“Blood on Holy Ground is an exciting contrast between belief systems, peoples, and forces of both good and evil, making for an engrossing story that’s hard to put down.”
Midwest Book Review, Diane Donovan, Editor and Senior Reviewer
“BLOOD ON HOLY GROUND is a beautifully-written mystery novel that combines a gripping and suspenseful story with thought-provoking and heartfelt spirituality.”
IndieReader: 4 stars
“C.L. Francisco is a modern writer in the tradition of Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis. Her ecumenical view of spiritual experience permeates this magical novel, expressing a love of the natural world and a reverence for religious folklore and fable.”
Self Publishing Review 4 ½ stars
Summary of Blood on Holy Ground
Blood on Holy Ground follows Miranda to the re-purposed convent of Monte di Angeles, where she plans a quiet summer’s research into an old Native American legend. Instead, almost before she can uncrate her cats, the killings begin, and she finds herself caught up in murder, stalked by the killer, and haunted by prescient dreams. Tennessee hills blessed with a deep and almost conscious peace are overwhelmed by one atrocity after another, as the killer strikes at the land as well as the people.
Miranda, a professor of religion at a small Appalachian college, is an expert on paranormal phenomena, and a woman with rare spiritual gifts. Free of classwork for the summer, she abandons her significant other, artist Jack Crispen, and sets out for the convent-turned-retreat-center at the invitation of an old friend, who settles her into a forest hermitage near the tiny Conicoke Indian reservation. Miranda knows that unless she can persuade the Conicoke Grandmothers to trust her enough to share their traditions, her research will founder, and the heart of the legend will never open to her, since her only other sources are a few heavily-edited church accounts.
When Jack arrives for a visit, the two of them stumble onto the first murder victim, and the killer’s bitter monologues join the mystery narrative. As time passes, Miranda and Jack seem doomed to find more and more evidence of the killer’s crimes, goading the murderer into a paranoid conviction that Miranda is out to destroy him. Abandoning his other targets, he stalks her with obsessive fury. When the Conicoke Grandmothers draw Miranda into their circle, hoping that their combined seeing may show them a way to stop the violence, Miranda is immersed in a flood of visions both from spirits of the land and the killer’s victims.
But the murderer finds himself ensnared by his own evil when his assault on Miranda miscarries, leaving him to prowl the forest wounded and delusional, but lethal as a cornered viper. His toxic obsessions create a vortex of rage and evil that nearly destroys them all in its final combustion. Only the Grandmothers can guide Miranda and Jack along pathways that offer any hope of escape from the firestorm the killer unleashes.
Lately I’ve been clearing out the clutter on my computer’s hard drive (my Mac is getting on in years and complaining about all the extra weight it’s carrying), and I came across this short essay I wrote in 2015. As far as I can tell, I never posted it anywhere. So for those of you who follow Yeshua’s Cats, here is another reflection on Mari’s beginnings . . .
Morgan, the cat from the wild woods
I remember the year I started writing The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat. I was working for a tiny non-profit whose prospects had just been obliterated by a catastrophic wildfire. The young cat who inspired the character of Yeshua’s cat had died as a consequence of the fire. My mother died a month after that. For months I spent my days climbing the burnt-out canyon slopes, measuring the severity of the burn in soil and trees, photographing the devastation, and assessing pockets of recovery.
After the Wildfire
In our battle against the land-owner’s determination to bring in salvage loggers (a battle we won), I dug tiny holes into the bark of every tree on our 2000 acres that still showed signs of life. The trees with healthy cambium layers I marked with green circles, exempting them from the loggers’ harvest–and, in the end, aggravating the loggers enough to cause them to back off, complaining that the profits weren’t worth their time without the living trees.
Trees with a chance of life
Even with our few hard-won victories, the stress took its toll on everyone. And no matter how hard we worked to support the land’s recovery, a non-profit foundation that relied on land-based workshops couldn’t survive on acreage that insurance companies saw as a treacherous ruin. We were forced to leave within the year.
Moving
On Easter Sunday of that last year, almost nine months after the fire, I went out walking in the blackened forest—only a few days after the kind of heavy rain that can be almost as devastating to a burned landscape as the original fire. I first visited a favorite Ponderosa pine that the fire had seared into a gleaming skeleton. Strange how the beauty of a tree endures after death; it merely changes.
