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Years ago a prominent Catholic publisher asked me to write a very personal grief book which was to be entitled: Weeping with Jesus: from Grief to Hope. I wrote the book with lots of heart. It featured the story of finding hope after the suicide of my son but also talked about general things about bereavement related to my husband’s death, etc. etc. The editors hated it so much that they said I could keep the $1,000 advance but they didn’t want to publish it after all.
I felt very sad. I put it up as a free e-book on my web-site and many benefited but now one of my newer publishers Enroute Books and Media has come out with a beautiful edition. If you click on Enroute Books and Media you will find a description of it under a designation at the top of the web called Titles of Chervin. |
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Because I love other books of Rumer Godden, the English Catholic novelist most famous for In This House of Brede, I pick up an older novel of hers: |
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A Breath of Air. One thinks it is a book about how to build a utopian island, but it turns out to be a denunciation of utopian impulses. The hero is a Englishman of the upper classes, between the World Wars, whose beloved wife dies, leading him to decide to get away from sophisticated London by buying an unspoiled island in the Pacific Ocean
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He brings with him his only girl child. The pagan natives live in idyllic sunshine with fish and fruit. Although the book is not religious at all, the moral, that even people with the highest goals, without God, will subtly become manipulative exploiters, is worth reading.
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This last month I have been reading a fascinating biography of Bartolomeo De Las Casas, the great champion of the “Indians” in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus. It was written in 1902 by a priest, Fr. Dutto. I told you a bit about the good attitude of Queen Isabella in last week’s blog, but after reading much more of the book I want to tell you about other thoughts. Because so many hate colonialism and mingle with that hatred ideas about the complicity of the Catholic missionaries, I sort of assumed that their description of colonial times was biased. |
Maybe so, in some cases, but this biography comes right out of the letters of De Las Casas to the King and Queen in Spain, and it is hair-raising in the descriptions of the lust for gold that blinded so many Catholic colonialists to the evils of enslaving the natives to get them to do the mining for the gold.
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