During the Yoga of the Heart course, Nischala Joy Devi shared a story that Dr. Ornish had told her that demonstrates an important aspect of the sublator. I may have a few details wrong, but the essence of the story is this: during his medical residency, Dr. Ornish was under tremendous pressure. He grew increasingly frustrated with his chosen field and especially angry at Swami Satchidananda for sending him down that path.

One night, Ornish had a dream in which he unloaded his fury upon his guru. Amidst a constant stream of shouting, he first threw handfuls of mud, then stones. When the stones weren’t enough, he advanced forward and throttled Satchidananda with his fists.

Satchidananda, all the while, received every blow calmly, neither defending himself nor castigating his disciple.

Finally, Ornish collapsed in exhaustion. When he looked up and met Satchiananda’s gaze, he expected a stern reproach. But Satchidananda was beaming with a loving smile that said, “There now, dear one. Feeling better?”

Overwhelmed by that unconditional love, Ornish awoke and thereafter formed a healthier relationship with his schooling and his career.

A non-concern for self

The important quality that Satchidananda expressed here is not just an overwhelming concern for the welfare of the disciple, as discussed in Part 2, but also a sublator’s utter non-concern for his or her own.

What, in contrast, would a normal teacher or mentor do if a student turned violent as Dr. Ornish had done in his dream? He or she would likely defend themselves even the point of taking the student’s life in self-defense. If nothing else, such an outburst would likely sever the relationship entirely (except, perhaps, for the subsequent lawsuits). A mentor’s concern for the student, in other words, goes only so far: there’s a line beyond which his or her self-concern overrides the disciple’s welfare.

As good example of this, to cite the Star Wars saga again, is the climax of Revenge of the Sith when Obi-Wan Kenobi abandons Anakin Skywalker, leaving him for dead.

An interesting aspect of this severing of the relationship is that Emperor Palpatine aka Lord Sidious, who earlier took over the role of Anakin’s mentor, soon rescues his protégé and restores him to a pseudo-life as Darth Vader. Sidious, however, does not rescue Anakin from any sense of love, only because Anakin/Vader is a useful and expendable tool in Sidious’ own ambitions and agenda. That’s why he corrupted Anakin to begin with, because otherwise he was a servant of the Jedi’s agenda, as explored in Part 2.

The mentor’s ego-consciousness defines the line

That line or point-of-no-return that severs the relationship is determined by the mentor’s degree of ego-consciousness. The heavier the ego, the more it favors the mentor’s self-concern and/or agenda, even to the point where that mentor has zero concern for anyone or anything else, and even their closest lieutenants are expendable. That complete absorption in ego is what makes such characters an embodiment of pure evil.

Lord Sidious demonstrates such extreme ego-consciousness in Return of the Jedi immediately after Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader. “Good! Good!” he cheers as Luke is holding his light saber to a prone Vader’s throat, ready to strike the fatal blow. Does Sidious care one whit about Vader? No. He simply says, “Your hate has made you powerful. Now, fulfill your destiny and take your father’s place at my side!”

Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter similarly demonstrates this utter commitment to “me and me alone” when he shows absolutely no remorse in sacrificing Snape to become, so he believes, the master of the Elder Wand. Snape, to his understanding (and everyone else’s, including readers), killed Dumbledore, the supposedly prior master of the Elder Wand at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and in doing so became the wand’s new master. Voldemort confronts Snape about this “problem”:

“…this wand…has not revealed the wonders it has promised. I feel no differences between this wand [and others].” (653 of 2007 Scholastic hardback).

Harry Potter, who is watching the scene from the shadows, has this experience:

Voldemort’s tone was musing, calm, but Harry’s scar had begun to throb and pulse. Pain was building in his forehead, and he could feel that controlled sense of fury building inside Voldemort. (653)

The conversation continues, during which Voldemort reassures how valuable Snape has been to him.

“You have been a good and faithful servant, and I regret what must happen. … While you live, Severus, the Elder Wand cannot truly be mine. … It cannot be any other way.” (656)

Voldemort then orders his snake, Nagini, to kill Snape.

“I regret it,” said Voldemort coldly.

He turned away; there was no sadness in him, no remorse. … Voldemort swept from the room without a backward glance… (656-657)

His only regret, obviously, is that he had to sacrifice a useful tool in Snape. Snape’s value as a human being is utterly unimportant; Voldemort might as well have been discarding an old pair of shoes.

Lord Sidious and Lord Voldemort both represent the “pure” evil of an ego-consciousness that has zero concern for anyone or anything. To both dark lords, everyone around them is expendable. Their only reality is their own.

And just to add another example, consider Agent Smith in The Matrix movies, who becomes a virus intent on replicating himself into everything. The directors nailed this extreme ego-consciousness in a scene of The Matrix Reloaded where he says, simply, “Me, me, me!”:

The lighter the mentor’s ego, on the other hand, the more it favors the student. In the true sublator, the ego has become lighter and lighter to the point of being transcended altogether. That degree of self-mastery is why many disciples refer to their gurus/sublators as “Master”—not in the sense of an overlord but in the sense of one who has conquered his or her own selfish tendencies.

Unlike a normal teacher or mentor, the sublator has the sole purpose of soul purpose: to lift the disciple closer to God. This unrelenting concern for the disciple’s welfare is why a sublator, as in Dr. Ornish’s dream of Swami Satchidananda, never gives up on a disciple and is willing to absorb pain, abuse, and even death if that’s what it takes to help the disciple’s spiritual growth. (This eternal bond is again another essential characteristic of the sublator, which we’ll cover in Part 4.)

Dumbledore accepting Harry’s anger

Although Dumbledore is much more of a mentor than a sublator, there are scenes in which he demonstrates a degree of selflessness. In Chapter 37 of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (a scene that’s not in the movie version), Dumbledore calmly receives several pages’ worth of Harry’s rage after the death of Sirius Black, Harry’s beloved godfather. Here are a few bits from that exchange:

“There’s no shame in what you are feeling, Harry,” said Dumbledore’s voice. “On the contrary…the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength.”

Harry felt the white-hot anger lick his insides, blazing in the terrible emptiness, filling him with the desire to hurt Dumbledore for his calmness and empty words.

“My greatest strength, is it?” said Harry, his voice shaking as he stared out at the Quidditch stadium, no longer seeing it. “You haven’t got a clue….You don’t know…”

“What don’t I know?” asked Dumbledore calmly.

It was too much. Harry turned around, shaking with rage.

[Shouting ensures, then Harry…] seized on of the delicate silver instruments from the spindle-legged table beside him and flung it across the room…he seized the table on which the instrument had stood and threw that too. … for a second he wanted to rush at Dumbledore and break him, too; shatter that calm old face, shake him, hurt him, make him feel some tiny part of the horror inside Harry. (823-824 of 2003 Scholastic paperback edition)

Harry attempts to leave, but Dumbledore prevents him, knowing that Harry really isn’t done and still needs to hear what Dumbledore has to say. Harry threatens to inflict more destruction.

“By all means continue destroying my possessions,” said Dumbledore serenely. “I daresay I have too many.”

…

“I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU’VE GOT TO SAY!” Harry roared. “I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say!”

“You will,” said Dumbledore sadly. “Because you are not nearly as angry with me as you ought to be. If you are to attack me, as I know you are close to doing, I would like to have thoroughly earned it.” (825)

Dumbledore goes on to say that he’s at fault for Sirius’ death and for keeping secrets from Harry. These admissions finally get through to Harry and calms him down. There follows another 21 pages of exposition (which occurs in the story’s denouement) in which Harry tussles a bit more with Dumbledore, but in the end understands.

Dumbledore, in short, isn’t concerned with the effects of Harry’s anger (he can, after all, easily magic all the broken instruments back to normal) but with helping Harry through that anger. The underlying motivation, of course, is still that Dumbledore needs Harry in the fight against Voldemort, but in this scene, at least, Dumbledore shows himself more a sublator than a mentor.

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore also arranges his own death with Snape in order to spare Draco Malfoy from committing an act of murder. This, too, shows a concern for others more so than himself.

Expecting praise and taking pride

Another facet of ego is the degree to which mentors and teachers expect praise for their work and take egoic pride in the success of their students—both of which constitute personal agendas that aren’t about the student’s inner growth. Sublators, in other words, don’t take pride at all, only delight in the disciple’s own development. Sublator, too, don’t seek praise, money, or any other reward for their work, unlike so many erstwhile “gurus” we find in various industries.

An example of a mentor’s pride is seen in the movie Groundhog Day, where the piano teacher proudly proclaims, “He’s my student!” as she watches Phil Conners (played by Bill Murray) perform virtuoso jazz. She’s genuinely proud of him, of course, but she’s perhaps more proud that she was his teacher, hence the emphasis on “my.”

Compare this to the scene from The Legend of Bagger Vance that we saw in Part 2 where Vance walks away from the tournament before the final hole. In doing so, he demonstrated again his unwavering concern for Junah’s welfare and his utter lack of concern for his own reputation, the latter shown by his non-response to the threat that he’d never caddy on that course again.

Laying claim to students vs. elevating disciples

Ego is the same reason that a teacher or mentor might permanently abandon an unwilling or uncooperative student and even exact revenge on a “disloyal” student who turns against him or her. Sidious and Voldemort demonstrate this, as does Denethor in Tolkien’s The Return of the King. After he accepts Pippen’s offer of service, he says:

“And this do I hear, Denethor son of Ecthelion, Lord of Gondor, Steward of the High King, and I will not forget it, nor fail to reward that which is given: fealty with love, valour with honour, oath-breaking with vengeance.” (Page 756 of combined The Lord of the Rings Kindle edition).

Here’s the movie version:

Sublators, by contrast, never lay claim to disciples; their greatest delight, indeed, is the spiritual elevation of those disciples, even if it exceeds the sublator’s own. For they know that if a disciple is able to rise higher, he or she will reach back down to pull the sublator up.

A good example of this relationship is found in the Bible, II Kings 2:9-13, between the sublator Elijah and his disciple Elisha when Elijah ascends to Heaven:

And it came to pass, when they were gone over, that Elijah said unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me.

And he said, Thou hast asked a hard thing: nevertheless, if thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee; but if not, it shall not be so.

And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.

And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more: and he took hold of his own clothes, and rent them in two pieces.

He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went back, and stood by the bank of Jordan.

As Paramhansa Yogananda explains in Chapter 35 of Autobiography of a Yogi, that “double portion of thy spirit” means that Elisha was graced with a higher degree of spiritual realization than Elijah, thereby surpassing his sublator. This is why, then, that when Elijah (also called Elias) reincarnated as John the Baptist and Elisha as Jesus (as Yogananda explains is supported by the Bible itself, which I won’t elaborate upon here), the roles were reversed and Jesus was now John’s sublator.

The lack of ego means that a sublator takes neither praise nor blame personally. It’s like Jesus saying to Judas, calmly and without judgment, “What thou dost, do quickly.” (John 13:27) So also did he say on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34) His sole concern was again for the welfare of his disciples and, by extension, the greater mass of people whom he was sent to serve, including the Romans who crucified him.1 And even in the case of Judas, Jesus never abandoned his disciple. Jesus, in fact, called Judas “friend” even as Judas gave him the kiss that sealed the betrayal. (Matthew 26:50).

A sublator in short, either is or aspires to be an egoless channel for the Divine. It’s never about personality.

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• Mentors, such as those well-known figures noted at the beginning of part 1, commonly appear with the purpose of training a disciple for some role in fulfilling that agenda that’s only secondarily (if at all) concerned with the student’s inner growth.

• That priority is reversed for the sublator, with whom the disciple’s spiritual growth and well-being outweighs any other agenda.

Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars

In the Star Wars saga, it’s clear that in their training of Anakin and Luke Skywalker, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi are primarily interested in defeating the Sith and bringing balance to the Force (respectively). Obi-Wan and Yoda admit to this principal purpose several times in The Empire Strikes Back. For example, during his training with Yoda on the swampy planet Dagobah, Luke is plagued by visions of Darth Vader inflicting great pans upon Luke’s closest friends, Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Chewbacca. Unable to shake those images, he’s intent on leaving to help them. Yoda and Obi-Wan (who appears as a spirit) urge him to remain and complete his training. Toward the end of that scene, Obi-Wan counsels, “Patience!”

Luke: And sacrifice Han and Leia?

Yoda (looking stern): If you honor what they fight for…yes.

Clearly, both Obi-Wan and Yoda are willing to sacrifice people’s lives in service to the primary goal. Neither one ever mentions Luke’s own inner development.

Luke chooses to leave anyway, and as he departs, we hear these words:

Yoda: Now, matters are worse.

Obi-Wan: That boy was our only hope.

Yoda: No, there is another.

Luke, in other words, is merely a means to an end. If he fails, there’s apparently a backup plan, meaning that although Luke is the best candidate for the job, he’s not the only one. That fact makes Luke expendable.

Here’s that full scene:

Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings

Next, consider the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, whose overarching purpose of destroying the One Ring and defeating the dark lord Sauron. Readers versed in the broader lore of Tolkien’s milieu, in fact, know that this purpose is Gandalf’s whole reason for being on Middle Earth in the first place.

Gandalf’s key disciple, Frodo Baggins, is consequently just a means to that end, like Luke Skywalker is in Star Wars. Gandalf loves Frodo, of course, but Frodo’s inner growth doesn’t figure into Gandalf’s equations. Gandalf simply tells Frodo that he was “meant” for this outer quest, that some higher power essentially chose Frodo to “bear the burden” of carrying the Ring to Mount Doom, where alone it can be destroyed. If there’s any inner, spiritual growth for Frodo in pursuit of this quest, it’s really not mentioned.

Gandalf even knows that he’s effectively just using Frodo, which is why his enemies twice try to leverage his guilty conscience at different times to thwart his overarching agenda.

One instance is in the movie version of Return of the King when the fallen wizard Sarumon says:

“Gandalf does not hesitate to sacrifice those closest to him…those he professes to love. Tell me, what words of comfort did you give the halfling before you sent him to his doom? The path that you have set him on can only lead to death.”

Actor Ian McKellen does a marvelous job conveying Gandalf’s guilt in that moment:

Later, before the Black Gates in The Return of the King, the Mouth of Sauron also seeks to manipulate Gandalf by revealing Frodo’s belongings and suggesting that Frodo has been captured and faces torture. Here’s how it appears in the book:

“Now, maybe he that bore these things was a creature that you would not grieve to lose, and maybe otherwise: one dear to you, perhaps? If so, take swift counsel with what little wit is left to you. For Sauron does not love spies, and what his fate shall be depends now on your choice.”

No one answered him; but he saw their faces grey with fear and the horror in their eyes, and he laughed again, for it seemed to him that his sport went well. “Good, good!” he said. “He was dear to you, I see. Or else his errand was one that you did not wish to fail? It has. And now he shall endure the slow torment of years, as long and slow as our arts in the Great Tower can contrive, and never be released, unless maybe when he is changed and broken, so that he may come to you, and you shall see what you have done. This shall surely be unless you accept my Lord’s terms.”

“Name the terms,” said Gandalf steadily, but those nearby saw the anguish in his face, and now he seemed an old and wizened man, crushed, defeated at last. They did not doubt that he would accept. (889-890, Kindle Edition of The Lord of the Rings)

In the shorter movie version of this scene, Ian McKellen again shows guilt and remorse:

Dumbledore in Harry Potter

Then we have the Harry Potter books and movies in which Dumbledore bears a similar guilt. Dumbledore’s interest in Harry is to train him as an agent to defeat Lord Voldemort. In the books, specifically, Voldemort learns of a prophecy that one born on July 31^st would be his nemesis: “Neither can live while the other survives.” Harry has that birthdate, which is why Voldemort attempts to slay Harry as a baby. This attempted murder is how Voldemort “marks” Harry as his chosen nemesis, which is why Dumbledore’s takes an interest in training Harry and virtually ignoring the other child born on the same day, Neville Longbottom.

The fact that Dumbledore’s overarching agenda is Voldemort’s downfall, even if it means Harry’s death, is finally revealed in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when Harry is viewing Professor Snape’s memories in the Pensieve. Viewing this memory is how Harry (and the audience) learns the backstory that makes sense of so much that’s gone on in the entire series to that point (books and movies both). Why is it that Harry can talk to snakes and shares a special connection to Voldemort’s thoughts and emotions? It’s because when Voldemort’s killing curse rebounded on the night he tried to murder Harry, Voldemort’s soul was fragmented and one of those fragments attached itself to Harry. And that come with some really bad news, as expressed in these lines from the movie:

“And while that fragment of soul, unmissed by Voldemort, remains attached to and protected by Harry, Lord Voldemort cannot die.”

Not only is this bad news for Harry, it’s also bad news for Professor Snape, who has been protecting Harry all along because of his love for Harry’s mother.

“So the boy … the boy must die?” asked Snape quite calmly.

“And Voldemort himself must do it, Severus. That is essential.

…

“You have been keeping him alive so that he can die at the right moment?”

“Yes, yes, the boy must die.”

So again, like Luke Skywalker and Frodo Baggins, Harry is merely a means to an end, and Dumbledore knows it, a guilt that actor Michael Gambon so aptly portrays in the movie version of that scene:

Mentors and students may abandon one another

The foregoing examples each show how a mentor’s outward agenda makes seeking out and training students as simply a means to an end. Mentors often take on students because of the student’s own interest in serving that agenda or gaining the powers that come along for the ride. Luke wants to be a Jedi and Harry wants to be a wizard because in both cases they’ve lost their parents and despise the foster homes in which they’ve been raised (an aunt and uncle in both cases).

