Recently I was shown an essay by poet, critic and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, titled The Catholic Writer Today, which appeared last year in the Journal “First Things,” and later, somewhat expanded, in “Santa Clara Magazine.” I was most impressed, and thought I fit his profile of the new Catholic imaginative fiction writer pretty well. I addressed myself by email to Mr. Gioia, asking if would read my book. His answer, “No, I will not read your book: my desk is already littered with the unread novels of my friends.” I then made the same request of the local literary pundit who, with glowing excitement, had pointed me at the Gioia article in the first place. She said she had no time; all her time goes into blogging. This conversation was repeated down the line, to anyone I knew with any Catholic intellectual pretensions. So how can the people whose opinions are the most educated be too absorbed writing and blogging about the former glories of Catholic imaginative fiction to read anything new? Flannery O’Connor isn’t with us anymore.

Belshangles is a work of Catholic Imaginative Fiction at a time when influential critics mourn the genre as extinct. However, “New Church” Catholic imaginative fiction need not resemble pre-Vatican II Catholic imaginative fiction very much at all, because the “New Church” doesn’t resemble the pre-Vatican II Church very much at all.

50 years post Vatican II a Pope can flat-out tell the Catholic Church to stop “obsessing’ over sexual issues, contraception, gay marriage, abortion, etc, and instead, spend its energies bringing God’s mercy to the poor, the outcasts, and the marginalized.

I think Rock Stars like Tommi Rhymer are a category unto themselves when it comes to marginalization: they are Idolized Outcasts (or is it Outcast Idols?) because of their perceived lifestyle, drug use, flamboyant sexuality, etc. Andy finds in these risk-taking behaviors reason to fear for Tommi’s wellbeing, and no reason at all not to love him. Here she sums up her oddly DIY religious education as a child of disaffected post Vatican II Catholic intellectuals, and how it bears on her devotion to Tommi Rhymer. She has just seen Tommi kiss his lead guitarist, Harlan, and knows this is a secret that love obliges her to keep.

...And it seemed so grossly unfair. This present ache in my chest was no by-product of a religious education. Not of mine, at any rate: this was one guilt trip I never ingested. The only Church I knew after all, was Father Malachi and Saint Ann's Chapel.

The entire Saint Ann's High Mass Chant Choir ate Vesper Dinner at our house on Sunday nights, twenty to twenty-five strong. Some were Stanford faculty and some were students. They talked Old Church theology, art, music, wine, medieval history, sports cars and computer hacking. I talked it with 'em, since none would admit, (not in that company at least) to even a tolerance for rock music. But mostly, they talked New Church politics.

