral seriousness, use of metaphor, the mix of humor and profundity, questing, and openness to transcendence.

JAW: You have previously written about the power and influence of stories, including writing a book called Tell Me a Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories. Could you discuss the role that stories have in our lives, and in your own life? In what way might stories open up the possibility for faith that, perhaps, straight philosophy or theology might not?

DWT: This requires a book-length answer, which is why I wrote a book to try to answer it. In fact, it requires a library. Very briefly, we are story-shaped creatures. We are born into stories, live in them, and die in them. They tell us who we are, what is true, what we are to do, and what happens to us when we die. Stories are central, in part, because the brain insists on it. It is constantly trying to find a story line in all the data—from the senses, from consciousness, from intuition and imagination—that constantly bombards it. Without a story of what’s going on, the brain (and we) cannot survive. All human achievement—starting with survival—is dependent on story telling of one kind or another.

JAW: I love that the Jon Mote series is set in my adopted state, Minnesota, predominantly in the Twin Cities. In fact, pre-pandemic, I biked across Wabasha Bridge into work, crossing over Jon’s fictional houseboat between Raspberry and Harriet Islands near downtown Saint Paul. Talk about the sense of place in this series. How important is Minnesota in your overall vision for these stories?

DWT: Minnesota, per se, is not that important, but place is. Like you, I’m not a native Minnesotan, though I have now lived here much longer than anywhere else. If I had been living somewhere else, I would draw on those local places. (In fact, I put Santa Barbara, the closest thing I have to a hometown, in the third novel, just as a tip of the hat to my roots.) I fix these novels in real places—with names and descriptions—because novels, like we human beings, are creatures of the physical. We assign significance to specific physical places because they are tied up in the details of our lives, not just as ‘where something happened,” but as influences on—as part of—what happened. I used to tell my lit students, “a setting is simply another character in a story.”

The second reason I try to locate action in identifiable places is because I started taking groups of students abroad forty years ago to study literature (in Europe mostly, but all over the world). Both they and I delighted in standing on T.S. Eliot’s London Bridge at the morning rush hour, reading a description of the same from The Waste Land. Likewise with visiting Joyce’s Tower in Dublin, Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage in the English Lakes District, Hemingway’s finca outside Havana, and on and on. I thought it would be cool to make the same possible with the settings in these novels.

JAW: Jon Mote, the protagonist of your crime fiction series, is deeply flawed. You describe him as a “hapless, haunted, faux detective.” Grad school dropout. Failed husband. Hearer of demonic voices real or imagined. He certainly does not fit the typical detective/private eye trope (ruggedly handsome man, good with the ladies, tough as nails, etc.). Many times, he seems to “solve” the murder mysteries as if by chance or accident (or grace?) I’m curious why you chose to write within the crime fiction genre, and then subvert it both with a protagonist who doesn’t fit the stereotype, and then with a narrative style that is much more concerned with Big Questions than the typical crime novel?

DWT: I will confess to being delighted with this question. The truth is I didn’t see the first novel (or any of them) as genre novels—crime or otherwise. My editor—who has to worry about the bottom line—did and does. I knew there was a body in the first novel, of course, and that any body suggests a mystery until it is known why it is there and answers the question “what happened?” But I was surprised to see on the cover of the second novel the words, “A Jon Mote Mystery.” I have tried telling my editor that I am much more interested in Mystery than in mystery. He nods and rhetorically pats me on the head, saying, “But you have responsibilities to meet the expectations of the reader.” In short, if you include a body then you have created a mystery and readers expect certain things in mysteries. And not satisfying those expectations leaves dissatisfied readers, which is not good for either the author or the publisher.

So I have put in extra bodies and manipulated plot devices to help the editor sleep better and to better satisfy readers. I can see from my Amazon reviews that readers are seldom fooled by these efforts. They can see that the white whale I’m chasing embodies the Big Questions, not Who Dunnit?

As to Jon Mote being screwed up, that is partly because we’re all screwed up—he in his way, me in mine, you in yours—and partly to protect myself. I’ve laid the groundwork for that occasion when, after I receive my Nobel Prize, I am criticized for being insensitive, retro, privileged, fragile, or otherwise obtuse. I can answer, “Yes, that Jon Mote is certainly messed up. I’m glad you and I aren’t.” It’s one of the advantages of having a first person narrator—deniability.

JAW: In terms of literary precursors, I see Jon Mote as a bit of a mash up between Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling, Herman Melville’s Ishmael, and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Did you have any literary exemplars that you drew from in creating Jon; if so, who are Jon’s literary ancestors?