Frodo, too, is an orphan that’s been raised by his uncle, Bilbo. Frodo, for his part, isn’t explicitly interested in developing powers or skills, yet he’s motivated by the desire—and thus the power—to protect his home. If the Shire wasn’t threatened, he’d be perfectly happy to live out his days in quiet comfort, never concerning himself with any kind of inner growth.

These interests make the mentor-student relationship one of mutual benefit as a means to an end: the outer mission, on behalf of the mentor, and the acquisition of some power, on behalf of the student.

If the student loses interest in the mentor’s agenda, the mentor is likely to lose interest in the student because fulfillment of that agenda overrides any concerns about whether serving that agenda is spiritually right for the student. The mentor can then go seek out someone else to exploit.

Similarly, if the student believes that the mentor isn’t helping enough to develop the desires powers, the student might terminate the relationship. In Attack of the Clones, for example, there’s a scene on Tatooine where Anakin complains to Padme that Obi-Wan isn’t training him properly, going so far to say that Obi-Wan is jealous of Anakin’s powers. The Emperor Palpatine—who is also the Sith by name of Lord Sidious—exploits Anakin’s desire in Revenge of the Sith by promising to give him training that the Jedi withhold. Anakin takes the bait, which leads him to abandon his loyalty to the Jedi and become the Lord Vader.

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The sublator’s priority of inner growth

Sublators, on the other hand, always place a disciple’s inner growth above all other concerns; any outward agenda is merely a means to that end. Put another way, the people are more important than the things—a sublator is perfectly willing to let an outer agenda or project fall into utter ruin if that’s what’s best for the disciple’s welfare and especially the disciple’s spiritual development. The sublator is simply not invested in any other outcome.

It’s for this reason that sublators don’t seek to attract disciples to serve a mission. Instead, it’s the magnetism of a disciple’s own desire to grow spiritually—the desire to know God—that attracts the sublator. As the saying goes, “When the disciple is ready, the guru appears close-by.” (It’s also why the disciple-sublator relationship is an eternal one, but that’s a separate distinction that we’ll explore in another post in this series.)

In some cases, a sublator does have a broader, outward mission that his or her disciples can serve. But that’s a can and not a must. A true sublator never uses disciples for the fulfillment of that mission. If a sublator happens to assign a disciple a task or role that’s related to that mission, it’s because the very attempt to complete that task or fulfill that role is what will help the disciple grow.

“Sometimes,” Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters) wrote of his guru/sublator, Paramhansa Yogananda, in The New Path, “he would not place people in positions for which they were eminently qualified, simply because they no longer needed those particular experiences to grow spiritually.” (Chapter 24) He learned this directly when Yogananda asked him, as a relatively new disciple, to write articles for the public, rather than having much more seasoned disciples do the job: it’s because he needed to do the work and the others didn’t.

Because Kriyananda’s own inner growth was also deeply intertwined with the need to share joy with others, Yogananda directed him toward public activities. “Your work is writing and lecturing.” In contrast, other disciples were instructed to spend their time in meditation, counsel others privately, get married and raise families, or perform simple labors.

Put simply, a sublator, has the sole purpose of soul purpose: to lift every disciple closer to God. Naught else matters. As Yogannada’s own sublator, Swami Sri Yukteswar said to him, “I would not use you for my own ends; I am happy only in your own true happiness.” (Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 14)

The Legend of Bagger Vance

An excellent fictional example of this relationship is found in Stephen Pressfield’s novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance. The novel itself is a retelling of the ancient Indian scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, which is a conversation between the disciple Arjuna (ARE-joon-a) and his guru/sublator, Krishna, also known as Bhagavan (Lord) Krishna1, just as the great battle of Kurukshetra is about to commence.2

Various scenes and events in the novel are clearly taken from those in the scripture, and the main characters in the novel are Rannulph Junah (R. Junah) and Bagger Vance (a variant of Bhagavan), a mysterious man who appears on the scene to serve as Junah’s caddy in an exhibition golf tournament. Just as Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita becomes despondent on the threshold of battle, the golfer Junah is despondent on the eve the tournament because he’s lost the touch that made him an amateur champion. Then, just as Krishna rallies Arjuna by helping him connect with his Authentic Self, Vance helps Junah connect with his Authentic Swing, which Vance in the novel explicitly states is the same thing:

“The search for the Authentic Swing is a parallel to the search for the Self. We as golfers pursue that elusive essence our entire lives. What hooks us about the game is that it gives us glimpses. Glimpses of our Authentic Swing, like a mystic being granted a vision of the face of God. All we need is to experience it once—one mid-iron screaming like a bullet toward the flag, one driver flushed down the middle—and we’re enslaved forever. We feel with absolute certainty that if we could only swing like that all the time, we would be our best selves, our true selves, our Authentic Selves. That’s why we lionize men like Hagen and Jones and treat them like gods. They are gods in that sense, the sense that they have found their Authentic Selves, at least within the realm of golf.” (Chapter 11, page 70, Kindle version)

Other passages like this one, too, clearly indicate the allegorical nature of the story, as does the book’s subtitle: “A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life.”3

Vance has no other agenda. It’s not important to him whether Junah wins the tournament or that he even does well:

“All I want is that you swing your Authentic Swing.”

Junah let out a breath, frustrated. “Please don’t confuse me again, Bagger. I thought you wanted me to win.”

“I couldn’t care less about winning,” the mysterious fellow answered. “I care about you.” (164)

And, a little later:

“Forget all else, Junah, but remember this: You are never alone. You have your caddie. You have me.

“More devoted than a mother, more faithful than a lover, I stand by your side always. I will never abandon you. No sin, no lapse, no crime however heinous can make me desert you, nor yield up to you any less than my ultimate fidelity and love.” (185)

A simple demonstration of this non-attachment to any other outcome is shown in the movie version when Vance turns down the usual caddy’s share should Junah win and is satisfied with a token fee of $5:

All that matters is putting Junah back in touch with himself—if that means winning, fine. If that means failing colossally on the links, so be it.

Junah, in fact, faces this test on the seventeenth hole of the final round, when he’s in a position to make a shot that would all but secure his victory. But, in the process of stepping up for the shot (in the movie he removes a piece of debris near the ball), the ball moves. By the rules, this movement incurs a penalty short.

The young boy Hardie Greaves, who is Junah’s forecaddie and also the story’s narrator, is mortified, for the penalty will certainly cost Junah the tournament. Convinced that no one else saw the ball move, he pleads with Junah to just play on without telling anyone. But Junah instead chooses to be honest and inform the officials—choosing dharma, or right action, as the Gita calls it. (The Gita as a whole is an exhortation to dharma.)

By making that choice, Junah has understood that dharma is the most important thing for his soul. Vance, in turn, recognizes that his job is complete.

He moved beside Junah and spoke, almost too softly to hear.

“In this hour,” he said, “you have reached me.” (206)

It’s at this moment that Vance departs. Onlookers cannot believe that Vance would leave Junah before the final hole, but that action serves to underscore Vance’s lack of any other agenda.

In fact, Vance is there to help not only Junah but also Hardie. Upon his departure, Vance passed the full caddy responsibilities to Hardie, knowing that the boy is ready for the job even as Hardie doubts himself. But Hardie rises to the occasion and thus grows in the process—grows toward finding his own Authentic Swing/Self:

With this realization a terrible gravity settled upon my young boy’s shoulders. I grew five years in that instant. I felt words forming inside me and knew they were his, they were Vance’s. I stepped forward forward and spoke directly to Junah. “The Rules require you to replace the ball. Back where it was, before it rolled. Otherwise it’s another stroke penalty.”

Junah blinked. His eyes met mine. “Thank you, Hardy. You’re absolutely right.” (208)

Here’s how the scene plays out in the movie:

A touching moment in this relationship also appears at the end of the movie version. To align with the novel’s retrospective telling, the movie begins with the elderly Hardie collapsing on the links, perhaps from a heart attack. As he lies there, he relives his boyhood experience with Vance. After all that’s over, we return to the aged Hardie who gets up and apparently continues his round of golf. But then we see Vance’s outline appear on the crest of a dune in the sunset, suggesting that Hardie actually dies on the course and that his sublator, Vance, appears to usher him into the next world.

(The video clip below is in Spanish but it’s the only one I could find for the denouement with Hardie.)

Coming up next

The next key distinction between a mentor and a sublator is the latter’s lack of ego motivation, which we’ll explore in the post that follows.

Until then, as always, your comments are welcome.

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Typically, the idea of a mentor and a “guru” are considered interchangeable. The notion of a guru, in fact, has come to denote merely an expert in some given domain, or even just a celebrity. We hear of tech gurus, financial gurus, self-help gurus, fitness gurus, social media gurus, etc.1 When that expertise is presumed or self-declared, “guru” even becomes a synonym for “charlatan.”

What’s lost in all this worldly, material, egoic, and practical emphasis is the original spiritual function of a guru or master, a function that seldom appears with mentors, too. For the purposes of spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in fiction, I think it’s necessary to rescue this specific archetype and to better understand how its distinct from mentors, experts, and celebrities, as we’ll do in this series of posts.

And to do that, I’d like to start by proposing a new term altogether, the “sublator.”

Deriving the term “sublator”

Many English terms for “one who (does an action)” come straight from Latin roots and end in -ator (masculine) or -atrix (feminine), as in mediator and mediatrix. These words derive from the Latin verb for the action in question. Mediator/atrix come from mediare, meaning “to be in the middle”; the mediator/atrix is thus “one who is in the middle.”2 Similarly, the verb nagivare, to sail, gives us the word navigator, one who sails; negotiare, to trade or do business, gives us negotiator.

Note that where English is concerned, we typically use the masculine form to refer to both men and women; although we have mediatrix, we don’t have terms like navigatrix or negotiatrix. Even where English does contain a distinct feminine form, we don’t often use it.

To go just a little more into the linguistics, these English nouns-derived-from-verbs (called “verbals”) are specifically constructed from what’s called the “fourth principal part” or past participle of a Latin verb.3 In many Latin verbs this part ends with -atus. With navigare, the four principle parts are as follows:

1. navigo: “I sail,” the first person singular active present active

2. navigare: “to sail,” the infinitive4

3. navigavi: “I sailed,” the first person singular active past tense

4. navigatus/navigatum: “sailed,” the past participle

As you can see, the “at” in terms ending in ator/atrix comes from that fourth principal part. It exists in both the Latin and English terms for “one who does (verb).” Here are other similar terms:

administrator, elevator, capacitor, adjudicator, resistor, motivator, distributor, disseminator, inventor, dictator, dominator, aviator, regulator, perforator, refrigerator, pollinator, alleviator, postulator, preceptor, protector, defector, masticator, professor (irregular), admonitor, legislator, agitator.5

To make a Latin-based term that’s equivalent to the Sanskrit guru, then, we need the fourth principal part of whatever verb has the same meaning.

Guru comes from the Sanskrit root gur- meaning “to raise, uplift” and thus means “one who raises, uplifts,” and more specifically to uplift in the spiritual sense. To be really precise, the compound Sanskrit term satguru, “true guru,” specifically differentiates a “savior” or one who can grant a disciple God-realization, from spiritual teachers and guides who are not yet capable. The term isn’t as commonly used, however, and it’s common to speak of one’s guru in the spiritual sense even if he or she is a satguru.

In any case, the Latin verb with the same general meaning of gur- is tollere, whose irregular principal parts are:

1. tollo: “I raise, uplift”

2. tollere: “to raise, uplift”

3. sustuli: “I raised, uplifted”

4. sublatus/sublatum: “raised, uplifted”

The nearest Latin equivalents of guru, then, are sublator (masculine) and sublatrix (feminine), and in this case we’d likely just stick to the masculine term alone regardless of the person to which it refers.

Sublator, then, is the term I propose for the character archetype whose specific role in a story is the spiritual upliftment of other characters, especially the protagonist.

I think the term’s unfamiliarity helps avoid all the baggage and corrupted meanings that come with “guru” and lets us talk about the spiritual nature of the role with much greater clarity.

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What distinguishes a sublator from a mentor?

The idea of “raising or uplifting” is quite suited to the role of the sublator. In Latin, especially, the prefix “sub,” which means under or at the foot of, which nicely gives an image someone who gives you a leg up, someone who has you step into their hands so they can help you climb higher. It can also imply that a sublator can reach down to lift you up. Either way, it’s the same effect: you’re raised to a higher level.

A mentor,6 of course, often performs the same service to a pupil or protégé in whatever field of endeavor they operate, raising others to various levels of competence in those fields. For our purposes here, however, the sublator’s specific expertise, to bring in the meaning of satguru in the Indian tradition, is God: not God in a theological sense but in directly knowing, realizing, and communing with God, Satchidananda, or whatever how one wants to refer to the Supreme Spirit. It’s about helping others achieve mystical oneness, salvation, soul-liberation, moksha, and so forth, all of which mean the complete freedom of the soul from sin, karma, delusion, etc. Salvation means that a soul returns to where it came from—God; it means an eternal and irrevocable reunion of the soul with its Creator.

The distinction of this role is made clear in the very first line of Paramhansa Yogananda’s spiritual classic, Autobiography of a Yogi:

The characteristic features of Indian culture have long been a search for ultimate verities and the concomitant disciple-guru relationship. (emphasis added)

Unlike a mentor, whose concern can be literally anything, a true guru/sublator is concerned with those ultimate verities—summed up in the single term, God. He or she is singularly concerned with uplifting the disciple’s consciousness. And it’s that meaning that’s lost when “guru” is used indiscriminately as a synonym for teachers, experts, and celebrities in worldly and materialistic contexts.

The sublator’s focus on God gives rise to other key distinctions from a mentor:

• The lack of a personal or other overarching agenda in favor of the singular concern for a disciple’s spiritual growth.

• The lack of ego motivation

• An eternal and unbreakable bond with the disciple rather than a temporary relationship with a student.

• Working through magnetism more so than a transmission of knowledge.

• The requirement of obedience on the disciple’s part.

We’ll explore each of these aspects in the posts that follow, because characters in fiction developed along these lines will certainly show their distinction from typical mentors.

In the meantime, your thoughts are welcome.

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Developing that sensitivity is, to my mind, essential for writing stories with spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism. It also helps you experience “inpletion” as described in the two earlier posts below that I’ve recently reviewed and edited:

Such experience is clearly necessary for anyone who hopes to evoke the same effect through an artistic medium like fiction. And perhaps that’s why inpletion is a rare thing to find in fiction and other arts: although I think everyone does experience inpletion here and there in the course of living, how many are aware that what they were feeling isn’t just another outward emotion? For artists, too, even if they are aware of the distinction, how many understand how to evoke that subtle feeling in others through their art, if they’re even motivated to share such deeply inward feelings in the first place?

Indeed, without differentiating inpletion and emotion, artists who’d like to uplift others would think only in terms of emotion and then wonder why they yet fall short of their aspirations.

That’s again why it’s important to consciously experience inpletion as inpletion (and different from emotion) through a method like breath awareness as shared in the Cultivating inner awareness post. And to that approach I would like to add another: listening attentively to inpletional music.

A unique source of inpletional music

In Emotion, “inpletion,” and devotion part 1, I shared an example of inpletional music with the story of singing in the Corycian Cave outside Delphi. The songs I sang there clearly drew others to a more inpletional state because their composer, J. Donald Walters (aka Swami Kriyananda, 1926-2013) wrote them specifically for that purpose.

And not just those couple of songs: what’s special about Walters’ work is that his sole purpose in writing music at all was to inspire and uplift listeners.1 In that way he never considered himself a composer or a musician—his mindset was never to express his personal feelings about anything through music or to use music as a form of self-therapy. Some of his most delightful melodies, in fact, were written during times of intense personal struggle. Nor did he write music merely to entertain—those same delightful melodies always convey an inner upliftment and open a doorway to the Divine. Always.2

I make this claim with confidence because I’ve had the privilege of working with Walters’ music for over 30 years now. With his blessings and guidance, I’ve also listened deeply and attentively to and meditated upon every single one of his compositions to understand, and confirm, their inner, inpletional effects.

A few examples are given below. With each piece, close your eyes and just listen inwardly. Let your body become still and focus on how the music resonates within your heart, mind, body, and soul. Feel how it draws you inward and upwards, letting you intentionally experience inpletion rather than waiting for it to just happen. With repeated experience, you then become increasingly aware of how inpletion differs from the emotional effects of other music.

“Brothers” (vocal) from the Finding Happiness motion picture soundtrack, sung by the composer and Ananda Joy Choirs from around the world:

“Cloisters” (vocal) from An Evening in Italy, sung by the composer in Italian and English:

“Homeward Bound” (instrumental) from The Mystic Harp, featuring the famed Irish harpist, Derek Bell:

“John Anderson, My Jo” (instrumental) from The Mystic Harp II, also featuring Derek Bell:

“Peace” (vocal) from an 2010 outdoor concert, sung by the Ananda Joy Choir:

“Wartime Lullaby” (vocal) from A Tale of Songs, sung by Sharon Nani:

A segment of “Land of Mystery” (instrumental) from the album Music to Awaken Superconsciousness:

How “Cloisters” is inpletional

Let’s explore the song “Cloisters” in more details, because (a) it’s the one I’m singing in the video from the Corycian Cave in Delphi and (b) Walters himself often used it to specifically highlight how it keeps the energy reined in—making it inpletional—rather than spilling out into emotionalism. Here are his own words on the subject, taken from a talk he gave at the Festival of the Joyful Arts at Ananda Village, June 14, 2003:

Every song that I’ve written has a meaning and I couldn’t begin to tell you what most of them mean because meaning doesn’t have to be something you can reduce to a verbal formula. But it’s a feeling.

[An example is] Cloisters. I did a slide show and I found it very helpful to make music based on [the slides as] a focal point [of] what I’m trying to say. In the Amalfi and Sorrento area there was a monastery in a church, but it was a monastery that was no longer an active monastery. It’s a place where people used to worship and now tourists go there. … I wanted to show the monastery and the church feeling there…the traditional sense because this was Italy. Naturally that feeling brought to my mind the Gregorian chant. It had to be in that mode. …

But then, I thought … “But this monastery is now a tourist place so it can’t be too traditional. It’s got to have the modern consciousness, too, that people come in and perhaps feel inspired by it but don’t feel drawn to it.” … But it can’t be too much of that or it would get away from the devotion.

[I then] held those thoughts clearly in my mind and held them up to my superconscious and said, “Give me a melody that says that.” Instantly it came—no problem!

[begins to sing] “Long I’ve called you my Lord, long I’ve called you. Many years I have longed for your sight.” Very Gregorian in feeling. Then, suddenly, it wanted to change. [singing] “Bathed the darkness with tears of devotion…”

Now that “tears” [a higher note] is not Gregorian—it gets out of the mold; it’s a more modern feeling to it. [singing] “Bathed the darkness with tears of devotion. Offered candles in prayer to your light.”

And then, having been raised here [in America] that thought came into my mind and I had to say “No, you have to control it.” Because modern music is emotional, and so the thought that since I wanted to be more modern naturally brought the impulse to go beyond that into an emotional [sings boisterously] “How much LOOONGGER FRIEND!” I knew that’s not what I wanted, so I pulled it back. [sings gently] “How much longer, friend, must I cry your name.”

You see, that controls it. The feeling’s a lot deeper—because there’s emotion there for sure; it wanted to say, [singing] “How much LOOONGGER….” [but] I knew it would be emotional, that wouldn’t be feeling.3 So, to keep the feeling there you have to control the feeling, don’t let it get out of hand. [sings gently] “How much longer, friend, must I cry your name. I am yours, ever yours, will you come?”

Now this is a spiritual song, it’s a song to God, and so it can’t end the way an ordinary song does. The rules of music are that you end on a tonic [like this] [singing, ending down] “I am yours, ever yours, will you come.” Isn’t that so? All music ends that way normally. [This song] couldn’t. This is a song offered to God. It has to go off into infinity. … [sings ending up] “I am yours, ever yours, will you…come?”

You see, it goes off into infinity—it doesn’t end.

I’ve edited the transcript above for brevity; see the video below (between 1:14:22 and 1:19:11) for the full version and to see and hear how he demonstrates the differences.

Inpletional music helps overcome harmful or challenging emotions

Specifically reining in the tendency to go emotional—pulling energy inwards rather than letting it spill outwards—and directing that energy upwards toward the Divine instead of outward (to the senses) or downward toward materialism—is what makes Walters’ music inpletional as well as devotional. In piece after piece, you can find places where a “modern” songwriter would likely have taken the composition into a more emotional space (or a materialistic one).

A common belief about music, and most other arts, for that matter, including fiction, is that its purpose is to stir emotions, to make us feel something even if those emotions are harmful or degrading. Walters’ music, on the other hand, shows that it’s possible to do something more, to make us feel something uplifting, even in many different musical styles.

What’s remarkable about such inpletional effects is that they also have the power to lift us out of the kinds of harmful and degrading emotions that we simply take as a given in human experience, such as anger, greed, jealousy, restlessness, hopelessness, grief, anxiety, and so on. This transformation happens because the inward and upward flow of inpletional music induces a higher level of awareness of consciousness in which those lower emotions lose their grip. To give some examples:

• Music that expresses and evokes a consciousness of contentment countermands the consciousness of greed.

• Music that draws you strongly into your own center such that you aren’t thrown off by anyone else’s behavior countermands anger.

• Music that evokes an awareness of a broader reality beyond personal concerns can lift one out of emotions like grief and despair.

• Music that induces a sense of peace is an antidote to anxiety.

Walters, in fact, said that every piece of his music is an “antidote” to one or more harmful emotions. To demonstrate what he meant, he assigned one or two songs to each of the sayings in his little book, Secrets of Emotional Healing, as shown on the following PDF:

Secrets of Emotional Healing Antidote Songs

318KB ∙ PDF file

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The “Rise in Freedom” Substack and podcast

My own work with Walters’ music since 2003 has largely been focused on this idea of inner effects and music “antidotes”—at first to clearly understand why his assignments work as they do and then to apply that understanding to the rest of his compositions. It was only in 2024 that I finished going through that entire corpus and am now working on sharing those results more broadly.

For that purpose, and to not overburden Deus in Fabula, I’ve started another free Substack publication called Rise in Freedom (below, written using my spiritual name Satyaki as noted in Why did I choose the pen name, Kiran Blackwell).

Rise in Freedom

An exploration (through posts and podcasts) of how Ananda Music helps you develop the art of living by uplifting the heart, overcoming harmful emotions, and learning how to respond constructively to life's challenges.

By Satyaki Brockschmidt

The immediate need for Rise in Freedom is to share fifty-two ~20 minute audio programs that originally played six times daily under the same title on the streaming channel, Radio Ananda, between July 2025 and July 2026. With the completion of that series, I wanted to make all the programs available on demand, hence the Rise in Freedom podcast.

As you can see from the programs’ titles, each is oriented around helping you release a specific harmful emotion or a set of related emotions—like, again, anger, greed, bitterness, jealousy, anxiety over worldly affairs, fear of death, grief, sense temptations, and so on. I’ve been quite gratified to hear from listeners that these programs worked for them exactly as intended.

But I won’t belabor matters here. Do read the Welcome post to learn about what I plan to publish there, such as written commentaries on specific songs and additional podcasts that explore why the groups of songs used in the different programs work for the emotions in question. I look forward to sharing the adventure with you even as we continue the adventure of spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in fiction here on Deus in Fabula.

In closing: helping you experience inpletion

Overall, this idea of music antidotes a fascinating study in itself, but my whole point in sharing all this is to point you to the powerful resource of Walters’ music that will help you experience inpletion in a meaningful way. That experience brings greater awareness of your inner life and greater control over how you respond to all the challenges that the world throws at you.

By learning new ways to respond to those challenges yourself, my hope is that those of you who are authors will be further inspired to bring that sensibility into your fictional characters. Doing so, I believe, will go a long way to writing fiction that has a similar power to uplift both you and your readers.

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This, in a nutshell, is what I mean by “spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism”: the inner awareness of God’s very real presence in ordinary, everyday life, in everyday situations and settings…experienced by ordinary, everyday people like you and me

For that very awareness is what turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, and not just in the fictional realms of speculative and fantasy worlds but in the real and tangible world in which we live, even the modern world with all its perceived complexities. That’s the “realism” part. And that awareness can again be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Like the weather. Like drinking a cup of tea. Like breathing.

Attached to that last short sentence is a footnote:

One of the simplest methods of cultivating such awareness begins with breath awareness, which means to focus the mind on something going on inside yourself rather than in the external world of the senses. But that’s a topic for another post.

Well, it’s high time I wrote that post, for if we follow the chain here in reverse, breath awareness leads to deeper inner awareness, which leads to a more extraordinary experience—which is to say a more wondrous and joyful experience—of our real and so-called “mundane” world. Whether you’re an author or not, living with that greater sense of wonder and joy is its own reward as it opens doorways to the divine (as explain in my post of that title). And if you are an author, living with that greater sense of wonder and joy yourself empowers you to depict it meaningfully and realistically in your stories, opening such doorways for others.

This process relates also to what I wrote about more recently in Interiority as a necessary characteristic of spiritual fiction:

When we speak of spiritual or mystical experiences, or even meaningful devotional feelings, we’re talking about inner experience. Indeed, spiritual experience is, by definition, non-sensual—the realm of “spirit” is not the realm of the physical world that we engage with through our senses. Spiritual experience even implies a withdrawal from the senses into an altogether different (and often intense) state of inner awareness.

Breath awareness also helps with this withdrawal: the breath is happening within the body, not outside of it, so focusing on the breath is to focus within yourself. If there is any sensation involved, it’s touch, but even then, those sensations are within the nasal passages rather than on the body’s periphery.

Method of practice

Here are the basics of this practice:

1. Sit upright in a quiet place with eyes closed and palms resting upright on the thighs.

2. Relax the body as much as possible and breathe naturally through the nose.

3. Observe your breath (without controlling it), mentally repeating a chosen phrase or word formula with the inhalation and exhalation.

Sitting still in a quiet place with closed eyes means deliberately turning down the volume on the sense inputs. Stillness minimizes touch sensations, especially with turning the palms upwards so nothing rubs the sensitive fingertips. A quiet place minimizes sound. Closing the eyes turns off visual inputs (excepting what light gets filtered through the eyelids). And obviously with this practice, too, you’re not eating or drinking anything, so taste and smell aren’t involved.1

You’ve probably already done something like this when you’ve wanted to think about something, emote in silence, or otherwise be alone with yourself, and going to sleep, of course, is a withdrawal from the senses. But the goal here is to withdraw from the senses while retaining and even heightening awareness, not lose it entirely. That’s why it’s important to sit upright, rather than lie down, while still relaxing the body as much as possible. Tension and stillness generally don’t go together.

Breathing naturally, too, helps quiet the body and mind; if the breath is rapid at the outset, give it a minute or two to slow down on its own. Breathing through the nose also cools the incoming air better than breathing through the mouth, which in turn helps cool the nervous system and bring you to a greater state of inward quietude.

It’s here, though, that we often discover how noisy our thoughts and emotions (agitated feelings) really are. Indeed, by withdrawing attention from the noise of the senses, the amplitude of this mental and emotional static seems even greater, which poses an obstacle to the awareness of calm, deep feeling (see the two-part series on Emotion, “inpletion” and devotion).

Toning down that inner noise is the purpose of observing the breath with a phrase or word formula. The breath provides a natural, slow rhythm upon which we can focus our attention; mentally repeating a word formula provides a focal point for thought and feeling rather than being whipsawed by the usual randomness.

The words you choose should be inspiring to you, personally, something that helps draw you into your calm center. For some it’s as simple as mentally repeating “I am” with the inhalation and “peace” or “Spirit” with the exhalation. Others enjoy the traditional practice of the Jesus prayer that’s come down from the early desert fathers: “Lord Jesus Christ” (on inhalation, with optional “Son of God”), “have mercy on me” (on exhalation).2 Others prefer mantras like hong (on inhalation) and sau (on exhalation), which means “I am Spirit.” There’s no particular magic here: the point is to choose words that are meaningful to you, whether spiritual or secular.3

Once you get into the rhythm of watching the breath, note the coolness in the nasal passages with the inhalation and a warmth with the exhalation. Feel it first at the opening of the nostrils, then breath by breath feel it higher and higher in the nasal passages until you get to the top of the nose where the breath enters the skull proper.

Continue watching the breath here for a few minutes more, allow the body and the senses to relax further with every breath.

After those few minutes, let go of watching the breath and focus this inner awareness onto the feeling of simply being alive. Feel your physicality not through the senses but through the life energy flowing through your body, your mind, and your (calm) feelings. When thoughts or emotions pop up, as they will, try to observe them dispassionately, rather than getting involved. Try to feel them simply as energies and what those energies feel like in the body and what other feelings arise from them.

Continue in this state of inner absorption for a few more minutes, however long you feel inspired.

Applying inner awareness to writing interiority

If you’re not a writer, this is the time to gradually come “back to your senses,” literally, with gentle movements so that you can try to carry that inward quietude into outer activity.4

For authors, however, now is the time to apply this inner awareness to the process writing scenes with powerful interiority.

Remaining still and inwardly focused, put yourself first into the body of a character, then put yourself in that body into the scene you want to write. Visualize that scene and experience it through that character—through their senses, yes, but more importantly through their whole inner reality. Play the scene and observe everything going on inside, repeating any part you want to. Feel what they feel. Think what they think. React as they react. Live their experience of the scene as fully as you can, as if you’re really there. Thrill or weep as you must. Feel the pains and the despair, but also feel the joys and the exaltations. And if your character is one that’s seeking to feel God’s presence within themselves, feel it too within yourself as a reality, opening, again, doorways to the divine.

This process of living the scene, of experiencing it with as much inner awareness as you can, rather than just thinking about it abstractly, replicates how you experience scenes in your real life. And isn’t it easy to tell a story about something you’ve experienced personally?

Now it’s just a process of transferring that story, including the interiority, into words on a page. I think you’ll find a comfortable—and most rewarding—flow.

I’d love to hear how it works for you.

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I’m not alone in identifying this characteristic, of course. In a 1925 essay entitled, “Why the Novel Matters,” D. H. Lawrence argues that the novel—which is to say, story—can best capture and express, among all literary and other art forms, the whole of the human experience. In the concluding paragraph, he writes:

Right and wrong is an instinct: but an instinct of the whole consciousness in a man, bodily, mental, spiritual at once. And only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living.

In recent years, inner experience or “interiority” has been become more important in fiction as people increasingly realize that they really can’t get it from any other media. As bestselling author and writing coach Suzy Vadori said recently in a podcast on Sam Cameron’s Substack, Truant Pen:

[When] I ask people why they read…it’s because they want the experience of [being inside characters], to escape from real life and walk a mile in other people’s shoes, [to experience] a point of view that isn’t your own. … [As writers], we want readers to feel that they’re [immersed] in your character’s body…which is why I think reading and writing is never going away.

She further points out that telling a story from the point of view of a movie camera doesn’t really accomplish this interiority because it doesn’t give us anything more than we’d experience were we standing alongside characters in the story or behind the camera itself.

Sense experience, in other words, even though it’s technically happening on the inside, is not interiority because it’s still only the outer experience. To get to the inner experience requires going into a character’s thoughts, emotions, and reactions that are happening in response to sense stimuli or in response to other thoughts and emotions and reactions—all those things that we cannot experience from the outside.

Consider, for example, a chapter in Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes (2015) in which one of the lead characters, Elias, is facing execution. Amidst the outer progression of the scene, Tahir gives us a great deal of Elias’ inner reactions and reflections. In the following bit, Elias reflects on touch sensations as well as olfactory memory as he’s walked out of the prison:

Outside, the stones of Blackcliff are gentled by the dawn, and the cool air warms quickly, promising a scorching day. A wild wind races through the dunes and breaks upon the granite of the school. I might not miss these walls as a dead man, but I will miss the wind and the scents it carries, of faraway places where freedom can be found in life instead of death. (428-429)

The scene (and chapter) then ends with a passage that wholly lets us share Elias’ experience of his final moments, which is especially poignant because the executioner is his friend:

Helene steps forward and lifts her ax. It will be one clean sweep, left to right. Air. Neck. Air. Elias dead.

Now it hit me. This is it. This is the end. Martial tradition says a soldier who dies well dances among the stars, battling foes for all eternity. Is that what awaits me? Or will I slip into endless darkness, unbroken and quiet?

Uneasiness latches onto me, like it’s been waiting around a corner all this time and only now has the gall to emerge. Where do I fix my eyes? On the crowd? The sky? I want comfort. I know I won’t find any.

I look at Helene again. Who else is there? She’s only two feet away, her hands loose around the ax handle.

Look at me. Don’t make me face this alone.

As if she’s heard my thoughts, her eyes meet mine, that familiar pale blue offering me solace, even as she lifts the ax. I think of the first time I looked into those eyes, as a freezing six-year-old getting pummeled in the culling pen. I’ll watch your back, she’d said, with all the gravitas of a Cadet. If you watch mine. We can make it if we stick together.

Does she remember that day? Does she remember all the days since?

I’ll never know. As I stare into her eyes, she brings the ax down. I hear the whoosh as it cuts through the air and feel the burn of steel biting into my neck. (431)

To reiterate my point from the posts linked earlier about writing such inner experience, the action of the passage above would take about five seconds in the story world, as it probably would in a movie. Reading the passage, however, takes about a minute (10-12 times as long), and surely Tahir took much longer, perhaps even an hour, to write it (what to mention making revisions). I imagine she needed plenty of tissues.1

Facing death, as Elias does here, could be considered a kind of spiritual experience, but as An Ember in the Ashes is not itself a spiritually oriented story it’s more of a psychological experience. Whatever the case, Tahir’s passage demonstrates the kind of interiority that is, in my opinion, essential for engaging readers with characters’ spiritual, devotional, and mystical experiences.

That is, when we speak of spiritual or mystical experiences, or even meaningful devotional feelings, we’re talking about inner experience. Indeed, spiritual experience is, by definition, non-sensual—the realm of “spirit” is not the realm of the physical world that we engage with through our senses. Spiritual experience even implies a withdrawal from the senses into an altogether different (and often intense) state of inner awareness.

Exploring such states is the focus for my own writing, as you can see in the pieces linked below.

Intensive interiority is often missing from “spiritual” novels

Intensive interiority where spiritual experiences are concerned is what I’ve come to realize that I’m looking for in this “quest for spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in fiction” that is Deus in Fabula. Its presence is why I so enjoy (and often refer to) books like The Robe by Lloyd Douglas and The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel; its absence is why I find other purportedly “spiritual” novels disappointing.

I expressed something of this disappointment in two footnotes in the post, Can spiritual superheroes be relatable characters in fiction? Part 1, such as Jamie Ogle’s choice in Chapter 54 of her novel of St. Valentine, For Love and Treason, to tell the scene in which Valentine is tortured from the torturer’s point-of-view rather than Valentine’s. I so, so wanted to see what Ogle would do with Valentine’s interiority in such a situation but got none of that—Ogle skips over most of the session itself to a time afterwards when the torturer reports to his superior how Valentine basically quoted scripture the whole time.

