Sins & Sorrow

SINS & SORROW

(Why I had to write what I did)

I faced a dilemma when I began THE SECRET MADONNA, the first sequel to my thriller, The Jesus Thief. For days I tried to write about my heroine—a woman of spotless virtue, charity, and unbending faith—and my hero, a paragon in that he’d risked his life for her. I couldn’t write a single word.

They had become super human, archetypes who exemplify all we aspire to. Yet continuing to write them as larger-than-life felt like a betrayal of my all-too-human readers, and of myself. Perhaps perfect people exist, but if so I haven’t met them. To be human means to sorrow, perhaps deeply, often frequently. Our harms can be devastating, seemingly damaging us beyond repair. In religious terms, to be human means to sin, often greatly — as we betray, hurt, steal, lie, violate, even kill.

Should not I, a storyteller, address reality? How else shed light? How else lift hearts?

At my computer with new vision, I thought of the millions who never had a chance at innocence because someone badly hurt them as trusting children, or unwary teenagers exploring life. Can such damage be undone? I thought of the millions who had sinned against others or against themselves through drugs, fear and hate, through violence. Can such sins be washed clean?

What if the worst possible thing actually happens to us? What if, in fear or anger or despair, we commit the most horrible act? Would we be permanently warped, never able to feel joy again? Can we recover after what we suffer and inflict?

After all, fear is the easy thing for human beings, a first unthinking, primal instinct. Succumbing to its intoxication takes no effort. What’s hard is to love in the face of death, love in the face of danger, love in the face of hate. What’s hard is to practice what we were taught in our churches and our temples and our mosques, to act on what we say before our shrines and under our Bodhi trees when we call out Jehovah, Allah, Mulungu, Krishna, Yahweguru, God, when we call to the Madonna, the Virgin of Guadalupe, to Shakti, Shiva’s mate. We are so alike when we do this. In The Jesus Thief, the scene at a beautiful temple in Turin is real. It happened to me. I went there and the deeply moving service made me, a non-Jew weep, as I have done when I hear voices lift in sacred hymn, see people take communion, kneel on their prayer rugs in Salat, chant to the ring of singing bowls. We are not different when we do this.

I had no desire to write about paragons in The Sacred Impostor. I wanted to attempt a larger truth—that we are loved through our sorrows as well as our sins, in our deepest error, blood dripping from our hands, hope and innocence flown. We are loved by the entity, by the force we call God.

To show this, I wanted my main characters to cross a veritable battlefield in The Sacred Impostor, and they do.

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J R Lankford’s Amazon Page