DWT: You are a perceptive reader. In answering a similar question for my publisher’s marketer questionnaire, I said that if I were very drunk, I would say my novels are a combination of Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor. I had in mind, as you suggest, the Underground Man and characters like Haze Motes (from whom Jon derives his last name). They are both Big Questions writers (as are all the Russians) and both have a sense of humor. So Jon’s ancestors include Ishmael, Haze, various characters in Saul Bellow, some of Faulkner’s hapless folks, maybe some Gogol, a touch of Singer and Kafka, and so on. I do not mean to insult any of them or their fans by claiming so.

JAW: Clearly, the series is deeply concerned with religious faith, particularly the

possibility/impossibility of Christian faith in the contemporary world. And while there are genuinely faith-filled characters in the books (Jon’s sister Judy, and Catholic nun Sister Brigit are obvious examples), Jon himself is deeply flawed, and no Prince Myshkin. What are you trying to accomplish or grapple with by making the hero so flawed, that perhaps you wouldn’t be able to do with a more put-together protagonist?

DWT: I know it may sound like an evasion, but I don’t see my writing (in fiction, as opposed to non-fiction) as “trying to accomplish” anything—other than telling an engaging story. (Okay, maybe one that illuminates a bit of the human experience.) Faulkner once claimed that all he does is run behind his characters trying to write down what they are saying as fast as he can. When I first read that, long ago, I dismissed it as coyness. But I have found it to be true in my own experience. Jon just started as Jon (well he started as my great childhood friend who died young, but only briefly) and became more Jon the longer I was with him. Same with Judy, Sister Brigit, and the others. (In Judy’s case, she is closely modeled on an actual person.)

I do invent ‘situations,’ in order to construct a plot, but once I have characters in a situation, I more or less just watch what they do and listen to them speak (or, more often in Jon’s case, think).

There is, of course, an effect of Jon being so troubled, even if I don’t contrive it. In the first novel especially, it creates a certain tension by putting him at risk, and readers like the tension of uncertainty (to a point). He is losing it. Will the voices prevail or will Judy (who, as you say in your next question, is the moral center of the novel) as she tries to save him? I hope it also creates sympathy for him—and for the human condition generally. We all want to know whether there is a meaning to the universe and to our own lives or not. Jon’s struggles to find out are just amplified versions of our own, or at least my own. (But no, I am not Jon.)

And sometimes his plight is simply funny, as is commonly the case with the human condition.

JAW: America is enflamed with “identity politics” and victim-making. But notably, in these discussions, there is very little mention of the mentally and physically disabled. I get the sense sometimes that we would just as soon see our disabled brethren put away somewhere where we don’t have to be confronted by them. In the creation of Jon’s mentally disabled sister, Judy, you put the spotlight on the disabled. In many ways, Judy is the heart and soul of the entire series. And the second book in the series, Do We Not Bleed, a murder mystery set at New Directions, once a home for the mentally challenged run by a group of nuns, now a corporate group home for the “developmentally disabled,” is my favorite in the series. The various “Specials” who inhabit the group home are beautifully rendered. Talk about Judy and the “Specials.” Where did they come from in your moral imagination? What might they reveal to the cynical Jon Mote, and to your readers, about the good life?

DWT: Confession: none of the Specials is imagined. Judy is as close to a real Judy as I could make her. As are the others (though Jimmy is a composite). My wife, Jayne, and I ran a group home for adults who we awkwardly call “mentally challenged” (how to refer to such folks is one of the issues in the novel) for three years in the 1970’s (her full-time, me a support person while I taught). We were supposed to be caring for them, but discovered that in many ways they were our teachers, just as Jon learns. We came to love them and this second novel is my homage to them. (And it is my favorite too.)

As regards what they reveal to Jon, let me say that I do not think Jon is cynical. He is simply confused. He’s trying hard. He’s something of a Bob character in our family’s favorite film, What About Bob? He’s baby-stepping. (Which actually makes it into one of the novels, can’t remember which.)

Jon learns from his charges something about how to live with adversity, and with simplicity, honesty, humility, and within community. They know they need help to make it and they both give it and take it from each other. Things like that.

