WHERE IS GOD?

“I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul.

We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.” ― Edith Hamilton

“While reason is the natural organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning.” ― C.S. Lewis

I start my LUCIFER'S ORPHAN trilogy with an excerpt from Lucifer's journal:

Here’s a thought for you: God and Evil.  He can either take it from the world, or He cannot, or even more delicious, He will not.  If He cannot, then He is not omnipotent, not even God.  If He can but will not, then He is not benevolent, much less loving.  Yet if He is both able and willing to annihilate Evil, why do I still exist?

     REFLECTIONS - Lucifer Morning Star

I answer that question in the third volume, BATTLEFIELD HELL, when young 14 year old Blake Adamson fearfully confronts Lucifer in a meeting that he knows will end in his painful death.

At the request of a distraught mother, I wrote those novels expressly for a young ill girl asking those same questions. 

But I mostly just wrote wild adventures for the girl to take her mind off her non-stop pain to stand in for the Harry Potter novels her mother would not let her read.

But for the most part, I stand back in my novels not putting my faith so blatantly into the mix. 

I am a spinner of tales for all who would listen.  I wish to put off no one. I want to entertain.  If I entice the reader to reflect along the adventurous way, so much the better.

If you disagree with me, that is all right.  Horse races are built on that concept.  :-)

In his beginning is his end

Still, I have always thought of it as something of a cheat for authors to write of demons, the devil, ghosts, vampires, and exorcisms and ignore God in the actions.

You can't very well have a shadow without someone casting it, can you?

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

We have somehow come up with the notion that the concept of God is illiterate and illogical.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics states Things progress naturally from order to disorder, or from an available energy state to one where energy is more unavailable. A good example: a hot cup of coffee cools off in an insulated room.

Something had to overcome the inertia of decay.

But I am not here to win you over to my way of seeing life and the Great Mystery.  Your path is yours to choose and to walk.  I wish you peace and love along whatever road you choose.

I just find it odd that in novels where you read of lustful angels, lurking spiritual enemies, and monsters of the supernatural, God is treated as an absentee landlord if at all.

The supernatural predators come out after Katrina.

Can two undead legends stop them?

In FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE, I have Samuel McCord, an agnostic by this time in his life, discuss with his best friend, the vampire priest Renfield,

the existence of the Great Mystery.  I do not give the reader a concrete answer either way in that novel or in its sequel, CREOLE KNIGHTS.

I leave it for my readers to decide.  But I do not hide from the issue.

It is an irony in those books that an agnostic duels with a powerful being who considers himself Lucifer.

Some have emailed me saying that they believe Victor Standish's entrance into Samuel's life is God's answers to his questions and unspoken prayers.

In mainstream fiction I understand why God is not mentioned.

  To all intents and purposes God is ignored in today's world.  And the thinking of the intellectual elite says that is only fair since He ignored us first.

In your workplace, God is absent in talk and in actions even in casual conversation. 

Among your friends, how many steer their lives by any thought of God? 

How often is God spoken of by celebrities in the news?

When was the last time you saw a priest or other man of God portrayed as anything but a scoundrel or lackluster human being on TV or the movies?

Mostly, modern man conducts his business in a manner that removes God from the equation.  So much so that now God is mostly only heard in curses on the streets.

During all the years of heartbreak on DOWNTON ABBEY, illness, transition, and death, the doctor was a regular fixture. But the vicar did not appear until halfway through Season 2.

He had one set of lines, and if you went to pour your tea at the wrong moment, you probably missed him. During his brief appearance, we learned that the vicar lives on the family's land, and is beholden to Lord Grantham for both his livelihood and the flowers on his altar.

Yet up to season 3 he seems to play less of a role in the household than the servants' new Ouija board.

But what about the time- and genre-tested possibilities of a wily local vicar?

In the poor man's one speaking scene (with Maggie Smith), he barely got a word in edgewise.

How much deeper and more fun the show might be with a vicar—or some person of visible faith—who could match the Countess' wit and gravitas.

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

We are far too easily pleased.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses