Winding Up Theresa's Challenge

I am going to finish Theresa's questions today even if the task completely finishes me.  Look for shorter answers this time!   

3.  Name an author of fiction that contributed significantly to your thought.  Explain how this author shaped your thought.  

This question sent me on a little research trip, since of course I couldn't remember the name of the author I wanted to write about.  It's Susan Howatch and her Glittering Images Series, which follows a small group of characters connected in various ways to the hierarchy of the Anglican Church.  I think that I first came across a review of one or more of her books in The Christian Century and was intrigued by the theme of spiritual dilemmas and the at-that-time unknown to me concept of one-on-one spiritual direction.  The books are a facinating and great read:  England in the immediately pre-World War II years to the fairly recent past; High Church intrigue and glamour; politics and plain old soap opera; characters engulfed in spiritual crises, sexual obsessions, coming-of-age, career, and midlife confusion; and individuals absorbed with questions of God's call on their lives in their most mundane and their most dramatic moments.  I love these books because they are fascinating reads; Susan Howatch depicts a world that most of us would otherwise not know exists except, perhaps, on its most superficial level, and reaches deep into her characters to portray struggles common to us all.   (And, thanks to this question, I bought Glittering Images yesterday and started all over again.)

4.  You are an image-maker.  You've also expressed an interest in other image-makers.  Choose the subject of a painting that speaks to you and let that subject speak to us.  What does he or she have to say to us?  

I love our own Judith Heartsong's Light Paintings.   Every one of them speaks to me of my daughter.  A girl both remotely distant and intimately in your face.  A girl who is a gentle observer and a grand dreamer.  A girl who is at times awash in swirling hair and fanciful colors, and at other times starkly detached from everything but her inner self.  A girl who at one moment stares reality down and, at another, looks obliquely into the distance.  Every one of those paintings captures the certain clarity and elusive transitory nature of young womanhood.  

 5.   In a recent comment to my journal regarding Thomas, you said you wished for strong women from the Bible with which to identify.  We won't rewrite the Bible, but create a woman of spiritual conviction who is living now.  Write a paragraph in which she confronts an issue that is dear to your heart.   

When I first read this question,  I thought it suggested writing about an existing woman of spiritual conviction, and I've decided to cheat a bit and leave it at that.  Creating a character would take me weeks.  And I know just the real-life existing woman:  Benedictine Joan Chittister, long a voice for social justice, for the poor, and for women's ordination in the Catholic church.  She's apparently been in Rome and has some intriguing things to say about the new pope -- and not necessarily things that you would expect from her.  Or maybe you would.   The woman is nothing if not consistent and direct.

The photograph below bears no relation to anything that I've just written, except that I enjoyed working on it -- as I did these questions.  Thanks, Theresa!  

Cemetery Monument  

(Walked 1 mile yesterday and 5.5 today.  That's 19 for the week, 56.5 for the month.)