But what I remember most clearly from that Easter walk was an unexpected discovery in an eroded gully cutting down the canyon slope. Its chalky soil abraded away by torrents of ash and water, a now-vertical arroyo wall had been transformed into art. Like a sudden ripple of joy in a sullen stream of melancholy music, the graceful skeleton of a tiny prehistoric horse leapt out of the bank to canter at my side. I almost didn’t see her. Dead for thousands of years, and yet somehow alive again.
Prehistoric horse
In a time when death seemed heaped upon death, the small skeleton might have been just one more death—but instead it felt like a gift, bringing with it wonder and hope. As Mari likes to say, it was a paradox.
A Burning Hope, CL Francisco
Sometime in the next few days I wrote the words, “My name is Mari, a name given to me by the man they call Yeshua ben Yosef.”
Morgan, by CL Francisco
If you count my PhD dissertation—and I do—then Yeshua’s Cat was my fourth book. I just never bothered to publish the others. Maybe I will some day, or maybe I’ll just publish with a pseudonym. Common wisdom decrees that an author shouldn’t change genres.
Postscript:
I did try using a pseudonym, but eventually I took my own name back. The Yeshua’s Cats ‘series of five books is now complete. My dissertation is available online at https://www.academia.edu/37357137/. The first of my three mysteries (This Madness of the Heart) was published a couple of years ago, and the second (Blood on Holy Ground) has just been released on Kindle. The third and last (Red Cliffs of Fall) is in the reviewers’ hands and will be will be out as soon as I can manage it. So keep an eye out!
My apologies to you all for disappearing for so long! I’ve been battling a bizarre antibiotic-resistant infection picked up at a hospital last year, and have been unable to work for many months, but I’m slowly improving.
I’ve spend untold hours working on digital mosaics and computer busywork (since I haven’t had the wit to write), but at least I’ve accomplished one thing: I’ve finished transcribing my 1993 PhD dissertation and uploaded it to academia.edu. The title is:
Native American Shields, Old Symbols for a New Spiritual Quest in the Contemporary Women’s Movement
The dissertation was based on a summer’s on-site research with Euro-American women raised in the Church who were attending workshops on Native American spirituality–specifically to build shields. I interviewed 40 women about their reasons for leaving the Church and choosing a Native American spiritual path, using Marion Woodman’s revisions of Jungian psychology to analyze the interviews and shield images. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Meinrad Craighead provided critiques of the Church from within. I concluded with a my own Jungian critique of the Church–and suggestions for constructive change.
Although 25 years have passed, the issues are still current, as are the women’s responses to the pain they experienced in the Church. My own thoughts have grown and changed in the passing years, but I still find myself content to stand by what I wrote then. Below is an edited version of the dissertation’s final chapter. You can also find it here, where I’ve uploaded a number of the photos I took of the shield workshops (see drop-down menu under Native American Shields, above). Descriptions of the workshops are in the dissertation.
Brooke Medicine Eagle
I dreamed I saw a giant tree, branches bare and cold, blown by the winds from place to place, rootless, tumbling across the plains. It stood precariously for a moment, and then fell with almost deliberate slowness, and in its fall it crushed beneath its branches the vast and delicate wings of a golden butterfly. As the butterfly died, its wings broke into brittle fragments and blew away like leaves in a winter wind. The great barren tree tumbled on, coming to rest at last, upright, supported by the strength of a living tree, caught and held by their intertwined branches.
Individuals are sometimes blessed with dreams that reach beyond the limits of their own lives into the heart of the reality that surrounds them. I believe the dream above to be such a gift. In it I felt as if I were seeing with the eyes of a woman like the one from my research, below, who experienced violence at the hands of the Church:
The Church kills dreams in women. It does it ruthlessly, without concern or love . . . Any woman who says she does not feel massive pain in this society and in the Church is living a lie, or she’s just burying it. It will surface, or it will kill her (“Leslie”).
The tree of my dream is a broken remnant of Meinrad Craighead’s “tree which lives at both ends.” The divine energy of the mind has been disconnected from the energy of the body, and the restless movement of masculine aggression has abandoned its roots in “God as mother of the entire fabric of creation.” The great barren institution of the Church rolls across the Earth, rootless, a truncated cross rather than a living tree, impersonal and uncaring in its destruction. Driven by the winds of arid masculinity, it crushes the fragile and beautiful butterfly of women’s hopes for transformation, scattering those hopes and women’s shattered lives to the winds, leaving women to search alone in the wilderness, without any visible paths, for the presence of the One in their lives.
Meinrad Craighead, “Tree of Life” http://www.meinradcraighead.com/
Although the dream scene is a wintry one, still it holds out hope for the spring. The rootless tree is caught and held upright by the strength of a second tree firmly rooted in the Earth, its branches locking the barren tree in a complex embrace, pressing the barren trunk into its own contact with the Earth. In the terms of the previous chapter’s discussion, the living tree could symbolize the living Church—the flowering Church—wherever it is found, as well as other living traditions, such as the Native American, which draw deep sustenance from the fertile, feminine Earth. The grafting of such Earth-affirming energies into its life embodies the strongest hope for the reflowering of the Church.
The two questions asked at the beginning of the previous chapter hang heavy in the silence of the dream. Can the Church affirm the balanced symbolization of the Holy in images and rituals that do reverence to both the feminine and the masculine? Can the Church affirm women’s unique insights into the central mystery of the Christ? The answers are not yet clear. As the women interviewed emphasized in their responses, the first necessary step is the recognition of fully realized feminine wholeness in the Church and in the nature of the One. Without the presence of this feminine wholeness—not the depotentiated feminine of Christian tradition—neither reconciliation with the Church’s lost women nor the healing of its own wounds can be found.
Women seeking religious meaning through Native American spirituality seek the same essential treasure: their feminine Beingness, the feminine God-image in their hearts. At this time the Church does not offer its women any reliable access to the specifically feminine matrix of life. Without a structured means of access to the feminine within the Church, most women who are able to articulate their need will simply drift away, as those interviewed for this research have done—embittered, shattered, grieving, relieved, or simply abandoning an irrelevant piece of history, as each woman’s experience may be. In many cases they will take Jesus with them, alive in their hearts, but no longer related to the structures of the Church. But until they are able to affirm their essential femininity, they cannot encounter him as the bridegroom, the creative masculine within, the self-sacrificing guide to the feminine face of the One. And unless the Church offers pathways to the feminine within its own doctrines, few of these women will seek the bridegroom there.
Although the Church has treasured up the most significant life-preserving mystery of the Western world, it faces the catastrophic possibility that the life may be draining away from its symbols more rapidly than the Church can apply remedies. Dissatisfied women represent a movement away from the Church that has its echoes in rapidly diversifying New Age phenomena, the emerging men’s movement, and deep ecology. People speak glibly of a contemporary paradigm shift, not realizing what such a shift might mean. If a paradigm shift is primarily away from old patterns of reality, without containing within itself the balanced fullness of a new paradigm, disaster could result. The abandonment of traditional religious structures without firm alternatives to replace them would, as Jung saw clearly, bring catastrophic chaos to society.
Unless the Church can open itself to re-experience the numinous heart of its message in symbols that speak to the needs of the contemporary age, then it cannot offer itself to the world as the living body of Christ. The urgent need of the industrialized West is for wholeness within and without: the balancing of masculine and feminine and the sacred marriage that leads to authentic encounter with the face of the One manifested within each human being and in the whole of embodied reality. In the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Church has preserved this life-engendering mystery, but it has severed it from the Earth, and from the balanced wholeness of humanity’s most authentic experience of the Holy.
It is futile for the Church to try to respond constructively to critiques of its institutional structures without seeking to change the spiritual and psychological bases of those structural problems. Most of the respondents in my research could not conceive of a Church free of the destructiveness they had experienced within its walls. I believe this inability to imagine ecclesiastical change is rooted primarily in despair over the Church’s doctrinal bases, and only secondarily in pain resulting from its institutional abuses. If the Church were to address Christian women’s despair at its ultimate source—in patriarchal formulations of the nature of deity and women’s insignificance in that masculine equation—the abuses could be transformed through a natural process of growth. Embrace of the feminine matrix of life could move in organic procession toward reverence for the embodied cosmos and awareness of its participation in the Holy.
Like Meinrad Craighead, each Christian woman who confronts her pain and chooses to remain in the Church faces a long and lonely struggle for possession of her soul. In a recent letter, one respondent still struggling to stay in the Church wrote the following:
I still believe in the Church, but I see my sister clergywomen worn down by carrying the pain of the churches and their own pain, and that of their sisters in the pews. I watch knowing that I will not go back until I can see a way to work in the middle of that pain . . . . I feel like the support and teachers I need are out there (based in other traditions], and that eventually I will find enough of a vision to reenter parish ministry (“Elizabeth”).
Singly, in small groups, and sometimes in community, such women are spinning strong and supple anchors for a new web of wholeness. Each weaves her own experiences into those of her sisters, connecting hopes and personal symbols into the outer ring of a spreading web, working steadily inward toward the center, in spite of personal storms and human destructiveness.
For a woman who has birthed a shield, that center may be held by the power of her shield’s vision, a reminder of a beckoning presence encountered in the wilderness or within her own soul. A shield captures a vision of wholeness, sometimes with the fullness of the masculine complementarity, sometimes emphasizing the feminine alone. Like any true symbol, a shield that touches a woman’s depths will continue to draw her in, pulling her forward toward the Self as long as she remains creatively engaged with her journey to the center it symbolizes.
Jungian psychology bids a woman turn inward to listen to the voice of her deepest Self, and, having heard, to manifest her experience in the physical world, through writing, artistic production, or dance. Native American wisdom pushes a woman out into the created world to experience the call of the One and to bring that encounter to physical expression through song, dance, ritual movement, and the creation of spiritually significant ritual objects. Native America meets Jungian psychology at the center of the mandala, at the midpoint of the flowering cross of Christ, where spirit incarnates in flesh, and flesh embodies spirit.
Meinrad Craighead, “Tree at the Crossroads” http://www.meinradcraighead.com/
The Church must rediscover its true center in the ecstasy of immanence as well as transcendence if it is to embody the mystery of incarnation for the world. Women seeking participatory ritual in worship are reaching out with a true human instinct for experience of the wholeness of the One. The danger confronting them is that without the structured guidelines of proven traditional paths, they may fall into fascination with the psychic numinosity of destructive complexes—rather than with the creative pull of the Self.
Traditionally, the mysteries of the Church have facilitated experience of the One through such proven paths; however, the patriarchal bias of those mysteries has distorted human reality to such an extent that a critical mass of spiritual anguish has been achieved in the contemporary Western world. The paradigm is shifting, whether we will it or not. As the old consensus dissolves and social fabric unravels, American society is being split by those straining to cover themselves with the tatters of receding traditions and by those eager to push ahead into new revelation.
This split characterizes the contemporary American Church just as it characterized Mediterranean religious expression in the New Testament period. The cross of Christ, however, in its paradoxical fullness, fully supports neither of these opposing energies: it offers a point of reconciliation at its heart. It preserves the Law down to the last jot and tittle, while demanding new wineskins for the new wine of the Creative Spirit. It introduces a sword of separation into the most intimate fellowship, but draws all humanity to itself in love. It marks the intersection of proven and reliable old roads of tradition with the ongoing creative paths of the One, who is eternally making all things new. The essence of Christ’s message for the world is found in the paradoxical presence of both ancient wisdom and newness of life born from his passion and resurrection. The yoke of Christ to which the Church is called is a double one, harnessing polar opposites in creative tension: immanence with transcendence, masculine with feminine, flesh with spirit, light with dark, death with life.
As I opened my sacred circle to the surrounding forest at the completion of the vision quest that birthed the concluding chapters of this dissertation, the setting sun created a glowing shield from a previously unseen spider’s web. The hoop of the web was perfect in its roundness. The dying shaft of light that turned the web to flame illuminated only a few radiating strands, etching a golden cross against the shadowed trees, a cross that reached its arms out to touch the web’s circle at the four points of the medicine wheel. The web only glowed for a moment before the shaft of light was lost among the shadows, but it burned its image into my heart as a symbol of the longed-for wholeness of all visible and invisible being: the cross of Christ woven into the luminous heart of Creation.
I found myself more than usually burnt out after finishing the launch of Yeshua’s Loom, so I took an autumn break: hiking and photographing the changing forests in upstate NY. Luckily my brother Don came to visit, so we photographed the woods together!
One of my readers said that my photos looked as if I were trying to find windows into the One’s Spirit in the world. I mentioned that to Don, who said that was exactly what he did! Spending deep time with someone who’s known you all your life is incredibly nourishing. Here are some of my photos–taken by the writer at rest, with her brother. Click on individual photos to see a larger size.
The first album is from Ferncliff Nature Reserve in Duchess County:
The second album is from the Devil’s Peak Trail in the Indian Head Wilderness area above Woodstock:
This third album is from a very windy day along the Hudson River:
And finally, the Vanderbilt Estate on Halloween, after I took Don to the airport:
I’ve been thinking a lot about how This Madness of the Heart (and all the following Miranda Lamden Mysteries) fit together with my Yeshua’s Cats series–and why I feel certain the two series can coexist as books by the same author. But since my reasons are more feelings and instincts than logic, I’ve had trouble putting them into words.
So I did what I often do when I need to make sense of something: I created a piece of art (below). After all, what good is an art therapy degree if you can’t use it to clarify your own confusion? If I’m lucky, by explaining the image I’ll be opening up what lies behind it!
The Sleuth, Chi Rho, and the Cat
So, what are you looking at here?
First, I chose a Hubble image for the background: “Interacting Spiral Galaxies” . . . surely ideal for this project, since galaxies don’t often interact–anymore than churchfolk and professor-sleuths! It felt like a propitious beginning.
Hubble, Interacting Spiral Galaxies
Three interlocking circles fill the foreground. The center circle pulses with a glowing gold and green light; the Christian Chi Rho emerges from its heart.
What is the Chi Rho? Like most symbols, it has different meanings across cultures, but for me it’s a symbol used by early Christians in the first three centuries after Yeshua’s birth–before Constantine transformed it into an imperial banner (the cross didn’t emerge as a Christian symbol until after the year 500).
Chi Rho, early 3rd C catacomb
The Chi Rho gets its name from the two Greek letters that overlap to create the symbol: Chi and Rho, the first two letters of the Greek word Christos, or Christ. In the image above, the Greek letters Alpha and Omega are added. I did experiment with using a cross in the center circle, but I like the visual effect of the Chi Rho better, probably because it has “rays” like the sunburst. Anyway, the central circle is meant to be the Christian faith–not the organized religion–but the living faith of all the individuals who hold themselves to be Christian.
The circle to the right is Mari, from Yeshua’s Cat, turning aside from a path in a green forest to investigate the central circle. In her circle she represents all of the natural universe. Creation. Everything that exists naturally, apart from the intervention of humankind. This natural order also includes human beings, since they’re part of the created universe–but not their civilizations.
The totality of the created world–as we know it on Earth–is flowing back from Mari’s search like the tail of a comet.
The circle on the left is where Miranda, my detective, lives. Her circle is the world of human civilization–urban, complex, multi-cultural, and often unsure exactly what they believe. Many, like Miranda, have their roots in Christianity, but have turned away from the church. Spinning out from her circle is a spiral of different world religions. But in her circle she, like Mari, has paused to examine something about the Christian faith that has caught her eye.
Both Mari and Miranda live outside the Christian fold, and they approach it from opposite directions. Mari moves from the non-human, natural environment, Miranda from a detached, urban, academic world. Still, both find themselves intrigued by the light in the center circle. Mari has the easier approach: Yeshua introduces himself by saving her life, and she joins him as a friend. But Miranda has been scarred by her Christian experience; she mistrusts the church and its agendas. As a professor, she sees all religions as examples of the human yearning toward the divine. Truth claims don’t enter the picture. She simply records what she observes, without making judgments. Her methods are catlike: she steps cautiously toward anything new, not committing herself, poised to slip back into the shadows if conflict threatens.
I knew a number of women like Miranda in my years apart from the church. Their worlds were full and rich, but they didn’t screen their experiences through a Christian worldview. Yet they were sometimes attracted by a light shining out from this tradition many of them had left behind.
. . . maybe the light shone through a person
a man like Elmus
or as comfort in the midst of evil
perhaps through the One’s presence in some crisis of their own
or simply in prayer and meditation.
But today we live in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to say, “I believe.” The language is lost. What does it mean to believe? Who are we believing in? People who live in the secular world can’t respond to most Christian overtures–because they don’t understand the words anymore. God-talk is becoming literal non-sense to those outside the churches.
People like Miranda are who they are, just as cats are cats. Each responds to life according to their gifts . . . but for some reason those inside and outside the churches are drawing further apart.
Perhaps we might learn from the effort, and love, we put into cross-species communication with our cats (and dogs, gerbils, birds, and ferrets) . . . and look at the incomprehensible human beings around us as if they concealed inner selves as delightful, unique, and full of surprises as a cat’s. It’s not really such a stretch.
I happen to find the lives of alienated Christians intriguing, perhaps because I’ve been there myself. And if the polls are right, their numbers are growing. Their honesty is often fierce, like their determination never to be taken in again by faux-Christianity and self-serving lies. Sadly we don’t have to look far to find the lurking predators they’re avoiding. And that’s what This Madness of the Heart is about.
Miranda peers into the light of Christian faith–but she looks from a place apart. Her own experiences haven’t shown Christianity to be that promised “light to the gentiles.” So she watches, examines, records, and considers. In the meantime, I feel privileged to narrate her journey.