It seems the Catholic Church went supernova six years before I was born: huger and brighter, more involved, more relevant, more media-conscious, more, More, more, until the gassy outer shell just blew off into space, and the rest fell back into the Vatican, an ecclesiastical black hole receding inward faster than the speed of light. American
Catholics (like my parents) got told something unheard of: "Form your own consciences." Half the Catholics in the U.S. went up in a radioactive cloud. But the remnant (like my parents) did what they were told.
Ten years after I was born it sunk in on the higher-ups the format of those consciences was not exactly as foreseen. "OK, folks, this has been a fun experiment. But now, unform your consciences." Meltdown. There go the rest. Descendants of survivors roam the parishes in furtive mutant bands, forming their own consciences.
The Folk-Mass and the High-Mass crews at Saint Ann's don't trust each other very much: your Modern Church in miniature. And the folk contingent runs the Sunday School: power in numbers. I got to be eleven years old and had never had First Communion, just like Saint Bernadette.
Papa looked over the materials the folkies used in their instruction, and at my grade level, when it came to the resurrection of Jesus (one key concept after all), the picture they put in to illustrate it was a two-page full-color glossy spread of––an Easter basket! Green fake grass, dyed eggs, marshmallow eggs and imitation baby chicks all wrapped up in pastel cellophane; and, get this, outside the cellophane, one solitary chocolate rabbit, free-standing on the table top.
When asked if he's a liberal or conservative Catholic, Papa's been known to say, "A Survivalist!"
Needless to say, I didn't go to Saint Ann's Sunday school. He tried to take me out to Redwood Priory. They only do boys. But one of the monks is a family friend; he offered to instruct me. Father Malachi is a genuine Hungarian Refugee, and has seen it all. He's also a counselor at Juvy Hall.
He began on me by saying, "The first question in the Baptism you received when you were very small is 'What do you ask of the Church of God?' The answer is 'Faith.'"
I said "Sounds all right to me," which everybody thought was hilarious for some reason.
"That," he said, "is what I try to give you." And he knew what I was like. No chocolate rabbits. He gave me the Saints. All this wondrous stuff from the Desert Fathers, Catherine of Siena, Francis of Assisi and both the Teresas, right down to Joseph of Cupertino and Margaret Mary Alacoque. People who preached to wolves and were fed by ravens, warriors and wise women and spinners of splendid words, hermits and holy loonies who piped like birds and flew above the heads of the people in church, and the swooning mystical lovers. They were just what I needed: someone to feed on, someone to bleed on, like the song says. I took them off into my blackest privacy and ate them up.
Like I know I was born on the Vigil of Saint Laurence, whom an angry Roman Emperor had broiled on a barbecue. Laurence's last words were, "Turn me over boys, I'm done on this side." I can appreciate Saint Laurence.
But then, into that select and glorious company, with no real qualm, I'd somehow admitted Tommi Rhymer: better than remembered poetry, a man I recited in my head for company. Is that so strange? I know any number of normal kids surviving much the same way, their whole inner lives hitched happily to different stars.
Fantasy Lovers. Icons of Desire.
Consider the gawky, zit-faced, longhaired boys whose every thought revolves around the raunchy doings of Iron Maiden or Motley Crue. And Oh, the dear, priceless dead ones––not quite saints, but I understood the concept––Elvis. Jim Morrison. John Lennon. Jimi Hendrix. Marc Bolan. Lily Langtry, dead since 1929.
I'd played with Tommi Rhymer for three years. Slept with him, showered with him, gone to school with him. When I was brave he was brave with me, and when I failed he took my rap. While to parents, teachers and siblings he was (more or less) invisible. I was twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen: a woman in a child's life with no appropriate place to go, stuck, like a fly in amber. Nobody understood but Tommi. And what was he? Sassy, sexy, witty magician. A child triumphant in a man's life, maybe?
If all the really-real I ever got to share with Tommi Rhymer was this one, lonely and unwelcome secret, at least it would keep safe with me. Value for value received. I owed him that much anyway.

Later, when Tommi is about to pass out in the alley behind the hotel, she thinks:
I could leave him here with Skye, and go tell––No, I couldn't. How about the party? I could go up there and find help. Nicky or Rollo. A roadie. Somebody. A drug bust might have roped in all those guys by now, to give statements or something. Or maybe they all were high. My idea of Narc Squad operations is courtesy commercial television strictly.
Like my idea how the Church feels about gays. Did anyone ever teach me that? No priest I ever heard preach said shit about that. No, I got the chance to learn it for myself, in all its glory, off the 6:00 O'Clock News.

Not only did Vatican II–– as Dana Gioia complains–– do a number on Catholic Art, Literature, Music, Architecture, etc, it also delivered a slow-acting death blow to the much joked-about Catholic sexual guilt-trip.

Today most Catholic youth (with the possible exception of home-schooled traditionalists) have never been taught, and certainly have never internalized the jaundiced view of human sexuality prevalent in the early twentieth century Church. They can have been to Mass every Sunday of their lives, and never yet heard anything said about that from the pulpit. The brooding sexual guilt that hangs over Catholic writers like Evelyn Waugh or Graham Green is to them quaintly alien at best, and at worst, absolutely repellant. Their views on sex hail largely from rock music.