JAW: In his recent book “The Decline of the Novel,” Joseph Bottum argues that the novel is primarily a Protestant art form that focuses on “the salvation and sanctification of the individual soul.” Certainly your books are concerned with the theme of individual salvation, especially the possibility of Jon’s own salvation. But of course faith is much more than individual salvation. Paul, for instance, seems more concerned with the Kingdom of God than individual salvation. Your books seem to me to engage the notion of the Kingdom of God, not just individual salvation. I think this is most clearly seen in the rag-tag community of the “Specials,” but it is also portrayed in the relationship between Jon and Judy, and the slow reconciliation between Jon and his estranged wife, Zillah. Do you agree with Bottum that novels are mainly concerned with individual salvation? Or is the portrayal of community and the Kingdom of God also at the heart of Christian fiction, in particular your own fiction?

DWT: I’m glad people like Bottum write books like his because they point out interesting things. At the same time, any sweeping generalization such as his makes me immediately want to identify exceptions, so many in this case that I think we have to take his assertion with a substantial grain of salt. My all-time favorite, Moby Dick, for example, is all about the “community” of very diverse characters on the Pequod—literally a motley crew—who are going to live or die together. The Scarlet Letter is equally an exploration of community. Same with Faulkner’s entire

Yoknapatawpha county (and its multiple generations)—and on and on.

I think you’re right that my novels are both an example of Bottum’s thesis about individual salvation and a counter-example. Certainly Jon is on a path that he hopes will be a kind of rescue (if not outright salvation), but it is unclear to him and to the reader (and to the author) whether he will succeed or not. If he does succeed, it will only be because of others—Judy, Sister Brigit, perhaps a church (see fourth novel in the works). And perhaps the Holy Spirit and the Cloud of Witnesses. We’ll just have to see.

JAW: You hold no punches for the political right or left. Postmodern literary theorists; unbelieving Bible scholars; unmerciful fundamentalist Christians; corporate do-gooders who ignore the dignity of the people they are “helping”; these and many others are skewered during narrator Jon Mote’s many monologues. Jon has a certain lack of reverence toward these folks who take themselves so seriously. Ultimately Jon’s ironic and satiric musings are very funny. But after the false and phony have been thrown down, what is left in Jon’s life to give him meaning and purpose? What do you see as Jon’s avenue for redemption?

DWT: Well, you are asking exactly the question Jon is asking throughout. He finds it easy enough to spot the holes in the reigning orthodoxies of our day. But he finds it very difficult to articulate something better that is for him believable, attainable, and sustainable. He is haunted, almost literally, by his religious upbringing—fundamentalist with a take-no-prisoners edge. He’s long left it behind but found nothing to replace it, and, in strange ways, the claims of faith keep calling his name. He’s not altogether happy about that, but he doesn’t know if he can run fast enough to escape it.

My take on his ‘avenue for redemption’? Read the novels.

JAW: To bring up Charles Taylor again, we live in a disenchanted world. And we see that certainly in contemporary fiction, where realism reigns supreme, and in particular in crime fiction, where even though there are fantastic scenarios (private eyes who solve a new murder mystery every week), there is nothing from outside of the material world that invades our world. I think the Christian fiction writer has a challenge. On the one hand, to authentically portray the material world. But to also account for the supernatural. In all three of the Jon Mote books, there are moments of apparent invasion by the supernatural. The unexplainable happens. I don’t want to give away these moments, but could you discuss how, as a Christian writer, you authentically grapple with both the natural and the supernatural?

DWT: Another very good but very large question. Let me start by quibbling with your assertion that “realism reigns supreme” in contemporary fiction. It certainly is not “realism” as understood in the 19th c novel, which was comfortable with the spiritual. Coming after modernism, meta-fiction, post-modernism and the like, it couldn’t be the same kind of “realism.” More importantly, no person of faith should grant “realism” as an accurate description of an approach to literature (and thought) that ignores so much of reality. Any expression or treatment of life that ignores the transcendent is too stunted to deserve the label “realism.”

I think it more accurate to say “materialism reigns supreme”—in the arts, human thought, and daily life. For instance, the spiritual in each sphere is reduced (a great reduction) to the merely psychological.

Though we may well agree on this, I also quibble with how you phrase the observation that in contemporary fiction there is “nothing from outside of the material world that invades our world.” “Invasion” from “outside” are, I think, the wrong concept. In my view there is no bright line between a “material world” and a transcendent one. There is only a single reality. What we call the transcendent or the supernatural inhabits and infuses the natural or material. God dwells both within and beyond his creation. He is not co-terminus with it (I am not a pantheist), but spiritual reality is not a separate thing “above” (super to) physical reality. It is reality, often expressing itself materially.

So I would say that the key scenes in the novels in which there is an “apparent invasion by the supernatural” is better understood as moments of the eruption of the divine that is always there–in such a way that we are more conscious of it than we normally are.

(I’m aware that all this is a theological-philosophical minefield that I am not competent to navigate. I’m just giving you “how I think” about these things. Somewhat Celtic perhaps, though I think their dominant view is simply orthodoxy. If I’ve expressed it clumsily, I plead for grace.)

I try consciously to testify to my understanding of these things in the novels. I have at least one church service in each novel, because millions—even billions–of people worship together regularly, and contemporary art and thought acts like it never happens. Having a church service is simple realism. I also have, as you indicate, these key scenes scattered here and there in which Jon Mote becomes aware of being “led,” you might say, by something beyond himself, though he doesn’t necessarily know what to make of it. They tend to be moments of grace. Again, simple realism in my view.

The challenge in all this for me as a Christian writer of fiction is witnessing to the reality of such things without becoming so didactic or heavy handed as to undercut their believability and power. It helps to have a skeptical narrator.

JAW: It seems that our society suffers at present from a certain humorlessness. Perhaps what I love most about these books is how funny they are. Many times I’d be reading in bed and laugh out loud, and then my wife would give me the raised-eyebrow look. In this way, these books participate in a long line of Christian comedy from Rabelais and Cervantes, to Shakespeare, Chesterton, and Percy. What do you think the role of humor is in fiction generally, and in your fiction in particular? Some horrible things have happened to Jon and Judy; does humor have the capacity to break through the immense suffering in the world and provide some healing and redemption?

DWT: I think the role of humor in fiction, in my own novels, and in life in general is to keep us realistic about ourselves as human beings. We make ourselves comic when we pretend we are things we aren’t (especially if we think we are fooling others)—as in passing ourselves off as overly smart or overly virtuous or overly pious. Humor always deflates pretension, which is why it is so valuable and enjoyable–and also why it is so dangerous in certain contexts (especially authoritarian ones).

In that sense, the role of humor (which is not an exact synonym for funny) is the same as with every other fictional strategy: to testify accurately to the human experience. One cannot fully portray the human condition without including humor, because human beings are, by one definition, the creature who laughs (related to homo ludens, the creature who plays). This is why we need many writers. Some have a great sense of the tragic but not of the comic. Others have the reverse. The greatest writers—including the ones you list–have both.

I am not one of the greatest writers, but I do have a keen sense of both. The biblical concept of shalom tells us how things ought to be. Human fallenness ensures that they are not that way. The gap between the two is often tragic but it is also, at times, a place for realistic laughter.

Humor is a chameleon, taking many forms, from simple incongruity or physical comedy to hyperbole and satire. And within satire, we have the more gentle Horatian satire that gently pokes fun and accepts human failures and foibles and also the more predatory Juvenalian satire that eviscerates and condemns. My own leanings are toward the Horatian with an occasional Juvenalian thrust.

Regarding humor and suffering, I think of humor as a consequence of and response to suffering, not as an escape from it. Life pricks us—sometimes flattens us—and one human response is to sadly laugh, not flippantly but profoundly, shaking our heads at that gap between how things ought to be and how they are, humbly acknowledging that we so often bring the suffering upon ourselves. And, yes, the act of laughing can make the suffering more bearable.

JAW: When might readers expect the release of the fourth and final Jon Mote book? Any fiction plans after that?

DWT: I completed a reader’s draft of the last novel in the series a couple of months ago (September 2020), but am letting it marinate for a while before sending it off to my editor. It generally takes him six months to get around to reading it. Then there is a month of the editor-author dance, followed by a month or two for me to acknowledge that he is probably right and hence a time of revision, followed by a 12-18 month period for the physical production of the book. So two years minimum from the time I send it in. I hope I live to see it in print (and no reason I shouldn’t), and then the trip to Stockholm.

After that, God only knows. I have toyed with a novel that focuses on the life of Judy, who is easily the most interesting character in the series (as she was in life). I’ve written the opening sentence, but I worry that the novel would be repetitious, so may well not attempt it.

In the meantime, I’m writing short stories, including about a homeless man from Africa who spends twenty years sleeping on a London night bus. Likelihood of any of these stories seeing the light of day is slim. But it keeps me out of the pubs.

Jeffrey Wald is an attorney, husband, and father of three boys. His short fiction, poetry, and reviews have previously appeared in a variety of print and online periodicals including Touchstone, Stinkwaves Magazine, Summit Ave Review, Whistling Shade, Philosophy Now, Light, and Plainsongs.