Similarly, Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, is labeled a spiritual classic in that there’s a priest protagonist who is martyred and plenty of theology and religiosity along the way. But there’s really no mysticism or inner experience to speak of, even when the priest performs the Eucharist. Another novel of the same era, The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin, though very well-written otherwise, also lacks inner experience and even any sense of God being a living reality. Both novels essentially make religion out to be a human thing and God a human invention.

The absence of inner feeling especially stood out when reading Mary Sharratt’s novel of Hildegard von Bingen, Illuminations. I had high hopes because some of the testimonials in the book’s front matter praised how Sharratt “realistically invokes the internal sensation of deep religious experience” and shows a saint “from the inside.” Yet once again, I was greatly disappointed (so much so that I had to force myself to finish the book).

von Bingen was a mystic blessed with many visions of the Divine that the Catholic Church eventually recognized as genuine; just a few years ago she was the second woman to be given the distinction as a Doctor of the Church alongside St. Theresa of Avila. Sharratt’s depiction of her, however, lacks spiritual interiority almost entirely. God is rarely mentioned at all and never in the context of von Bingen experiencing God’s living reality within herself.2 What interiority we’ve given, in fact, is primarily (this fictional) von Bingen’s bitterness and resentment about how she’s being treated by the a--hole patriarchy. The whole book, in fact, is political and not spiritual in nature, “espousing,” as one testimonial admits, “a protofeminist agenda.”

What I found especially absent was any kind of inner feeling related to her visions. Although Sharratt gives us von Bingen’s visions as she sees them, visually, she gives next to nothing about how von Bingen experienced them. We’re given the sense experience, in other words, but not the inner experience, the clear sense of the wonder, joy, awe (or fear), and even ecstasy that normally accompany such visions.

One example from Chapter 5 will suffice, because all of the visions are presented in a similar manner. Notice that the only emotion involved here is bitterness, as expressed through what I’ve highlighted with boldface:

Lying as corpse-still as I’d done when they first laid me in this tomb seven years ago, I waited for something to happen. For Abbot Adilhum to appear at the screen, drag a confession out of me, and then lay on a penance that would make hell seem merciful.

Instead, a cloud descended and from that billowing mist emerged a pale blue woman, crowned in majesty. My name is Ecclesia, the true and hidden Church. In her great arms, she cradled a company of consecrated virgins. They weren’t veiled, weren’t starving or frightened. They sported neither hair shirts nor scourged but were dressed like royal women, robed in crimson damask, crowned in gold, their unshorn hair flowing free [she complains about this practice earlier]. Faces alight with joy, they lifted their hands in prayer. The most beautiful girl with long black tresses smiled at me as though I were her dearest friend in all the world. Have courage and endure. One day I shall come to you.

As the apparition vanished, I sat bolt upright, my face burning, as though Jutta [her senior in the anchorage] had caught me in some shameful act. My magistra [Jutta] regarded me with eyes as glittering and cold as frost. (73 First Mariner Books edition, 2013)

Although we as readers are shown this vision, Sharratt doesn’t help us feel it. Did von Bingen not thrill at the vision? Did she have no physical response, like a racing heart or holding her breath in awe? Did she not have any hope with Ecclesia’s promise of coming to her one day? All it would take, I think, is a short passage like, “One day I shall come to you. She’d made her promise. How I would yearn for that day!”

In other visions we get a little fear, but it’s not related to the content of the visions but rather fear of what the patriarchy will do to her if she were to confess to having them. That’s a kind of interiority, but not the sort that I can think would be particularly uplifting to readers. (If you’ve read the book and disagree with my assessment here, please let me know in the comments as I’d welcome a conversation on the matter.)

Examples of interiority of spiritual experience

Compare the excerpt in the previous section now with how Franz Werfel depicts Bernadette Soubirous with The Lady, using just one paragraph (of many) from the first encounter in Chapter 7:

Never has Bernadette told her beads so slowly. But the rosary is doubtless a powerful means of keeping the lady with her. And that is all that matters to her. She is so afraid that that supremely lovely one, to the vision of whom her whole soul clings, will grow utterly weary and sick of staying in that inhospitable hole in the rock on the edge of a precipitous cliff (from which one could so easily plunge down) for the sake of a poor girl like herself. Probably, too, she does not at all relish being stared at uninterruptedly, and in such weather. Oh, soon she would go away and leave Bernadette alone…. (70-71, 1941 Viking Press hardcover)

More excerpts from this scene are also given in the following post:

Every encounter has a similar nature, filled with what, citing the post above and its associated part 1, I call “inpletion,” such as a single flow of awareness (and a single paragraph) in Chapter 17 (“Monsieur Estrade’s Return”) that spans two and a half pages! And the final vision in Chapter 30 (“Farewell of Farewells”) is especially lovely and especially moving, but also too lengthy to repeat here. One has to appreciate the time it must have taken Werfel to write those passages—and the blessing he must have felt in doing so. I certainly feel those blessings when reading the book.

In The Robe, Lloyd Douglas achieves similar inner experiences, such as Demitrius’ encounter with Jesus on Palm Sunday that I shared in Can spiritual superheroes be relatable characters in fiction? Part 1. Here is another from much later in the book in which we share both the sense experience and the inner experience of the protagonist, Marcellus, wanders along a road after escaping a ship that was conveying him back to Rome:

The sun was high now, and Marcellus carried the Galilean Robe folded over his arm. He frequently paused to rest in the shade beside the descending stream that grew more and more active as the grade stiffened toward the foothills of the distant, snow-capped Apennines. He had no plans, but he was not depressed; nor was he lonesome. Indeed, he had a curious sense of well-being. The country was beautiful. The trees were in full leaf, the nesting birds were busy and happy, the wild-flowers along the bank of the lively stream were exquisite in their fragile beauty. Marcellus drew deep sighs of contentment, gratified but surprised that he could feel so free of any care. … That night, with the Robe for a cover, he slept in the open, remembering—as he drifted off—something Justus had said of Jesus’ homelessness: ‘The foxes had holes, the birds had nests; but Jesus had no bed, no pillow.’ Marcellus drew the Robe closer about him. It was not heavy, but it was warm and comforting. He fell asleep thinking of Diana, but not hopelessly. In the morning he rose refreshed, bathed in the cold stream, and breakfasted on wild strawberries. (Chapter XXII, Location 8225, Kindle Edition)

Marcellus’ inner experience here is one of deep peace and inner security. Do you not share those feelings? Douglas, in fact, maintains Marcellus’ sense of peace and security throughout the rest of the book, even unto his death at the end. Such calmness is a far greater spiritual state than the bitterness that Sharratt maintains in von Bingen.

A final example is from another book that I’ve cited before, Martine Leavitt’s Buffalo Flats (see Mystical character arcs in fiction, part 2). This passage is from the penultimate chapter entitled “Grippe,” in which the protagonist, Rebecca, pushes herself to the limit to care for others during an epidemic. Her encounters with death constitute a form of spiritual experience:

Every person was a surprise, she was learning. Every soul never had its copy. Each one a world to itself, a world of that soul’s making, and when that soul was gone, a whole world ended. It didn’t matter if they started out old or ugly or cranky; by the end of it they were sweet and soft beyond bearing. She held the dying, each one a world, and she loved the life of that solitary world, that single bit of holy flame that birthed itself back to God. She’d thought it strange, when nursing the sick, that just when life was all but gone, just at the moment when things seemed most unfair, that was when they loved God most. Why? she had wondered. What did they see on that precipice? What view? What new world, new understanding? How did they, in the end, hand over life so simply? A breath not breathed, and peace. (208)

A short time later on the same page, Leavitt gives Rebecca a preternatural experience that’s simply left to its own without any further reflection:

But [those who brought soup supplies] were only visitors to Rebecca’s real world, which now was filled with spirits, the deathbed room crowded with spirits, like a family reunion waiting for the honored guest to arrive. She felt the spirits around her whispering, and the dying said the names of the dead, and then it was over and the house was empty of all but the living. (208-209)

I hope you can see and feel how all of these passages convey something much deeper than mere sense experience. Do you also feel something more inspiring and uplifting than a sense description would convey? Such deep feeling or “inpletion,” as I call it elsewhere, would I think be essential for any fiction that endeavors to inspire and uplift in this manner.

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As noted in Part 1, I’ve recently edited the following posts, so again, go check them out if you haven’t already.

With this present series, Part 1 first looked at the relatability of superheroes in general. It then examined two approaches in fiction where saints and spiritual superheroes are concerned: (1) assuming a reader’s prior relationship with a saintly character and (2) making the saint relatable through secondary characters. Here, Part 2 begins with the relatability of saints in the making. It then explores the practice of assigning flaws to saintly characters to make them more relatable.

The relatability of saints in the making

Any static arc character can be made relatable when a story begins with the dynamic arc that brings them to that point. Just as many superhero movie series begin this way, a saint can be made more relatable by following the story of his or her overcoming obstacles to become a saint.

Granted, such a story could be a challenge to write but could yet inspire readers through possible stages of their own inner growth. Personally, I think this is a fascinating prospect that I hope to explore. See, for example, the excerpt I shared from a draft story called A Gift for King Felix in the following post:

Franz Werfel’s portrayal of Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette follows this pattern to an extent: at the outset, Bernadette is a simple daughter of poor peasants. Most readers, I think, can easily relate to her mundane life experience and the everyday concerns she shares with her parents.

Bernadette then has a transcendent experience of The Lady, to whom she inwardly gives herself completely. Yet outside of her visions, little changes in her bearing; Werfel specifically draws that contrast, illustrating how Bernadette returns from the exaltation of her visions to her normal state of a simple peasant girl.

If anything changes for Bernadette, it’s that she’s becomes so immersed in her love for the Lady that little else matters. This new-found, overarching priority turns her into a static character. The rest of the story is about her standing firm in that unshakable devotion regardless of the tests to which she’s subjected. She so immersed, in fact, that she doesn’t even think in terms of “standing firm” or defending herself: The Lady and her devotion to God in that form is simply her highest reality.

In this way, Werfel’s portrayal can inspire readers with a similar devotion. It’s an invitation to ask oneself, “Would I not do the same if the divine appeared to me in this way?” Werfel provides relatability through that invitation, in other words, rather than the specifics of the character’s life and circumstances.

On top of that, Werfel also provides many other secondary characters through which a reader can relate to Bernadette:

• Sister Vauzous is most sympathetic for readers who are inclined to rules or who cling to orthodoxy.

• Vital Dutour, Police Chief Jacomet, and other intellectuals can work for readers inclined to doubt and/or hostility.

• Hyacinthe de Lafite works for those who are inclined to remain aloof.

• Dean Marie Dominique Peyramale connects with those who go from doubter to champion.

• Mayor Lacade for those who hope to leverage matters to their own ends but end up accepting what God gives them.

• Bernadette’s mother, father, and sister can work for those who might struggle to see past the mundane.

A common element to all these characters is that they each feel some sense of superiority over the lowly Bernadette that is abruptly challenged by her spiritual elevation. As such, readers are again invited to explore whether they, too, would cling to that superiority themselves or surrender it, as most of the characters eventually do.

Saints with flaws

People who achieve excellence in some realm—such as champion athletes, Nobel-prize winning scientists, and creative geniuses—always begin at some point as “ordinary” human beings. Their excellence is a result of the choice to invest the necessary time and energy to realize their aspirations.1

Spiritual excellence is no different: saints and spiritual superheroes also begin as ordinary human beings, even as “sinners” to use religious terminology. They just chose to invest the necessary time and energy to realize spiritual aspirations rather than worldly ones.

To help “ordinary” readers relate to such characters in fiction, authors often assign them various flaws. Readers who identify with, share, or simply understand those flaws will naturally feel closer to those characters and thus are more likely to be inspired by their examples. “If they can do it,” readers might say, “then why can’t I?” Indeed, many spiritual high-achievers encourage others with exactly that faith in their own potential.

Assigning flaws, then, works well when it establishes a basis of relatability, a common ground upon which to build. But I think the practice goes awry if those flaws are instead used to drag such characters down and devalue their excellence.

I read one novel (Karen Kingsbury’s Chasing Sunsets) in which angels are portrayed as typically flawed human beings, struggling with base emotions like jealousy, anger, fear, anxiety, and so on. I had to ask, “Seriously? These are beings who’ve been in the direct presence of the Almighty (as this particular story itself indicates). Does that direct contact with God have no impact on those emotions? No impact on one’s state of consciousness or being?” Many saints and even more “ordinary” people who’ve touched the Divine in some way all declare that even a momentary contact is utterly transforming.2 So do the scriptures.3

Similarly, a scene in Jamie Ogle’s Of Love and Treason (mentioned in Part 1) has Saint Valentine despairing in loneliness when he’s imprisoned. Yes, despair is a relatable human emotion that most of us would feel in similar circumstances. But should not a saint at least hint at a way out of despair through some kind of inner attunement with God’s presence (prayer, contemplation, self-surrender)? As Ogle depicts Saint Valentine, however, God has no present reality; God is separate and distance; Valentine neither feels God nor even tries to talk with God. That strikes me as a lost opportunity to inspire readers more deeply than simple relatability.

To give a third example, in Up from Dust (also mentioned in Chapter 1), Heather Kaufmann portrays Jesus’ apostles as a motley group of rag-tag bums. She even imbues Jesus with a kind of boasting egotism (emphasis added):

“Martha,” he managed to say, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

He dropped my hand to thump his chest adamantly, eyes igniting with fervency, voice quavering with emotion but growing stronger and more urgent as he continued.

“Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (270)

This portrayal of saints and angels as “ordinary” people has, I think, two origins. One is the theological idea that a “believer” is already a “saint,” and that such believers, pretty much as they are, will essentially become angels in the afterlife. If that’s true, then it must follow that there’s nothing special about angels or saints of anyone else who demonstrates spiritual excellence: they must be just like the rest of us, hopelessly full of flaws. But that cheapens the value of God-contact to near worthlessness. Why, then would one aspire to draw nearer to God at all, then?

The second possible origin is the prevailing thought in modern psychology that being “fully human” means wallowing in and even celebrating the lower aspects of human nature, such as anger, jealousy, anxiety, greed, and egotism. In fiction with worldly characters, such flaws might even be praised as virtues. Characters thus have little incentive to overcome those flaws unless doing so is critical to the overall plot arc.

Spiritually-focused characters, on the other hand, seek the higher aspects of human nature and thus naturally seek to overcome those flaws—to overcome anything that separates them from God. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount—which as a whole is an exhortation to strive for spiritual excellence—“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)4

Fiction that intends to inspire readers with spiritually-focused characters (as opposed to simply making readers feel good about themselves) would thus want again to use flaws to establish relatability but avoid using them to cut those characters down to “ordinary” levels. For spiritual excellence is the birthright of every soul and indeed what everyone is ultimately seeking.

Inviting readers a little higher

To use the terms established in the extended series on Transition Points in seeking God, spiritually-focused characters clearly fall into the self-transcender pattern. But most people—meaning most readers—live within the self-comforter and self-server patterns and will relate most easily characters in similar patterns. That’s why relating to saints through other characters in those lower patterns can work well.

That said, if the goal of a work of fiction is to inspire and uplift readers, then it should be inviting readers in its target pattern to relate to the next higher pattern, and then from there to at least hint at still higher patterns.

In practice, then, a story’s initial depiction of a saint or a saintly character can emphasize his or her basic humanity, thus providing a relatable foundation (as in The Song of Bernadette). But don’t keep it there: begin to emphasize the character’s higher qualities that point to the next pattern. Like I said in the series on Inspiring the self-server to self-sacrificer pattern, a story that’s targeted to readers in the self-server pattern can emphasize the higher aspects of that pattern wherein one begins to see that the best way to serve oneself is to serve others, that there is more joy in an expansive self-interest than a contractive or selfish self-interest.

Next, the character’s choices and behaviors can then pivot increasingly to that of the self-sacrificer. Even where a saint is concerned, a story can emphasize a character’s self-sacrificer qualities at this point, perhaps in socio-political contexts, leaving their self-transcender qualities understated.

The story can then shift to an emphasis on the character’s inner connection to the divine as what’s ultimately empowering those outward acts of self-sacrifice. To do so demonstrates a clear link between inner communion with the divine and outward activity in the world, a relationship that I believe can certainly inspire readers to develop their own inner relationship with God.

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I’ve recently made a few edits to the three-part series, Character Arcs in Mystical Fiction, which examines static arcs (Part 1) along with both positive/upward (Part 2) and negative/downward dynamic arcs (Part 3). These are some of my favorite posts from two years of writing Deus in Fabula, so I encourage you to read them if you haven’t before.

Here, I want to pick up a thread that I noted in Part 1 of that series:

When the protagonist is static, [he or she] must then necessarily be something of a spiritual superhero…. In the context of mystical realism [such] characters may not be particularly relatable to most ordinary readers, but that’s another topic in itself.

The question here is this: can characters who are spiritual superheroes, like saints, be relatable to ordinary readers who are, by definition, not (yet) saints themselves? I think the answer is “Yes,” and there are several approaches to portraying such characters that can help that relatability, as we’ll explore in this two-part series.

Note: I’m using “saint” here to refer to individuals who have reached an elevated state of spiritual awareness and God-communion, rather than as a synonym for an ordinary “believer.”

Relatable fantasy superheroes

First, let’s broaden the question to consider superheroes more generally, such as protagonists in the Marvel franchise. Because these characters are typically imbued with their powers from the get-go, they follow more or less static character arcs. Furthermore, the typical viewer or reader cannot, in reality, aspire to be endowed with supernatural powers, extraordinary genius, or technology that’s physically impossible.

Yet the very success of these movies suggests that the characters involved are relatable.

One reason is that if such characters grow, it’s typically not in developing their powers but in developing the wisdom to use those powers well. This question is meaningful for just about everyone, for we all have some kind of power, however slight, such as the power to help or hurt others physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

A more significant reason is that these characters represent not so much who we (the people in the audience) are or have any chance of becoming (especially where specific superpowers are concerned), but that they represent an ability to change the world that we wish we had. Many people today feel powerless and helpless before the apparent onslaught of political, economic, and even existential threats. Superhero fantasy thus provides an escape, two- to three-hour doses of lovely “what ifs?” They give us permission to think about what we would change if you could.1

A spiritual superhero or saint is similarly relatable—they may possess the power to change the world through healings or other miracles. But even lacking those capabilities, they represent the power to change oneself, especially to sustain if not deepen one’s devotion to God amidst all manner of challenges. And those are powers that we can all use.

Assuming a prior relationship

Another approach to relatability is to rely on readers’ existing knowledge. A novel that portrays Jesus, for example, or perhaps a well-known figure like Saint Francis, doesn’t typically need to help readers form a relationship with those characters at all: authors can just assume that a relationship already exists. Authors can also assume that readers who are even drawn to such a story in the first place already want to relate to such characters. Consequently, authors don’t need to work very hard to make those characters sympathetic.

A reader without such a prior relationship, however, will likely struggle with such stories; “Christian” fiction is rightly marketed as such, because the label denotes a set of assumptions about the reader as much as it indicates boundaries around the content (such as omitting profanity). Readers for whom those assumptions apply can jump right into stories that employ Christian jargon, for example, or refer to Bible passages. A non-Christian, on the other hand, is likely to be confused by such stories if not repulsed. Similarly, a Hindu easily relate to portrayals of Krishna, Rama, and Hanuman whereas a non-Hindu would need some help.

This approach can work with spiritual superhero characters, then, if you’re specifically targeting readers who know something about them already. But don’t expect the story to have any appeal outside that group.

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Relating through a character who forms a relationship

Without assuming existing knowledge, one way an author can help readers relate to a saint is through a protagonist who goes through the process of forming that relationship themselves. Instead of asking readers to relate directly to a saint, in other words, provide them with relatable characters who experience the saint on the reader’s behalf.

This relatability-by-proxy is what I think works so well with Lloyd Douglas’ The Robe—the whole story is about the protagonist, Marcellus Gallio (a Roman Tribune), not just learning about Jesus (whom he himself crucifies early in the book) but also developing a deep, committed devotion that empowers him to become a martyr at the end. Because Douglas’ portrayal of Marcellus is quite sympathetic, readers can develop their own devotion as Marcellus does. Furthermore, because Marcellus already lives and knows how to relate to the world of Roman-era Palestine, readers can just take that world for granted, thereby allowing them to focus on relating more specifically to Jesus, as Marcellus is doing.

Also in The Robe is the encounter that Marcellus’ personal slave, Demitrius, has with Jesus on the latter’s entry into Jerusalem, which occurs at a moment when the procession stops for a few moments:

Gradually [Jesus’] eyes moved over the crowd until they came to rest on the strained, bewildered face of Demetrius. Perhaps, he wondered, the man’s gaze halted there because he alone—in all this welter of hysteria—refrained from shouting. His silence singled him out. The eyes calmly appraised Demetrius. They neither widened nor smiled; but, in some indefinable manner, they held Demetrius in a grip so firm it was almost a physical compulsion. The message they communicated was something other than sympathy, something more vital than friendly concern; a sort of stabilizing power that swept away all such negations as slavery, poverty, or any other afflicting circumstance. Demetrius was suffused with the glow of this curious kinship. Blind with sudden tears, he elbowed through the throng and reached the roadside. (Chapter IV, Location 1531, Kindle Edition)

Demitrus, as a disempowered person who grapples with his oppression, is certainly relatable.

Another example is Heather Kaufmann’s Up from Dust (2024), a novelization of the story of Martha of the Mary and Martha duo in the Gospels, both of whom are sisters to Lazarus. Kaufmann certainly makes Martha sympathetic so that the reader can experience certain Gospel stories through her eyes.2

Similarly, Jamie Ogle’s fictionalized account of Saint Valentine, Of Love and Treason (2024), provides a number of characters who relate to the saint. In one scene, for example, Saint Valentine is being tortured (as happened historically). Ogle tells that scene from the point of view of the torturer, who has to then reflects on the saint’s response to that torment.3

I also think of the 1993 movie, Little Buddha, which tells the life of Siddhartha Gautama through the experience of two Westerners, a young boy and his father, who are being exposed to it for the first time. The boy provides a character who is open and curious; the father provides a character who is skeptical and reluctant. Together, they give different viewers access to the story. The movie, of course, couldn’t go into the characters’ inner experiences, but a novel written along such lines most certainly could.

Coming in part 2

In Part 2, we’ll look at the approach of showing a character’s process of becoming a saint. We’ll also examine the approach of loading saints with flaws (which I think needs to be used carefully) in contrast to one that invites readers a little higher by depicting different aspects of saints at different points in the story.

Until then, your thoughts are welcome!

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In Part 1, we looked at Act I of the 2006 Pixar movie, Cars, which establishes the protagonist, Lightning McQueen, as a consummate self-server (as described in Transition Points in Seeking God). That first act sets up McQueen’s transition into the next higher pattern, that of the self-sacrificer (as described in Inspiring the self-server to self-sacrificer transition), which happens in Act II. The climax of the movie in Act III then tests whether McQueen has actually made that transition.

Act II: McQueen’s inner transformation

In Act I, McQueen ends up by accident in a little town called Radiator Springs. He causes significant damage to the town’s main road and is sentenced by the local head-car, Doc, to lug an old paving machine to make repairs. When McQueen complains that he’s a race car and not a bulldozer, Doc challenges him to a one-lap race, the loser to take responsibility for the road. McQueen thinks he’ll have no trouble beating the aging Doc, but loses control on the dirt track and must carry out his sentence.

This abject humiliation—specifically not being able to complete a race—is perhaps the first real failure that McQueen has ever experienced. To add insult to injury, Doc jibes, “You race like you fix roads: lousy.” But the insult stirs something in McQueen. Instead of whining, his will is awakened. “I’ll show him,” he says, “I will show him!” As a result, he makes his first step into the pattern of a self-sacrificer by doing an excellent job on his first day of repairs. The beauty of the new road surface inspires the other townscars to clean up their own areas.

Having run out of asphalt for a time, McQueen returns to the dirt track under supervision to try to figure out why he can’t complete the one turn—a repeated failure that chips away at his sense of invincibility but inspires him to focus on self-mastery rather than outward success. Doc observes McQueen’s efforts, then tries to explain the necessary method. McQueen, however, still isn’t in a mood to take advice.

Meanwhile, other cars in the town reach out to McQueen. Because they have no idea who he is, they’re not enraptured by his fame and treat him kindly as they would any other person (car). The local tow truck, Mater, engages him in friendly banter; the local handyman, a little forklift named Guido, fixes a slow leak in one of McQueen’s tires and his boss, the tire dealer Luigi, enjoys a haggle with McQueen over a new set of new treads. Red, the fire truck, gives McQueen a hose-down and Sally, a Porsche, offers a McQueen a room in her Cozy Cone Motel so he doesn’t have to stay in the dirty impound.

One night, while Mater is in charge of watching McQueen, they go out “tractor tipping”—McQueen initially considers the activity silly, but he ends up enjoying himself to the extent that Mater considers McQueen his best friend. This declaration, too, stirs something in McQueen—even though he doesn’t take it seriously at first, he realizes that he doesn’t want to hurt Mater, either.

All together, these kindnesses recognize and touch the inherent worth of McQueen’s soul, something he’s never experienced before. And that begins to form a basis for inner self-worth that’s independent of outer success.

The next morning, McQueen discovers that Doc, unbeknownst to the rest of the town, is actually a former racing champion himself—the legendary Fabulous Hudson Hornet—with not one but three Piston Cups gathering dust in his garage. Doc discovers McQueen there and pushes him out, obviously bitter about this hidden part of his past and saying, of his trophies, that they’re just empty cups. McQueen, though, realizing who Doc really is, has for perhaps the first time encountered someone he could really look up to. This, too, softens McQueen’s heart, and perhaps he realizes that the “empty cup” was the state of his own selfish heart.

Sally then makes a gesture of deep trust by giving McQueen a full tank of gas and inviting him out for a drive. This presents McQueen with a dilemma: he can now escape to Los Angeles in an attempt to reclaim his prior dreams, thus reinforcing the self-server pattern, or he can remain and build upon his nascent friendships, which embraces more of a self-sacrificer pattern. He chooses the latter, and Sally takes him to a place of magnificent natural beauty.

As McQueen marvels at the sight, he’s able to see the interstate in the distance. When he remarks what a shame it is that so many cars are missing the opportunity, Sally explains the history of Route 66 and the impact of the interstate system on small towns like Radiator Springs, a place she fell in love with after leaving a hectic life in LA where she never felt happy. She shares with McQueen her wish to see Radiator Springs in its heyday.

Sally’s story gives McQueen pause to reflect on how much he pretended to happiness in his previously empty life. Realizing that there’s more to life than fame and glory, that there are simpler dreams that are just as meaningful, if not more so, he begins to grow beyond his egoic self-preoccupation through an appreciation of others’ needs.

That evening, when he goes out to the racetrack again, he watches Doc, who has donned his old racing tires, speed around the track as McQueen so often failed to do. Doc flees back to his garage. McQueen follows and then hears Doc’s story of having been abandoned by a racing world dominated by selfishness. McQueen, having pivoted inwardly from his own selfishness, claims that he’s isn’t like those others. In response, Doc issues a challenge:

“Oh yeah? When is the last time you cared about something except yourself, hot rod? You name me one time and I will take it all back.”

McQueen droops in shame and has no immediate response, but he reminds Doc that keeping his own true identity secret is an act of selfishness in itself. In this way, McQueen is now able to recognize selfishness for what it is, whereas at the beginning of the movie he knew no other way of being.

The next day, after completing his road repairs overnight, McQueen is free to leave. But he instead chooses to stay a little longer to give his business to all his new friends: new tires, a new paint job, purchases at the various shops, and so on. To fulfill Sally’s wish, too, he convinces everyone to repair their neon lights so that they can all enjoy an evening of old-time gaiety. It’s there that Sally and McQueen realize they’ve fallen in love with one another—something that McQueen couldn’t have imagined for himself only a few days earlier.

McQueen is clearly a new person. He has left his old world behind and embraced the new. The question, though is whether that transition is permanent or only temporary.

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Act III: Proving his transformation

McQueen, though, must now prove that his inner transformation is real and not just a passing phenomenon. Just when Sally and McQueen begin to embrace, the press corps of the racing world suddenly appears in Radiator Springs because Doc secretly leaked the news of McQueen’s whereabouts. A dazed McQueen doesn’t want to leave, but he is herded back into his truck and taken to Los Angeles in time for the big race.

During the race, McQueen finds himself unable to return to his prior self-serving superstar mindset: he keeps thinking about Sally and his other friendships in Radiator Springs. Just when he’s on the verge of giving up, he discovers that Doc—wearing his Fabulous Hudson Hornet paint—has appeared with others from the town to serve as his pit crew. Once the announcers and the audience realize Doc’s presence, the stadium erupts in applause.

A renewed and inspired McQueen then resumes the race and catches up to The King and Chick Hicks, who’ve been running side by side the whole time. On the last lap, Chick tries to bump McQueen off the course; to Doc’s delight, McQueen recovers using the dirt-racing technique that Doc had demonstrated, putting him in the lead.

As McQueen approaches the finish line, however, Chick purposely forces The King into a heinous crash reminiscent of one that ended Doc’s career decades earlier. McQueen now faces his greatest test: will he revert to the self-server pattern by claiming the Piston Cup, or will he affirm his new place in the self-sacrificer pattern by turning away from his long-sought victory in order to help The King. He stops just short of the finish line to ponder his options.

As the entire audience waits in awed silence, McQueen allows Chick to cross the line first (making him the champion), then makes the soul-satisfying choice of backing up so that he can push The King across the finish line.

“What are you doin’ kid?” [asks The King].

“I think The King should finish his last race,” [answers McQueen].

“You just gave up the Piston Cup, you know that?”

“Ahhh…this grumpy old racecar I know once told me something: it’s just an empty cup.”

When Doc hears this, he realizes that not only has McQueen changed, but that he himself is healed from his bitterness. Doc’s empty cup is now full as well, as is everyone’s in the audience, who all erupt with cheers and tears.

In the denouement after the race, Dinoco offers McQueen his long-cherished sponsorship. But affirming his new pattern as a self-sacrificer, he turns that honor down to remain with his original sponsors, Rust-Eze. He then goes on (in the movie’s conclusion and during the credits) to rejuvenate Radiator Springs by setting up his own racing headquarters there and drawing many new visitors to the town.

In closing

As I said in part 1, Cars not only beautifully depicts the self-server to self-sacrificer transition but can also inspire viewers to make such a transition themselves. It does so by first clearly laying out the cost of the self-server mindset: an inner poverty even in the midst of external “success.” It then clearly lays out the much more fulfilling rewards of the self-sacrificer mindset—the inner riches of love and joy and friendship that are not dependent on external circumstances. And it the goes even further to show that external rewards may yet come, and indeed will come, when you include others in your success.

By showing the greater joy that comes through this transition—a joy greater than the self-server pattern can ever deliver—Cars has the power to inspire viewers to expand their own sense of self and to include others’ realities in their own. That self-expansion brings one closer to ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new joy of God/Satchidananda, the end goal of all striving as discussed in Everyone is seeking God, but most don’t know it.

And thus, for many people, Cars is rightfully considered a spiritualizing story.

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As I write this, my wife and I are on a three-month RV trip to the American South—focusing on Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas, with a little dip into West Virginia and Kentucky—many of which I’ve never visited before. It’s a trip we’d started in March 2020, but we got only as far as Tucson, AZ, before COVID shut everything down and sent us back home. This trip is also one of the reasons that my posting on Deus in Fabula is more sporadic for the time being, as all the driving and touring on such a trip occupies the majority of my time.

Given our starting point in Northern California, our path to Louisiana—where we settled into a more leisurely touring pace—necessary took us down the length of California and then across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Driving through those parts, you invariably encounter the legacy of “Route 66,” with all its charm and kitsch.

These encounters reminded me of the 2006 animated Pixar movie Cars, which was my son’s #1 favorite when he was 2-3 years old. Due to an unplanned medical event that took my wife out of commission for a time, it fell to me to put our son to sleep every night. The routine we settled into involved having a snack (to help him wean) and watching half of Cars. I’m thus being entirely honest when I say we watched the film over 100 times. (It’s also why Cars world at the California Adventure Park has a special place in our hearts; see Follow-up thoughts on transition points in seeking God for a related story.)

Even so, we never tired of the story. Why? I think it’s because the film is clearly uplifting in the sense discussed in all the posts on Transition Points in Seeking God. Specifically, Cars not only depicts the self-server to self-sacrificer transition but also, I believe, has the capacity to inspire viewers to consider such a transition for themselves.

Reflecting on that potential while driving through Route 66 territory, I was surprised to realize that I hadn’t written about the movie in the context of those other posts. So, given that it’s such an exemplary example of that particular transition, let’s take a look.

Act I: Establishing Lighting McQueen as a self-server

The protagonist of Cars, an anthropomorphized hot-shot racecar “sensation” named Lightning McQueen, begins the story as a quintessential self-server. He’s selfish, self-centered, and concerned with only fame and glory. His arrogance is not without reason: he’s on the verge of being the first rookie to win the “Piston Cup” championship and the first rookie to land the top sponsorship of the oil company, “Dinoco.” He dreams of the glamour of both achievements, especially shedding his present sponsor, Rust-eze Medicated Bumper Ointment (basically Preparation-H for cars). Yet he’s so full of himself as a “one-man show” that he refuses to take advice or cooperate with others. He’s recently fired his crew chief of the season and, with the exception of his transport truck, Mack, he’s utterly friendless even though surrounded by admirers and an eager press corps.

His self-superiority costs him in the movie’s opening in which he’s vying for the Piston Cup with two other racecars: Strip Weathers aka “The King” (a wise old veteran) and Chick Hicks (an even more arrogant and unscrupulous nemesis). All three are tied for the season points lead, so it’s a winner-take-all event.

Toward the end the race, McQueen ignores his underling crew’s insistence to change his tires because he wants to show off by winning the race by an entire lap. But he blows not one but two tires on the final lap, allowing The King and Chick Hicks to catch up with him, and they all cross the finish line in exactly the same moment.

The race officials decide to hold a tiebreaker with just those three cars in Los Angeles a week hence. Wishing to get to Los Angeles first to “schmooze” Dinoco, McQueen and Mack set off immediately. Thinking only of himself, as a self-server does, McQueen insists that Mack drives non-stop, day and night. McQueen promises that he’ll stay awake with Mack, but soon breaks his promise and nods off. Mack then does as well and meanders onto the freeway’s rumble strips, causing the trailer door to drop open and McQueen to slide out.

McQueen, shocked awake by oncoming traffic, is unable to calmly assess the situation and chases another trick off a remote off-ramp, putting him on an old stretch of Route 66. Speeding down that lonely road in a desperate attempt to find the Interstate, he ends up causing mayhem in a little town called Radiator Springs and wrecking the road. In the process he gets wrapped up in barbed wire and telephone lines so that the local police car can apprehend and impound him.

In Traffic Court the next day (during which time Mack and the rest of the world have no idea where McQueen ended up), the town’s leader and judge, Doc, sentences McQueen to five days’ community service: pulling a massive old paving machine to repair the road while being given only a small gas ration so that he can’t try to run away. McQueen balks at this, especially as it’ll delay his arrival to Los Angeles until the day of the race itself, thereby posing a threat to his self-server dreams.