Bringing C. L. Francisco and Blair Yeatts Together
I imagine two women walking a little apart in an autumn wood where filtered sunlight hangs in the air like rainbows cast by stained glass windows. They might be sisters, although separated by many years: one has dark hair with ruddy highlights, while the elder’s hair shines silver in the shifting light. Both are tall, with the easy gait of serious walkers, loose denim skirts swirling around their legs as they stroll. Each gazes at the wood intently, reaching out to touch the trees . . . a beech here, an oak there . . . eyes shining with pleasure. The same surety of a benevolent Creator’s love undergirds both, rising up through the fallen leaves like an unfailing spring. But there they part ways.
The younger woman knows herself wounded and angry, torn from her roots, unable and unwilling to return to them. Life for her is a trackless horizon, where she must make her own way among a maze of confusing choices,
. . . a life rent by the emptiness of years alone, of stubborn search and dead-end roads, a renegade among the certain, a voiceless stranger in the garrulous crowds.
The older woman has made her peace with that old pain, accepted the paradoxes, and learned compassion for herself and the ghosts of her past. Her eyes dwell on the infinity of light surrounding her. She falls back into shadow only rarely, and when she does, she knows the light holds her still.
Yeshua’s Cats speak with the voice of the older woman. The Miranda Lamden Mysteries live in the younger woman’s world, overlaid with the hindsight of the elder. But they are both the creation of a single heart. I hope this post may help you bring them together. I’ll also say that, with the exception of a few creative details necessary to establishing a pen name, all Blair Yeatts’ memories and thoughts shared in posted interviews are C. L. Francisco’s own, although offered from the perspective of that younger self.
Blair Yeatts’ This Madness of the Heart was my first book, apart from a mammoth PhD dissertation and an unpublished memoir. I finished the original draft almost 20 years ago, as a way of venting my hurt and anger at the dirty tricks and character assassinations in the fundamentalist takeover of a conservative protestant denomination. As often happens in revolutions, a zealous minority overwhelmed a more moderate and less vocal majority, and then ruthlessly silenced those who disagreed with them. This previously loose-knit denomination had a cherished history of settling doctrinal disagreements locally: churches had simply split, becoming the 1st, 2nd, etc., churches in a given town. Dissent was in their blood, like the freedom of the individual believer. But this ultra-conservative minority targeted the whole assembly of churches in an iron-fisted power grab.
Once the coup was accomplished, dissidents had two choices: either bow to the doctrines of the new power elite, or leave the church. The denomination of my youth was swept away in a furor of self-righteous certainty. Pastors, professors, and church leaders were driven out. Hearts and lives were broken. Doctrine was narrowed, warped, and set in stone. Callings scorned and contracts withdrawn, women clergy left to find ways to minister among people with a wider view of God’s mercy. A few powerful men now controlled the hearts and minds of the denomination’s mostly oblivious members. There was nothing I could do . . . so I wrote a book.
Unfortunately, trying to read Madness’ original draft felt much like Harry Potter opening the screaming book in the Hogwarts’ library: the anger I’d poured into it flamed from its pages. I realized this at the time, and set it aside—for almost twenty years—until I could return and treat it as a mere story. Then I wrote most of the anger out, leaving a fast-paced tale about a slimy charlatan with an honorary divinity degree in a haunted hollow in Appalachia. The story is admittedly over the top . . . vengeful ghosts don’t play feature roles in most grifters’ lives. But where evil thrives, its deadliest mass tends to hide beneath the surface . . . often masquerading as holiness.
I found myself alienated from the Christian faith during two periods in my life: first for the decade spanning college and my early twenties; second, beginning with the fundamentalist takeover and stretching across another 10-15 years. I still find myself at odds with much of the organized Church. I wrote The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat as an expression of my own faith in a Jesus of Nazareth who speaks with love and compassion, untouched by the legalism he challenged. A cat’s voice seemed appropriate for the task. The first book has now multiplied into four, with a fifth on the way.
The Miranda Lamden Mysteries have roots in those secular years, as well as in my lifelong love of mysteries, starting with Nancy Drew and most recently Charles Todd. They are not Christian mysteries. Neither are they “cozies” (emerging from a cozy mystery feels to me like struggling out of wad of cotton batting back into the realities of life). Ugly or not, if a thing is part of human experience, it’s fit to write, and read, about. Violence is part of life, and so are pain and tragedy; they belong in novels, and you will find moderate amounts in mine. But I also write about what I call “spirit” or “faith” or “redemption”—pick whichever word you like: without it the unremitting darkness of despair grinds human beings into something subhuman.