The present Pope recognizes that the sheep have stopped following the shepherds, and are finding their own way. It has at least occurred to him that the shepherds might try following the sheep, see where they’ve got to, and minister to their needs in situ. And in accordance with that idea, he has proclaimed a Jubilee Year of Mercy for the Church.

Having said all this, I realize the Catholic aspects of Belshangles are something with which many not want to get involved. And I can understand that.

I should point out that I got as far as I did with Belshangles in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards competition without ever mentioning religion or Catholicism in the pitch, in the synopsis or anywhere. But neither did the readers who gave me five stars or the glowing Publishers’ Weekly review say a word about it. I find this downright odd. The Catholicism of it seems to me pervasive; it’s like the elephant in the room. I feel almost certain, that if this book should gain any readership, I will scandalize some traditionalist Catholics, and maybe even some liberals as well. I’m surprised that no secular reader has called my hand on the PC-ness of what is certainly a love story between a fifteen year old protagonist and a man twice her age, who has a well-earned reputation as a libertine.

When asked to characterize my work’s content in one sentence, my first thought was:

Fifteen year old Catholic virgin meets rock star;
fifteen year old Catholic virgin loses rock-star (almost);
fifteen year old Catholic (still) virgin, gets rock star (maybe).

But my friend, the author and blogger on literary subjects said, “Oh no! I wouldn’t use the word Catholic! That’s the kiss of death!” She is a devout Catholic, it was she who introduced me to the Dana Gioia article on the demise of Catholic imaginative fiction.

Years ago, when agents would actually take time to insult authors instead of emailing them brief form refusals, I had one snarl at me, “You’re preaching something!” I asked, “What do you think I’m preaching?” She said, “I don’t know, but I don’t like it!” So I gave some serious thought to whether I actually was preaching, and if so, what? I decided that if I had any message, it was “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have mercy shown them.” The Hebrew word that gets translated in English as “mercy” literally means “inalienable love.”

At the beginning of Belshangles we hear Andy Falconer asking, and asking, how one gets to meet the stars. And the answer is always, “You have to have something they want.” She can’t imagine in her case, what that might possibly be.

But she does in fact have something, and Tommi gets it. As he says:

"I’m quite scandalously well off, y’know. I’m on the top of my pile. I’ve got the whip hand now in everything I do, while I’m still young enough to relish it. Nobody would suppose I need much mercy to get by. Surprise, nobody thinks to show me any. It’s what I call the ‘Tommi, you are God’ syndrome. And I’m not, y’know. Sure. You know.
“On the flip-side, is my image as a ‘Public Sinner’.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Well? It’s true. I worked hard for it: ‘T.P. Rhymer: by appointment, purveyor of vicarious debauchery to a society largely incapable of providing its own cheap thrills. Everybody knows what I deserve: to be ragged on and lusted after all at the same time, by the same people, even. Mercy is not the currency my kind are paid in.
“Which brings me around to you. What have you imagined you were doing?”
“Oh. Rolling with the punches, mostly.”
“I guess. Y’ know, I hit you? Funny, considering the walk I come from, but I never hit a woman in my life before. I’ve not been a very charming guest. I’ve sworn at you. Threatened you. Run out on you. I’ve been ugly and terrified and sick. Really wonderful person, y’know.
“I shit and puked your floor. You cleaned up after me like you––like I was your––I don’t know what. You’ve spread mercy over me at every turn; when I wanted no part of it, you made it stick. And I’m touched. This doesn’t happen to me every day. I don’t usually cry. Oh, I’m used to following Harlan around with a towel. But I got the tables turned on me now, don’t I? Tell me, what am I supposed to do?”

Later on he shyly adds, “I could love you for it.”

So, I think if had to sum up what happens in Belshangles with one sentence, I’d go with “Blessed are the merciful.”