Consequently, he tries to game the system. “I can go when this road is done, right?” That’s the deal, so he pulls the paver as fast as he can, “completing” the job but leaving the road in even worse shape. “It looks awful,” says one of the townscars. “Well, it matches the rest of the town,” mocks McQueen.

Doc demands that McQueen scrape it all off and start again. When McQueen complains, “I’m a racecar, not a bulldozer,” Doc offers him a chance of early escape: a one-lap race between the two of them, with the loser taking responsibility for the road. In the climax of Act I, then, McQueen believes he’ll have no trouble beating the aging Doc, but because he doesn’t understand how to drive on a dirt track, he fails to make a crucial turn and ends up in a ravine as Doc moseys around the track for the victory. McQueen now has no choice but to complete his sentence.

To be continued in part 2.

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The post below, which I’ve just reviewed and edited, explains the differences between three terms that are often confused with one another. In this present post, I want to expand on the key differences between “magical” and “mystical.”

The concerns of the mystic vs. the magician

In the original post, I cited three qualities of the mystic identified by the researcher Evelyn Underhill, as quoted by Marsha Sinetar in Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics. Let me restate each of those here:

1. Mysticism is inwardly transformative to one’s approach to living, rather than being merely a mental exercise or something that’s focused on outer effects (like wealth).

2. Mysticism is about deepening one’s inward relationship with God and may not have any noticeable effect on outward appearances.

3. The mystic’s dominant life-emotion is love, expressed as a strengthening dedication of will toward the things of God rather than the things of the world.

These three qualities, which constitute an inward stance of humbleness before the Divine, stand in almost diametric opposition to the typical focus of “magic,” which is an ego-aggrandizing concern for things of the world and one’s relationship with worldly matters.

Put another way, “magic” is generally considered a means to gain power not over oneself (the goal of mysticism), but power over the world, especially power over natural forces and over other people. The magician’s dominant life-emotion, then, is power or domination, not love.

In my prior post, I also observed this aspect where the magic of Harry Potter is concerned:

The magic that J. K. Rowling shows in Harry Potter, for example, demonstrates a power over matter, often used for destructive purposes, as well as power over people’s minds and the ability to inflict misery, torture, or death. What we don’t see is the equivalent “magic” that can enhance life, inspire joy, or draw one closer to God.

In the Harry Potter universe, magic is both predominately dark and utterly materialistic, stuck in a pre-industrial medievalism full of constant power struggles, people who are ready and willing to ruthlessly exploit others for their own benefit, a pervasive contempt for helping those less fortunate, and so on. Why, with the command over the material world that witches and wizards are supposed to have, is there any poverty in the wizarding world? Why is there class warfare? Why does Harry even have to wear glasses? (A 15-minute LASIK surgery can fix nearsightedness.) And when there are incredible potions like Felix Felicis, why aren’t there potions to cure simpler emotional maladies like envy, jealousy, grief, and resentment?

And why is there no magic in the Harry Potter universe that has anything to do with helping people find what they’re really looking for, as explained in Everyone is seeking God but most don’t know it and Transition points in seeking God). I think the simple answer is: J. K. Rowling herself doesn’t know much about such matters herself, so how could we expect her to write about it?1

If we look more broadly at “magic” as it’s used in other fantasy literature, we again see that it’s concerned with things of the world, not things of God.

“Real” magic is also obsessed with power

The same is even true of what some consider to be “real” magic, which is to say, real-world phenomena and experiences that are classified as having magic-like effects.

A primary text on this subject (which I recently read), is Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe by Dean Radin, a well-known consciousness researcher and Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization founded by former astronaut, Edgar Mitchell. Radin begins the book as follows:

This book is about magic.

Not the fictional magic of Harry Potter, the feigned magic of Harry Houdini, or the fraudulent magic of con artists. Not blue lightning bolts springing from the fingertips, aerial combat on broomsticks, sleight-of-hand tricks, or any of the other elaborations of artistic license and special effects.

This is about real magic. (1, Kindle Edition)

Such “real” magic, he says, falls into three categories:

1. “Mental influence of the physical world, perception of events distant in space or time, and interactions with nonphysical entities. [This] first type I’ll call force of will; it’s associated with spell-casting and other techniques meant to intentionally influence events or actions.”

2. “Divination; it’s associated with practices such as reading Tarot cards and mirror-gazing.”

3. “Theurgy, from the Greek meaning ‘god-work’; it involves methods for evoking and communicating with spirits.” (1)

Radin spends much of the book providing evidence that he believes proves that these capabilities are, in fact, part of our real world.

Whether you agree with such claims or not, what’s important for the question of magical vs. mystical is the distinct emphasis here on power. That emphasis is in the book’s very subtitle: “A Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe.” It’s explicit in Radin’s first category, force of will, which means a way to impose one’s (egoic) will upon the rest of the universe.

Divination, too, is clearly a power: to know what’s about to happen gives you power over those who don’t. It’s why people from kings and queens and presidents and other people at the top of the social hierarchy all the way down to society’s lowest echelons have sought out soothsayers and fortune tellers throughout recorded history. The movie Back to the Future II is based on this premise; it’s why people have tried to use any number of indicators, charts, and other data to predict the stock market; it’s the reason why people are so interested in today “prediction markets” to the extent that they report “news” about them.2 It’s why insider trading is illegal.

The third category, theurgy, at least has the potential for something to do with genuine spirituality and drawing closer to God, but even here, such “magic”—as Radin explains it—is again nothing more than a means of gaining power. In this case, it’s the power to enlist the aid of supernatural beings who have a greater power or perception than our own. To quote Radin:

Theurgy involves communication with disembodied entities, also known as spirits, angels, fairies, phantoms, shades, and ghosts. Some magicians are inclined to evoke entities with darker connotations, known as demons, imps, gremlins, jinn, specters, wraiths, and banshees. Another type of traditional magical entity is a servitor, a thought-form created to serve (hence the name) a specific purpose. In Tibetan lore, such creatures are known as tulpas. In Jewish lore, a similar mind-made creature is called a golem. These creatures apparently have a penchant for making up their own minds after a while, so they’re not always benign or trustworthy. (154)

Put bluntly, theurgy is just force of will and divination magic evoked through another agent.

Radin even characterizes prayer and other religious practices in purely materialistic terms:

Prayer is a form of intentional magic, a mental act intended to affect the world in some way. Wearing a sacred symbol is a form of sympathetic magic, a symbolic correspondence said to transcend time and space. Many religious rituals are forms of ancient ceremonial magic. (3)

Granted, many people do use prayer and religion with these intents, but the highest form of prayer is that of the mystic, wherein one seeks greater attunement and oneness with God. As Radin himself admits:

Within the path of yoga, the goal of meditation is transcendence, or personal liberation [that is, finding and communing with God]. In that tradition the siddhis, or powers, that are gained are strongly deemphasized. In the magical tradition, gaining those powers is the goal. (76)

It’s perhaps for this reason that in this book on “magic,” Radin doesn’t mention those spiritual masters who have, like Jesus, found oneness with God (see also Yogananda’s example given in Three literary accounts of mystical union, part 2). Being one with the Creator, such masters share God’s omnipotence (force of will) and omniscience (divination). But they have the wisdom to use it for the benefit of others—namely, for the spiritual liberation of others—rather than for selfish or egoic ends. As Yogananda’s wrote in his poetic prayer, “God’s Boatman” (found in Whispers from Eternity):

I want Thee, Oh God, that I may give Thee to all.
I want salvation in order to give it to all.
Free me, Oh God, from the bondage of body that I may show others how they can free themselves.
I want Thy everlasting happiness that I may make everybody happy forever and forever in Thee.

Most of Yogananda’s other recorded prayers have a similar sentiment, reflecting that if a mystic seeks any kind of power, it’s the power over oneself in order to give oneself to God more completely, fulfilling Jesus’ commandment to love God “with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30) and to love others (Mark 12:31).

And that again is the core distinction between magical and mystical.

With regards to fiction

In fiction, then, magical realism is that type of fiction that encourages readers to consider the existence of “magic” in the real world, which at best seems to inspire readers to seek such power for themselves that they can exercise over others or the material world.

Mystical realism, on the other hand, as we’re exploring here on Deus in Fabula, is that type of fiction that encourages reads to consider the reality of God’s presence, even and perhaps especially within the real world, inspiring them to seek God in their own lives, which is to say, an ever-increasing awareness of that presence.

These are two very different things.

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It’s been two years since I launched Deus in Fabula as “a quest for spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in fiction.” As I noted in Doorways to the Divine, an anniversary like this is an excellent time to reflect on where this quest has come thus far.

As I noted in that same post, I’m also concentrating for a time on reviewing and editing previous posts rather than writing new ones, which also accommodates the fact that my wife and I embarked on a three-month RV trip (from California to visit the Deep South) in late January.

To that end, I’ve recently updated two prior posts:

In the latter post, the definition I give for “spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism” is as follows:

…the inner awareness of God’s very real presence in ordinary, everyday life, in everyday situations and settings. … Mystical realism is also God’s presence experienced by ordinary, everyday people like you and me, rather than something reserved only for “special” souls.

Having explored the subject through many posts over the last two years, I think we can add a bit more depth to each of the terms in the phrase.

Spiritual refers to that which is non-material, non-physical, and non-sensual, meaning a focus on inner realities rather than the outer realities (sense experiences) that merely stimulate the inner. Spiritual, moreover, does not mean religious. Although religion can be practiced in a spiritual manner to draw one into those inner, non-material realities, religion can also be practiced in such a way as to obscure those realities in favor of outward concerns.

In many uses of the term, “spiritual” is more or less equated with the psychological, because psychological concerns are also an inner reality. “Spirit” can also be used to refer to one’s sense of self rather than to something beyond the self or a greater reality such as God. This is why I don’t think the term is sufficient by itself to describe the focus of our quest here.

That’s why I also include “devotional” to refer to the intentional directing of one’s aspirations upwards into a greater spiritual reality—call it God, Satchidananda, your Higher Self, etc.—wherein that greater reality becomes one’s point of reference, which in turn implies a sense of self-offering and diminishment of the ego. Devotion also implies an attitude of receptivity, of listening.

Again, religion can and often is be practiced in such a devotional manner, but it can also be practiced in a way that instead reinforces the ego and a sense of elitism. It’s also tempting to claim God’s support for one’s own ideas, which is really the opposite of receptivity.

Devotion to God, too, is different from devotion to a cause—even if that cause is ostensibly religious or “spiritual”—because love for the cause takes the place of pure love for God. This difference is very much the separation between what I call the self-sacrificer behavioral pattern and that of the self-transcender.

Mystical then refers to the experience that comes through devotional self-offering and transcendence of the ego: an increasing sense of oneness with that greater reality, which includes a greater awareness of how that greater reality expresses itself in and through other people and the rest of Creation. In mystical experience, the apparent veils of separation between oneself, God, and the “other” become increasingly thin or transparent (meaning that it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition).

I emphasize experience here because one can practice devotional self-offering while yet being closed to that developing sense of self-expansion, such as trying to draw attention to one’s outward demonstrations of devotion. Mystical experience, in other words, follows naturally from sincere devotion, for God always responds to pure love. If God isn’t responding in some definite manner—at the very least through an increasing sense of inner joy that’s not conditioned by outer circumstances—then one should question one’s own sincerity.

To bring these ideas together, that which is “spiritual, devotional, and mystical” means that which is concerned with inner realities and the focus of one’s inner energy toward loving, self-offering to God in order to more deeply experience God’s presence within oneself and within all of Creation.

What, then, about the realism part? I include this term to indicate that such an experience is only not for saints and some “chosen” few, but for everyone—for real people. And it’s an experience that isn’t limited to ostensibly spiritual or religious settings, roles, and other forms; it’s available anytime, anywhere, including our present-day world.

A quest for “spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in fiction,” then, means seeking stories that involve that mystical experience in the lives of real people in everyday circumstances of our real world (rather than some fantasy world). Because if a story can depict such an experience in the lives of real people, then perhaps real, ordinary readers may come to say, “Maybe that’s also possible for me!”

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When I started Deus in Fabula, I wrote a short bit for this newsletter’s About page to explain my choice of the name. At that time I was using a simple stock image for the publication, and it wasn’t until a few months later that started working on a custom logo. I made a few sketches and decided I like this one the best:

(The horizontal lines on the paper are from a college-ruled notebook, to give you some idea of how small this sketch was.)

The question then was how to turn that sketch into a suitable piece of vector art that could be scaled and reoriented as needed. That would require some knowledge, or someone with the knowledge, of a program like Adobe Illustrator. Because I have an old copy of Illustrator CS2, I figured I’d first give it a go myself, relying on various YouTube videos to learn how Illustrator works. Here are some of the interim designs:

It took some time, but I eventually landed on a design I was pleased with, a key element of which was stylizing the black lines of the book more than in the original:

In my current review process, it was high time that I edited that original post about the Deus in Fabula name to add further details about the logo design. You can read all of that in the update below:

What’s also gratifying about editing an earlier piece like this is that there are now other posts to link to that go deeper into what was just an initial thought. For example, in the first paragraph I mentioned the idea of deus ex machina and divine intervention in literature—for which now I could add a link to the three-part series on that subject, Divine Intervention in fiction: The challenge of avoiding deus ex machina resolutions.

I added a bit of other material as well, so if you’ve never read that page, I think you’ll find it interesting. Note, too, that it doesn’t appear alongside other posts because it’s technically a “custom site page” for this newsletter that’s published differently. For that reason it doesn’t have a space for comments, so if you’d like to comment, do so with this present post.

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This is not a solo journey, however. Although I am personally working on fiction that expresses this flavor of realism, I cannot be but a drop in the literary ocean. I believe that there is a whole realm of fiction waiting to happen—to open “doorways to the divine”—and that there is space for many authors as well as readers.

That’s where you come in. The very fact that you’re reading Deus in Fabula suggests that you, too, are interested in this pursuit.

• Perhaps you’re a writer wanting to incorporate more inner experience and spiritual depth in your characters, something that I don’t believe AI can generate in any meaningful way.

• Perhaps you’re a reader hoping to find more of that depth in the characters through which you enjoy new experiences.

• Perhaps you’re an agent or publisher looking for material with a fresh vitality.

• Perhaps you’re just a human being who is wanting to tap into your own wellsprings of inspiration.

Whatever the case, I invite you into an ongoing, extended conversation about this quest, about this idea of “spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism,” and about the potential for writing—and really art in general—to not merely represent or depict spiritual concepts and ideas, but to have a spiritualizing effect upon readers even without explicit spiritual content.

Of these subjects I won’t say anything more here, because that’s what all the other posts are for!

Joining the conversation is simple

1. Subscribe (content is free, but see “Paid support tiers”)

2. Read the posts and notes that stimulate the conversation.

3. Comment on posts and notes, which generates the conversation.

4. Share posts and notes with others to expand the conversation.

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Let me be clear: even though I’ve been pondering matters of “spiritual fiction” for some time and thus have ample material with which to stimulate the conversation, I don’t presume to know or have the answers. In fact, finding fixed “answers” isn’t even important. The conversation is rather a flow of energy, a flow that magnetizes what every participant needs at any given time.

Paid support tiers

At present, all content on Deus in Fabula is freely accessible. That said, I welcome your financial support, which helps me offset various costs in putting mystical realism “out there” into the world beyond this newsletter:

1. Acquiring books and other materials to review and bring into our conversation (and supporting those authors), including subscriptions to other paid Substack newsletters.

2. Entering written works into contests with entry fees, which, win or lose, at least put such works in front of contest judges.

3. Attending conferences and workshops where I can both represent this conversation and engage others directly in it, including meeting networking with other authors who are doing similar work.

4. Publishing longer works like novels, which involves many costs for editing, cover design, and marketing.

I think of the above activities as cultivating soil, planting seeds, and nurturing new growth. All of them take time, energy, and money, which is why your support is so appreciated, and meaningful.

Full pricing is set at $8/month or $72/year (which is $6/month), but I also offer the following discounts so you can find whatever level suits you:

• The Budget Cautious: 25% off either monthly or annual subscriptions ($6/month or $54/year).

• Halfsies: 50% off monthly or annual subscriptions ($4/month or $36/year)

• Grateful for the Gift: 75% off ($2/month or $18/year)

• Brother/Sister Can You Spare a Dime Quarter: one year for $13, which is just 25 cents a week.

In whatever way you choose to engage and whether you choose to offer direct support, I’m glad to have you on board.

The novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood once wrote a short essay called, “The Problem of the Religious Novel,” which concluded with this thought:

Perhaps the truly comprehensive novel could only be written by a saint—and saints, unfortunately, are not in the habit of writing novels. (REF: “The Problem of the Religious Novel” in The Wishing Tree, pages 164-168)

As I plan to explore in a later post on that essay, I think Isherwood’s primary hang-up is the thought that a truly “religious novel” must achieve some nearly unattainable level of perfection to be considered worthwhile. Spiritual inspiration, he seems to think, can occur only at that level.

I must disagree, as made clear in all of my previous essays on the transition points in the search for God. Although the highest spiritual attainment—oneness with God/Satchidananda—is rightly considered a singular end point, spirituality as a whole is a directional aspiration toward that goal.1 As such, anything that inspires individuals in that direction can be considered spiritual and spiritualizing, or “religious” in Isherwood’s parlance, at least for those individuals.

Spiritual or religious novels, in other words, need be neither perfect nor written by a saint, nor do they need to somehow depict perfected saints, as Isherwood seems to believe. They simply need to inspire their specific target readers—whether self-comforters, self-servers, self-sacrificers, or even self-transcenders—to take but one step further in the direction of God/Satchidananda.