I write mysteries I’d like to read: novels of danger and intrigue, with depths of love and pain, where characters wrestle with despair and disaster, and fight their way through to the light. They surmount capricious hazards without toxic overloads of violence or sex. Spirituality and questions of meaning drive both cast and plot. I don’t strive for great literature, but for a read an intelligent mystery-lover would welcome at the end of a long day—and have difficulty putting down. I don’t guarantee happy endings, but I never end a book with despair and shattering loss of meaning . . . endings may be bittersweet, but they’re always suffused with hope.
If you’re a Blair Yeatts reader, would you like Yeshua’s Cats? If you’re a Yeshua’s Cats reader, would you like the Miranda Lamden Mysteries? Here’s my take.
Yeshua’s Cats are intended for a Christian audience, although reviewers have repeatedly assured readers that their appeal is much broader. The two most recent books, The Cats of Rekem, and Cat Born to the Purple, have both been chosen for Indie Reader’s “Best of” new book list for 2015 and 2016 respectively. But if you’re a devout atheist, or not at all spiritually inclined, I suspect you wouldn’t like them. If you’re a cat-lover you might leap all other boundaries and enjoy them anyway.
The Miranda Lamden Mysteries are full of spiritual matters of one sort and another, since Miranda is a professor of religion and an expert on paranormal phenomena . . . they’re for spiritually curious readers. But if you’re a conservative Christian who thinks preachers can do no wrong, you won’t like the first book. If you believe that you’re in possession of the only truth, and don’t care to consider anyone else’s perspective, you won’t like any of the books in the series. Like Miranda, I’ve spent much of my life in institutions of higher learning, and I’ve seen too many people convinced of the unassailable rightness of their own opinions, mistaking the echoes of their own thoughts for the voice of God. That way lies the Inquisition.
Goya, “Scene from the Inquisition”
So why did I reverse direction and decide to claim these mysteries as my own? I think the presidential election made my choice for me: the tragedy of my denomination is now replaying on the national stage, and my mysteries have become appallingly relevant. In Miranda’s words, from This Madness of the Heart:
How had we stood by and let such a man amass so much power? Why were the good people of the town not fleeing the contamination of his spirit? How could they not sense the heart of hate beneath his harangues? Any amount of violence might erupt from the bloodlust JJ was whipping up among God’s elect. Religion! Why did the search for ultimate love so often end in hate?
“What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
I realize that choosing a side in a divisive political—and religious—controversy may alienate me from some of my readers. I hope not. But for me this has become a matter of conscience, and keeping faith with myself . . . as well as with my faith.
Freedom of conscience has always been our privilege in America, but it didn’t come free: it was bought with the lives of people desperate for liberty, and its defense lies in our hands today. I pray we will have the strength and integrity to preserve the freedom our founders entrusted to us.
Readers are always asking me how I get the ideas for my books, and I’m usually at a loss for answers. So with Cat Born to the Purple, I tried to notice right along how the ideas developed. Now I offer you a small window into the earliest beginnings of Purple.
When I introduced Purple’s main character, Eliana, in The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat, I hadn’t planned on writing anything else about her, much less a continuing series of Yeshua’s Cats books! But I did write more books, and Eliana turned out to be one of those characters who set up shop in the back of my mind, insistently hammering at my dreams and thoughts until I allowed her to tell her story: Cat Born to the Purple is her tale.
But before I could tell her story, I had to figure out what her family history might have been, and what circumstances could possibly have left her, a young woman barely more than a child, stoned and near death in the hills of Galilee near Sepphoris. I knew that she was going to be an exceptionally fine weaver and embroiderer, which meant that she probably came from a family that worked with textiles, most likely from one of the semi-professional family workshops found in sizeable towns like Sepphoris.
But her wrongful stoning suggested that she’d had no real family to protect her. How could that have happened? Jewish women of merchant status always had male relatives from their birth-families hovering in the background somewhere, prepared to protect them from abuse. I started reading everything I could find about the area around Sepphoris during the time of Herod the Great and his son Herod Antipas, since Eliana would have been born around 12 CE.
Herod the Great’s port at Caesarea Maritima, 10 BCEReconstruction of Sepphoris Dionysos mansion
Scholars have been wrangling for years over whether the Sepphoris of Yeshua’s youth and adult years was primarily Jewish, Greco-Roman, or a mixture of the two. The dust is finally beginning to settle in that argument, leaving what seems to be a clear picture of Sepphoris—along with most of the rest of the Galilee—as predominantly Jewish in population and culture during the early-to-middle 1st C CE. The recently discovered Greco-Roman palaces of Sepphoris came considerably later.