The same can be said for poetry, musical compositions, and any other form of art that’s created with the intent to uplift and inspire in this way.

All of my previous essays on transition points also make clear that it’s utter folly to think that any given piece of art will inspire everyone equally or even inspire them unequally. As we explored, people as a whole are spread across a broad spectrum of behavioral patterns that view life and life’s purpose differently. Each pattern has its own needs where spiritual growth is concerned, just as school children have different needs in each educational grade. Thus, what is inspirational and spiritualizing to people in one pattern is not necessarily inspirational and spiritualizing to those in another and, in fact, can even be degrading.

We must say, then, that what makes any piece of art “spiritual” is determined not by any aspect of its form or content but by its effect.

Art that opens doors

Lately, I’ve been thinking about such effects as “doorways to the divine” (especially in the context of music along the lines of the previous post, A performance of ‘That Night When Christ Was Born.’)

God’s infinite love, light, peace, etc.—which I’ll refer to collectively as simply grace—is always reaching out to every soul and every living thing, forever inviting each one of us to take a step in the direction of that lasting fulfillment that we all fundamentally seek, even if we don’t realize it yet. In their ignorance, people shut themselves off from that flow of grace, effectively closing the doorways through which that grace might come to touch them. Any given piece of art that is created to uplift and inspire, then, has the sacred purpose of opening a doorway, thereby allowing that grace to flow through and enabling one to take an upward step in response.

I say “any given piece of art” rather than “art” in general because where an individual is concerned, only one piece of suitably inspiring art is needed to inspire that person to take a step. Whether that same piece of art inspires anyone else is irrelevant—if it inspires but a single soul, then it proves its value.

Any given individual, then, who finds inspiration in a specific piece of art—a painting, a poem, a novel, a piece of music, etc.—is under no obligation whatsoever to find inspiration in any other works, even those by the same artist. Similarly, artists who seek to inspire others2 should never expect that their entire body of work be universally inspiring to any given individual, let alone to “everyone.” If one piece opens a doorway for just one other person—even the artist themselves—should that not be enough?

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Looking ahead into 2026

With all this in mind, I want to share how I’m thinking about Deus in Fabula for the coming year.

Since starting this publication in early 2024, I’ve written over 90 posts that constitute something on the order of 370 single-spaced pages and over 180,000 words—easily enough for a doctoral thesis! That’s a lot of write, and, I imagine, a lot for you to read.

That means it’s a good time to make some space in which to review those existing posts, as I’d do if I was editing a book or thesis. For one thing, I’d like to integrate thoughts from later posts into earlier ones. I’d also like to incorporate this “doorways to the divine” idea where appropriate. And there are always opportunities for improving passages that didn’t come across as clearly as I’d hoped when keeping up with a mostly weekly cadence of posts.

Accordingly, I’ll be reposting a lot of the earlier material, giving you a chance to read posts that you might have missed, especially if you’ve not been with Deus in Fabula from the beginning.

Along the way, I do expect to add some new material, especially on topics that I said I’d come back to later. I’d also originally planned to report more on titles that I’ve read as part of my search for spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in fiction. What transpired, though, is that various topics I thought would occupy perhaps two or three posts turned into a longer series, and then, lo and behold, months go by and I still haven’t gotten to other planned subjects!

I’ve also found that by being so engaged with essays, I haven’t given myself much time to exercise, in story, the principles and ideas contained therein. For me, writing essays and writing stories and poetry are two very different processes. My “muscle” for writing analytical prose (upon which I built my previous career in tech writing at Microsoft) is also much more developed than the muscle for creative forms. To exercise the latter, then, I have to take time away from the former and disproportionately so.

What that all means is that I’m allowing myself to be more irregular with postings—including reviews/edits of existing posts, new essays, and pieces of fiction and poetry. After all, part of exercising that artistic/creative muscle is engaging more with a flow than a schedule, so we’ll see how it unfolds!

I hope you’ll enjoy the flow with me, and, as always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts and comments.

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For your Christmas joy, I offer here a recording of a performance I gave of this delightful song at the Christmas Festival of Light at The Grotto in Portland, Oregon, December 2008. My wife and young son (just over 2) were among the audience of about 300, and I was very touched that my son fell asleep during the piece.1

I include the lyrics here as well as a short commentary afterwards.

Lyrics

1. Once there lived a tiny nightingale
In the ancient land of Israel.
Not a note he ever sang until
That night when Christ was born.

Chorus:
That night! That night!
No song he did sing,
So wise men2 tell,
Till that night when Christ was born.

2. On that night he came upon a field;
There a band of shepherds to sleep did yield,
For none knew what wonders the dark concealed,
That night when Christ was born.

3. Suddenly an angel host appeared,
With their songs the solemn darkness cleared,
And the shepherds awoke, God’s host revered,
That night when Christ was born.

4. Then the nightingale did fly up high
Till he joined the angels in the sky;
In his joy he opened his beak to cry,
That night when Christ was born.

5. As he tried to chirp that holy name
Suddenly his voice in music came,
And with angel choirs he did proclaim
That night when Christ was born.

6. Ever since that night, the nightingale
Every heart with music does regale,
And his favorite song, it is the tale
Of that night when Christ was born.

7. Then let us, if we would sweetly sing,
Join the angels praising Christ the king,
That they to our hearts once more may bring
That night when Christ was born.

Chorus for last verse only:
That night! That night!
No song we can sing,
So wise men tell,
Till that night when Christ is born.

Commentary

One of the things I enjoy about all of Walters’ ~350 compositions3 are that every one of them has an inner, uplifting effect that carries deeper meanings that those that appear on the surface.

As a bird, the nightingale is famed for its beautiful song, which it sings both day and night. The nightingale has often been used in literature and especially poetry, even back to Homer’s Odyssey. Shakespeare likened his love poetry to the nightingale’s song; Beethoven and Liszt used the nightingale’s song in some of their compositions; Omar Khayyam refers several times to nightingales in The Rubaiyat, as does Paramhansa Yogananda in a number of his poems. Suffice it to say that a nightingale is a symbol of one who has a beautiful song to sing. In his interpretations of The Rubaiyat, Yogananda also identified the nightingale as a symbol of eternal Truth.

In this song, then, a nightingale who has never sung a note implies anyone who has a beautiful song to sing but has not yet found their true “voice” through a connection to wisdom, which is to say, to God. In that way, the song suggests that there’s nothing truly worth saying until one has at least touched God’s presence within—no such “notes” are worthy of the name if they’re born merely of lower (egoic) consciousness rather than born of a higher, more expansive consciousness.

Also consider the word “tiny.” Tiny implies humbleness, which is to say that you don’t need to be famous or important or anything like that for your voice to matter if it’s connected to Truth, if it speaks of seeking God or inspiring others to seek God. You don’t have to be an angel: when you’re connected to God, whatever words you speak or notes you sing resonate with all the power of Creation. “Tiny” here can also imply that perhaps the nightingale did sing, but none of that singing was of any consequence—which is to say, it had no purpose or lasting impact on Creation—without that connection to the Divine.

This interpretation is further supported by the chorus: “No song he did sing so wise men tell.” Honestly, what do wise men (and women) have to do with this story? The song could easily have said, “So legend tells”—but we’ve got wise men here, suggesting that there’s a deeper implication as befits any parable or story that such sages see fit to share. Jesus told stories not to be amusing or to be the center of attention but to help people awaken spiritually. By making this connection to wise men, then, That Night When Christ Was Born tells us that its inner message is one of spiritual upliftment.

More specifically, the song’s purity and lightness have an effect of cleansing the heart and mind of shyness or shame. It releases the heart from smallness, releasing the love and joy that’s otherwise trapped beneath layers of uncertainty. So released, that energy can then flow upwards from the heart to the point of spiritual awakening, the point between the eyebrows in the forehead. This point, often referred to as the spiritual eye or the “single” eye (Luke 11:34), is where we connect to God and find our voice.

The song, then, indicates that each one of us is the bird, the unawakened nightingale who must learn to sing by attuning to divine consciousness, to find one’s voice not in opinions and lower thoughts but through offering all the heart’s desires and ambitions into that highest inspiration. This idea is spelled out clearly in the last verse:

The let us if we would sweetly sing,
Join the angels praising Christ the King,
That they too, our hearts, once more may bring
That night when Christ was born.

That little bit, “once more,” suggests that Christ has already been born within us, and we’re seeking a second birth, an awakening to that ever-present reality. Thus, the repeat of the ending chorus says, “no song we can sing” and “Till that night when Christ is born”—again, nothing we say has any purpose of impact without a connection to God and Truth, without the foundation of seeking God. Without that connection, you might as well be silent!

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Every December when I was studying German in high school, our class took a field trip to the Bavarian alpine village of Leavenworth, Washington (where all the pictures in this post were taken). At that latitude, the winter sun sets early, allowing us to enjoy the lights before it was time to make our 2-1/2 hour return trip. Even though the weather was cold, these visits—and subsequent ones to similar mountainous settings—always filled me with a certain warmth. This poetic story expresses something of that feeling, which could, I think, also make a lovely children’s book.

Dusk descends early in the mountain village.
The winter white glistens
in the light of a thousand bulbs
adorning roofs, rails, and trees.

Icicles dangle from the eaves,
new snow covers the benches,
clings to the streetlamps
and the leafless heritage maple
in the village square.

Shoppers tote their chosen gifts;
the tantalizing aromas of fine meals
and candied delights enrich the air,
every door festooned
with wreaths and garlands and lights.

The soft layer of white
muffles every noise;
the clomping of hooves,
the scraping of footsteps,
the laughter of children
all absorbed in a symphony of stillness.

Stirred in the crystalline glow,
I am drawn to my heart
rejoicing in a Presence.
“Christ is near,” it whispers,
“Christ is near.”

“O driver of your fashioned sleigh,
with mares of ivory braids,
ready to delight a family
under the twinkling heavens—
Have you seen the Christ?
For I feel He is near.”

“Yes, He is here:
in the joy of my fares,
in the jingling of sleighbells,
in the cheer of the townsfolk.”

She snaps her reins
and glides away
into the starlit darkness
of the countryside.

A gust of warmth
from an open door
invites me within
a Christmas store.

“O merchant of wares,
with your ornaments fair,
your nutcrackers, ribbons, and succulent treats,
your Santas and creches and snowglobes and angels—
Have you seen the Christ?
For I feel He is near.”

“Yes, He is here:
in the glimmer of glass,
in the shine of silver,
in the delight of discovering a gift of love
for a dear friend.”

He adjusts a candle
to fill a gap on the shelf,
and turns to attend another.

Again, outside,
in the chilly air,
I don my hat
and cross the square.

“O workers on your evening shifts,
so thoughtfully clearing snowy drifts,
to make our passage safe and sure—
Have you seen the Christ?
For I feel He is near.”

“Yes, He is here:
in the paths we turn
through the treacherous freeze,
in the service we render
for the welfare of all.”

I tip my hat
and bow my thanks.
To another section
They move their ranks.

From beneath the maple,
from a platform festooned
with holly and lights,
the voices of song
thrill my ears.

“O singers of celebration fond,
of centuried remembrance long—
Have you seen the Christ?
For I feel He is near.”

“Yes, He is here:
in every inspiration of melody
that flows through our refrains,
in the gladness of every harmony
arising from every chord of our loving cooperation.”

Another carol they begin
Past inns and shops it carries.
I gaze about, absorb the scene,
My every sense to tarry.

In the warmth of friends sharing a meal,
I touch the Christ.

In the sweetness of candy and caramel apples
alighting upon the tongues of children,
I taste the Christ.

In the brilliant spectacle of the starlit canopy
beyond the radiance of the village,
I behold the Christ.

In the wind through the evergreens
and the gentle breezes of night,
I hear the Christ.

In the crisp mountain air
and the subtle scents of balsam and fir,
I breathe the Christ.

He is near.
He is here.
In every joy and delight,
in every smile and pleasant greeting,
in every service graciously given and received,
in every lilt of devotion in joyous hearts.

In the driver, the shopkeeper,
the workers, the singers.

In the lights, the earth, the trees,
in the glimmering of the sky
and the silence of the snow.

And He is with me, always near.
Alive within me, always here—
Smiling through my eyes,
shining through my kindness,
singing through my voice,
and blessing through my love,
given freely to all.

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In Part 2 of this series, we looked at why divine intervention in fiction must preserve character agency lest it become a deus ex machina—a solution to some story problem that bears no relationship to the choices and actions of the characters. We also saw that the best stories make a least some attempt to answer the question of “Why now? Why here? Why does God, who is supposedly omniscient and can thus see how matters are shaking up, choose this particular moment and this particular place to intervene, whether directly or through angels or other agents who are supposedly in contact with the omniscient God?”

To wrap up this series, then, and to provide a contrast to the earlier problematic examples, this post explores what I consider to be an exemplary depiction of divine intervention: Frank Capra’s 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. The intervention fulfills both the criteria set out in Part 2: it happens in response to people’s prayers, which preserves character agency, and happens immediately, which explains the timing of that response.

What makes the depiction even more exemplary—even flawless—is the nature of the response itself. As we’ll see, God doesn’t just show up and fix the problem but instead works through people to bring about those solutions.

An immediate response to prayer

It’s a Wonderful Life opens with exterior scenes of Bedford Falls, New York, on Christmas Eve, with which we hear voiceovers of many people praying for a man named George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart), who is apparently in some kind of distress. We then ascend into the heavens where two galaxies/nebulae—one named Joseph and the other referred to only as “Sir,” presumably a senior angel or perhaps God himself—discuss the matter and decide to intervene by “sending someone down immediately.” A charming part of the story is that the “someone” is Clarence Oddbody, AS2 (Angel, Second Class, played by Henry Travers), whom Joseph describes as having “the IQ of a rabbit” though he also, in the senior angel’s assessment, has “the faith of a child.”

Clarence is told that George, in his distress, is contemplating “throwing away God’s greatest gift”—his life. Joseph and the senior angel then prepare Clarence for his task, showing him (and the audience, of course) all the relevant episodes of George’s life that bring him to his critical moment. For this reason, Clarence doesn’t make his appearance on earth until three-quarters of the way through the film.

In reviewing his life, we learn that since childhood, George has nurtured dreams of seeing the world and accomplishing those “big things” that he believes will bring him happiness—like building bridges and skyscrapers. As he grows older, however, George becomes inwardly frustrated because life seems to keep him forever bound to Bedford Falls, spending his days in a “shabby office” running the “penny-ante” Baily Building and Loan that his father started.

One day, on Christmas Eve, his business partner, Uncle Billy, misplaces $8000 (over $130,000 in today’s money), a deficit that will put one or both of them in jail for fraudulent business practices. Driven to despair, George succumbs to angry outbursts, such as yelling at his children and berating his daughter’s schoolteacher over the phone. Storming out of his home, he tries to drown himself in drink. At the bar, in tears, he utters a desperate prayer just before he’s punched in the face by the schoolteacher’s irate husband. Convinced that God isn’t listening and seeing no alternative, he decides to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, hoping that his next of kin can collect on his only real asset, a $15,000 life insurance policy. It’s at this moment that Clarence makes his appearance.

Clearly, this intervention comes about in direct response to people’s prayers, including that of George. because of people’s prayer, including George’s. The screenwriters (Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra) even dropped in the immediacy of this response in the opening dialog taking place in Heaven:

Senior Angel: Hello, Joseph. Trouble?

Joseph (another angel): Looks like we’ll have to send somebody down. A lot of people asking for help for a man named George Bailey.

Senior Angel: George Bailey…yes! Tonight’s his crucial night. You’re right…we’ll have to send someone down immediately.

[Some dialogue omitted; enter Clarence.]

Clarence: You sent for me, Sir?

Senior Angel: Yes, Clarence. A man down on earth needs our help.

Clarence: Splendid. Is he sick?

Senior Angel: No, worse. He’s discouraged. At precisely 10:45 Earth Time, that man will be thinking seriously about throwing away God’s greatest gift.

Clarence: Oh, dear, dear. Then I’ve only an hour to dress. What are they wearing now?

Senior Angel: You will spend that hour getting acquainted with George Bailey.

(The video below starts at the appropriate moment, with the last of the prayers before the dialogue above.)

Getting acquainted is then what the first 75% of the movie is about, which nicely explains (with the text that’s bolded above) why there’s a small delay of an hour or so between the prayers and the intervention. Thus, the writers left no question regarding “Why now?”

Furthermore—and this is another tribute to the writing—at no time earlier in the story do we see George or anyone else praying. George could have prayed many times, obviously: he’s been frustrated and feeling trapped in Bedford Falls for years and might have petitioned the Heavenly Powers to help him out. But he doesn’t, which means that the writers didn’t have to somehow account for why certain prayers are answered with divine intervention while others are seemingly ignored.

Indeed, the writers even accounted for George’s lack of earlier prayers: when George utters his singular desperate petition in Martini’s bar, he begins by saying, “Dear God, I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there….”1

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Clarence does not solve George’s problems for him

Now observe carefully how Clarence intervenes. He doesn’t come down, say hello, and materialize $8000, which is what George thinks will solve his problems. As George says to Clarence, “There’s only one way you can help me. You don’t happen to have eight thousand bucks on you?”

No, Clarence knows that the real problem is that George, as the heavenly powers say at the beginning of the movie, is deeply discouraged—he feels that his life is without value and meaning, which is why he decides to throw it away for a little money.

Clarence’s real job—and the nature of the divine intervention—is not solving George’s immediate issue of the missing $8000 but rather helping him understand that his life has, in fact, been most meaningful and wonderful. Hence the title of the movie.

To achieve this deeper purpose, Clarence simply presents George with choices.