Remains of early 1st C Sepphoris
Almost nothing remains of the mid-1st C city, which would have been almost entirely Jewish. During Yeshua’s lifetime Sepphoris was a regional market and civic center—Herod Antipas’ Galilean capital until he built a new capital at Tiberius around 20 CE. Sepphoris was a large Jewish town for its time and place, but neither Roman in culture, nor heavily gentile.
The most dramatic event in Sepphoris’ history during that early period came soon after Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE, when a band of Jewish dissidents and townspeople overwhelmed the city guard and raided the treasury. Rome’s reprisal was swift and cruel. The rebels were crucified along the highways, and most of Sepphoris’ citizens were sold into slavery at Acco. Herod Antipas rebuilt and fortified the city to some extent before moving on to Tiberius, but he didn’t create the wealthy Greco-Roman Sepphoris whose ruins have been excavated in recent years.
Artist’s Reconstruction of Tiberius
So with this regional history in mind, Eliana’s own family history began to fall into place for me. The timing of Eliana’s birth could easily have placed her grandparents in Sepphoris as weavers and merchants when the city’s residents were sold into slavery by the Romans in 4 BCE. Only their young daughter Sarah—Eliana’s mother—perhaps eight years old at the time, managed to escape. Terrified and confused, the homeless child was taken in by a kindly woman from Shikhin, a neighboring village of about 500 people. Archaeologists recently discovered the ruins of Shikhin only a mile northwest of Sepphoris, just off the main highway connecting Acco and Sepphoris. The Via Maris, the major Roman road that followed Israel’s coastal plain along the Mediterranean Sea, intersected the Acco-Sepphoris road nearby, placing both Sepphoris and Shikhin at a major crossroads.
The low hills of ShikhinShikhin pottery fragments
Archaeologists had long searched for the location of Shikhin, known by reputation as a village that manufactured everyday pottery found in archaeological sites all across Israel. Rabbis of the early Roman period even used Shikhin storage jars as their standard for liquid measure. Shikhin’s period of greatest productivity probably began sometime in the late 1st C BCE and increased through the early Roman period. They were known for strong, fire resistant pottery made from black clay: particularly amphorae (storage jars) and small clay lamps, but also jugs, kraters, cooking pots, and bowls. Archaeologists guess that Shikhin’s potters may have made common cause with wine and oil merchants and sold their pots already filled.
Recent excavations at Shikhin have uncovered cisterns, pits, potters’ wheels, kilns, and large numbers of discarded pieces of pottery damaged in firing, indicating a significant manufacturing area. The site was abandoned around the time of the great earthquake of 363 CE.
Now the story was beginning to take shape in my mind. As a refugee child in a time of chaos, Sarah’s unofficial adoption by a family working at a craft totally unlike her family’s own guaranteed her separation from any extended family who might have survived the upheavals at Sepphoris. She was simply a child working beside her adopted family making pots. Sarah eventually married the potters’ only son and taught her daughter Eliana the skills of a potter. But even though Sarah had lost her parents at a young age, I imagined that she would never have forgotten the weaving and embroidery skills she must have learned at her mother’s knee–which would probably have been valued by her adopted family. These skills she passed on to Eliana as well, along with an innate gift for working with textiles.
Sleeveband from 3rd C CE Mediterranean textileOld brick kilns in Spain
But for Eliana to be without family when Yeshua found her, both her parents must have been dead already. After learning what I could about the manufacture of ancient Palestinian pottery, I decided that her parents might have died together in a fire caused by a collapsing kiln during a minor earthquake (more on that in another post). So Eliana was indeed left alone in the world, a young bride without anyone but treacherous and greedy in-laws to care for her. The complex system of Jewish kin relationships protecting vulnerable women had failed her. Yeshua’s assumption of just such a situation led him to place Eliana with his friend Eli in Cana—which is where Cat Born to the Purple truly begins.
In the end, the unique possibilities presented by 1st C Israel’s culture came together to create the backstory of Eliana’s life, thus laying the groundwork for the rest of the book. Research can be a wonderful thing!
“BLOOD ON HOLY GROUND is a beautifully-written mystery novel that combines a gripping and suspenseful story with thought-provoking and heartfelt spirituality.”
“C.L. Francisco is a modern writer in the tradition of Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis. Her ecumenical view of spiritual experience permeates this magical novel, expressing a love of the natural world and a reverence for religious folklore and fable.”