First, by jumping into the river before George can drown himself, Clarence awakens George’s instinct to help others, which have been amply demonstrated by al the preceding scenes in the movie that Clarence has reviewed. Clarence’s act evokes George’s inherent selflessness, giving George a choice and preserving George’s agency.

Second, Clarence allows George to choose whether to be helped at all, again evoking George’s selflessness:

“I haven’t won my wings yet. That’s why I’m an Angel Second Class.”

“I don’t know whether I like is very much being seen around with an angel without any wings.”

“Oh, I’ve got to earn them, and you’ll help me, won’t you?”

“Sure, sure. … How?”

“By letting me help you.”

And then third, when George thinks that everyone would’ve been better off had he not been born at all, Clarence grants that wish, transporting them both into an alternate reality of a Bedford Falls that’s bereft of George’s lifelong impact. George, horror-stricken by what he sees—especially the sufferings of those he loves—realizes what his life has meant and, in Clarence’s words, “what a mistake it would be to throw it all away.”

In the movie’s pivotal moment, a near-psychotic George flees from the police, whom Clarence has stayed behind to detain (his one physical intervention). Returning to the same spot on the bridge where he started, he there calls to God and Clarence:

Help me, Clarence! Get me back! Get me back! I don’t care what happens to me. Get me back to my wife and kids. Help me, Clarence, please. Please. I want to live again. I want to live again. I want to live again. Please, God, I want to live again.

Here’s the most critical point: the completion of the divine intervention that now occurs at this moment does nothing but restore George to his previous life, exactly as it was. Nothing changes in George’s circumstances: George is still “stuck” in Bedford Falls and the $8000 is still missing. Nor is George forced into a change of heart: George has arrived at that inner transformation by his own volition, choosing to accept whatever might happen to him so long as the world around him—and everyone he loves—is restored.

Thus, God and his angels answered all the prayers by giving George an expansive vision and a change of consciousness. George’s problem of discontent, of feeling stuck in Bedford Falls, is solved by his own self-transcendence: “I don’t care what happens to me. I want to live again.” In that consciousness George discovers that his life has, in fact, been beautiful, even if it means taking full responsibility for the missing $8000 and going to jail as a consequence. As he says when returns home and meets to the D.A. come to arrest him, “Isn’t it wonderful! I’m going to jail!”

God also responds through the agency of others

The divine intervention that brings about George’s inner transformation is powerful enough to carry the story, but there’s yet one more aspect that makes It’s a Wonderful Life so inspiring, and that’s the unasked-for grace that solves the problem of the missing $8000. Once again, however, God just doesn’t make the $8000 appear out of nowhere. He instead works not only with but through the agency of human beings, namely willing human beings who choose, with their own agency, to surrender their own self-interest and allow God to work through them, even if only in small degrees. In the movie’s conclusion, in fact, we once again see almost everyone else in the story with the singular exception of the cranky nemesis, Mr. Potter (brilliantly played by Lionel Barrymore), who represents the utter joylessness of being closed to God’s grace and love.

The chain of agency begins immediately after George storms out of his home. Before we see where he runs off to, we see his wife, Mary (Donna Reed), respond to George’s behavior not with anger but with the love that she’s nurtured since she was a little girl (as seen early in the film). Demonstrating the utmost maturity, she sets herself aside and immediately picks up the phone to call Uncle Billy to understand what’s going on.

Her example inspires her children. The oldest, Pete, opens a short piece of dialogue:

Pete (age 12): Is Daddy in trouble?

Mary: Yes, Pete.

Janie (age 9): Shall I pray for him?

Mary: Yes, Janie, pray very hard.

Tommy (age 5): Me too?

Mary: You too, Tommy.

All the children run upstairs to pray, a moment that ties us back to the very beginning of the movie as the last two prayers we hear in that opening montage are those of Janie and the other daughter, Zuzu (age 7):

Janie: Please God, something’s the matter with Daddy!

Zuzu: Please bring Daddy back!

Just before the children, we also hear Mary calmly pray, “I love him, dear Lord. Watch over him tonight,” which demonstrates not only again her maturity but also a deep faith. And it’s that faith that then inspires her to evoke a cascade of response throughout Bedford Falls.

The last we see of Mary at this point is when Uncle Billy answers, whereupon the movie shifts entirely to George’s experience. Clearly, then, we can assume that Mary learns about the $8000. It’s at this moment that we have to assume that Mary utters her calm prayer, essentially attuning herself to God rather than freaking out or having a self-involved panic attack. And it’s in that attunement that she opens herself as an instrument for grace.

We learn later that Mary makes a few calls to inform others of George’s situation, and they scatter all over town to spread the word. All those friends respond also with prayer, as we again hear at the beginning of the movie, but instead of just waiting for God to do the work, they willingly choose to participate by gathering what monies they have and head to George’s house.

After George is restored to his life as it was, he hurries home to find Mary, encountering first the Bank Examiner and the District Attorney, who has a warrant for his arrest, along with a reporter and a photographer. (This is when he delights in the prospect of going to jail.) He then sees and embraces his children. Mary arrives home in a state of excitement, beckoning George downstairs.

In the movie’s rather boisterous conclusion now, we see all the townsfolk stream in, collectively providing the money George needs. Even the Bank Examiner, the reporters, and the DA join in, the latter also tearing up the warrant with a huge smile. And we learn that Clarence has indeed earned his wings.

All this shows that God doesn’t solve problems through some kind of magic: he instead inspires a change of consciousness wherein George—and all his friends—manifest the solutions.

His wife, Mary, calls the response of all their friends “a miracle.” But it’s not a miracle in terms of direct divine intervention: a pile of cash does not just appear out of thin air. Instead, the money again comes through the instruments of George’s friends, in amounts both small and large. And why does it come? It again comes because of the choices that George made throughout the whole story to help those same friends. “I wouldn’t have a house over my head if it weren’t for you, George,” says one of them. Thus, again, the miracle comes through the protagonist’s own agency.

If there’s any divine intervention, it’s that the God who dwells in the hearts of every person responds to the God that dwells within George, who has, so many times, helped others through George.

That’s how God works. And that’s what makes for great stories.

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Even though divine intervention, which can appear as a deus ex machina as noted in Part 1, is generally something authors avoid in fiction, such “heaven-sent” solutions are more natural and even expected within a religious or spiritually-oriented story. Some stories are even centered on such intervention: a protagonist or another character has likely called upon the Divine through prayer or some other supplication, and God responds with a miracle or by sending a heavenly agent to act on his behalf. The Bible itself is full of such incidents, such as the parting of the sea in Exodus, fixing the sun in the sky while Joshua besieges Jericho, or preserving the lives of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego when they’re thrown into Nebuchandezzar’s fiery furnace. Similar stories can be found in other scriptures and spiritual literature, like Paramhansa Yogananda’s spiritual classic, Autobiography of a Yogi.

In my mind, divine intervention must meet two requirements if it’s to work well in a story. First, the intervention should maintain character agency, meaning that there’s a clear relationship between the intervention and the characters’ choices and actions (even if they’re small). Second, the story should make at least some attempt to answer “Why now? Why did God not intervene sooner?” lest God be portrayed as merely whimsical.

Preserving character agency

“Agency” means that a character has the drive and capacity to make choices, act upon those choices, and bear the consequences of those choices in pursuit of a goal. Without desires or goals, there’s no reason for characters to make those choices in the first place, and bearing the consequences is what tells us that the goal matters (as noted in Part 1).

Goals and agency are thus intertwined, making characters active participants in the fulfillment of the story goal. Their actions and choices matter in whether the story goal is attained. Without agency, characters as just passive victims of circumstance, or, as we’re discussing here, passive beneficiaries of a deux ex machina.

Keep in mind that characters who are outwardly powerless can still exercise active agency if the story is focused on the character’s inward response to their situation. Consider royal scions who must outwardly submit to every demand in a life path that’s already been decided for them. Or consider characters who are imprisoned, undergoing torture, or facing execution. If such characters are inwardly passive and merely wallow in victim consciousness and self-pity, their stories are insipid and lifeless. If they’re inwardly active, however, say with a goal of maintaining integrity, upholding a principle, or surrendering oneself in deeper devotion to God, then they’re choices are meaningful.

Making choices and accepting the consequences provide a foundation of meaning upon which great stories are be built. Thus, for a divine intervention to be meaningful to a story, it cannot come about “just because” because such a contrivance devalues the story goal. It must come because of a character agency, allowing God to intervene in response to sincere action, not in spite of it or irrespective of it.

Furthermore, the best stories continue to preserve agency even when the intervention occurs by not having the divine agent simply solve all the character’s problems directly. Instead, the intervention is such that it aids the character in solving their own difficulties, thereby helping that character become stronger in some way. Indeed, stories work best when God responds not only because of but through human agency.

A divine agent who does all the work, on the other hand, robs characters of their agency as much as any straight-up deus ex machina, rendering them powerless and their stories flat and uninspiring. Spiritual inspiration is always a matter of higher energy, not passivity.

Thoughtfulness regarding “Why now?”

If an author doesn’t provide at least some explanation, or even a hint, as to why an intervention happens when it does, then God or the divine agents come across as whimsical, like many of the old Greek and Roman gods. Perhaps we can just brush this off by saying, “God’s ways are mysterious,” but that seems like a cop-out. It’s perhaps for this reason that many authors side-step the question by avoiding intervention altogether, but that leaves us with stories in which prayers don’t really matter, such as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (as discussed in previous posts), or where God doesn’t have any kind of tangible presence in the lives of the characters, such as A. J. Cronin’s The Keys of the Kingdom, Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory, and Endo’s Silence. Such stories depict faith, yes, but not any kind of mystical awareness. (For this reason, I consider these novels “religious” but not necessarily “spiritual” and certainly not “mystical.”)

The core reason for this avoidance is, I believe, one of theology, namely, the theology about how God operates in the world, especially for stories set in our world. Many theologies characterize God as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, meaning he can do anything, anywhere, at any time. God has no limits and nothing to prevent him from doing whatever he pleases, whenever he pleases. That’s why people find it difficult to explain why God permits suffering at all.1 But again, suffering is the currency that makes story goals valuable, and without it there’s little story to tell.2

To avoid whimsical intervention is again why character agency is necessary, because then God is characterized as responding, meaningfully, to people’s choices, especially when they choose to express sincerity and devotion. Perhaps they also need to build and strengthen their devotion before God responds; a story, in fact, can be built around that exact premise.

Once a character crosses the necessary threshold, however, it’s best to have God respond quickly, thereby demonstrating the relationship to character agency.

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Example: the climax in the movie, Stardust

A very direct example of this principle of immediacy is the climax of the 2007 movie, Stardust, in which a star that has taken the form of a young woman, named Yvaine, is falling in love with the hero, Tristan.3 She’s heartbroken, however, because a misunderstanding (that’s set up quite well earlier in the film) leads her to believe that Tristan loves someone else. In her dejection, she’s captured by witches who want to cut out her heart, as eating said heart grants them lasting youth. Tristan, who is, in fact, in love with Yvaine, almost succeeds in rescuing her, but they still find themselves facing the most powerful witch. It’s at that moment that Yvaine demonstrates her full power by shining like the star that she is, destroying the witch in her brilliant luminosity.

The question is, if Yvaine possessed such overwhelming power, how is it that she allowed herself to be captured and nearly murdered in the first place? The screenwriters were obviously aware of this, because they immediately answer it with the very next bit of dialogue:

Tristan: Why didn’t you do that earlier?

Yvaine: I couldn’t have done that without you. No star can shine with a broken heart. I thought I’d lost you…but you came back!

Tristan: Of course I did. I love you.

That little bit of writing leaves no question as to why Yvaine hadn’t yet used that power to solve a story problem.4 Here’s that scene from the movie:

Leaving questions open: A Wrinkle in Time

A contrasting example that doesn’t show such a relationship between agency and response, and it leaves the question of “Why now?” unanswered, is the climax in Chapter 12 of Madeline L’Engle beloved children’s novel, A Wrinkle in Time.

Here, the protagonist, Meg, is striving to rescue her brother, Charles Wallace, from possession by a satanic consciousness called IT. She is attempting to do so on her own because her angelic aids, Mrs Whatis, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which, told her earlier in the chapter that they are powerless in the situation:

“You know that we can do nothing on Camazotz [IT’s planet],” Mrs Whatsit said, her voice still cold.

“You mean you’ll let Charles be caught by IT forever?” Meg’s voice rose shrilly.

“Did I say that?”

“But we can’t do anything! You know we can’t! We tried! Mrs Whatsit, you have to save him!”

“Meg, this is not our way,” Mrs Whatsit said sadly. “I thought you would know that this is not our way.” (185, Kindle edition)

After some verbal tussles that also include Meg’s father and older brother, Meg realizes that it’s her destiny to attempt to save Charles Wallace and is teleported to Camazotz for the showdown.

There, Meg realizes that her solution lies in what IT doesn’t have, namely love, and so she calls to the real Charles Wallace through his possessed form:

Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. I love you, Charles. Oh, Charles Wallace, I love you.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was unaware of them.

Now she was even able to look at him, at this animated thing that was not her own Charles Wallace at all. She was able to look and love.

I love you, Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you. (199)

Clearly, Meg is calling upon her powers of love, which the angels gifted her, and devotion to her brother to meet and overcome the power of IT. The message of this climax is “love conquers evil,” which is appropriately simple for a children’s novel. I think L’Engle uses “love” to imply a connection to God, given the Biblical passages that say, “God is love,” so even though Meg’s love is quite personal and egoic—the love of a sister for a brother rather than God’s love flowing through her—we get the point.

Whatever the case, Charles Wallace is able, with Meg’s love pouring into him, to shake loose from his captivity:

Slowly his mouth closed. Slowly his eyes stopped their twirling. The tic in the forehead ceased its revolting twitch. Slowly he advanced toward her.

“I love you!” she cried. “I love you, Charles! I love you!”

Then suddenly he was running, pelting, he was in her arms, he was shrieking with sobs. “Meg! Meg! Meg!”

“I love you, Charles!” she cried again, her sobs almost as loud as his, her tears mingling with his. “I love you! I love you! I love you!” (200)

Love has apparently won the day.

The battle is not over, however. Although IT has been driven out of Charles Wallace, it’s still there to threaten both children anew, even entering into Meg:

A whirl of darkness. An icy cold blast. An angry, resentful howl that seemed to tear through her. Darkness again. (200)

Now what is Meg to do? Is it Charles Wallace’s turn to invoke love? Will Meg fight an internal battle now, drawing on the love she’s built up within herself, or perhaps using that as a springboard to call upon God’s love to drive IT from her for good?

The answer is: none of the above. Perhaps L’Engle figured she’d taken the theme far enough for children and it was time to wrap up the scene. Thus, instead of having Meg or Charles Wallace take any further action, Mrs Whatsit—in the very next line of the same paragraph—suddenly appears and teleports them to safety:

Through the darkness to save her came a sense of Mrs Whatsits presence, so that she knew it could not be IT who now had her in its clutches.

And then the feel of earth beneath her, of something in her arms, and she was rolling over on the sweet smelling autumnal earth, and Charles Wallace was crying out, “Meg! Oh, Meg!” (200)

Meg’s love saved Charles Wallace, at least temporarily, that much is true. But nothing that either one of them did ultimately saved them from IT. The rescue happens only because Mrs Whatsit just so happens to show up “through the darkness” to whisk Meg and Charles Wallace away from all danger. And despite her own unequivocal statement from a few pages earlier that “we can do nothing on Camazotz,” she somehow manages to just waltz into the heart of IT’s domain and waltz right out with the children.

Now, we might allow that Meg’s crescendo of love, like Tristan’s in Stardust, is what enables Mrs Whatsit to penetrate IT’s domain. L’Engle could have easily made mention of that in the brief denouement that follows before the book ends. However, such a possibility has not been established elsewhere in the story: there’s no indication that such love, or any love for that matter, is a factor in drawing a divine response. Nor does L’Engle offers any explanation as to why Mrs Whatsit shows up at that moment rather than some other time in the story. Mrs Whatsits action, in short, appears to be a contrivance, a deus ex machina.

Again L’Engle needed only have Mrs Whatsit mention that Meg’s love created an opening through which she could come in and do her deed. That would give Meg some agency in this resolution and answer the question of why Mrs Whatsit couldn’t have done so earlier. As it stands, though, L’Engle leaves that question open.

A mention of Harry Potter driving out Voldemort

To give an example of what L’Engle might have done with Meg, I’ll close this post with a brief mention of the climax scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in which Harry, like Meg, is possessed and inwardly tortured by the evil Lord Voldemort.

In the book version, Harry manages to dismiss Voldemort with a mere thought of his beloved and recently killed godfather, Sirius Black, which isn’t any stronger of a resolution that A Wrinkle in Time:

Let the pain stop, thought Harry. Let him kill us….End it, Dumbledore….Death is nothing compared to this…. And I’ll see Sirius again….

And as Harry’s heart filled with emotion, the creature’s coils loosened, the pain was gone, Harry was lying face down on the floor, his glasses gone, shivering as though he lay upon ice, not wood….

The movie version, however, greatly improves on the idea by having Harry use his will to conjure memories of love and friendship, even showing compassion for Voldemort, which drives Voldemort out:

This kind of inner battle is again the kind of character agency—or use of will—that could draw a divine response, even if it’s just implied.

Coming in Part 3

To conclude this series, Part 3 takes a close look at what I consider to be an excellent example of divine intervention done right, which is the holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Until then, share your thoughts.

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In the real world, many people have given testimony as to the reality of divine intervention—through answered prayers, for example, or the appearance of some kind of angel (guardian or otherwise) in a moment of great need. Not unexpectedly, then, divine intervention is a trope that appears in religious and/or spiritual fiction (even if it’s just a character’s hope for intervention as we saw in recent posts about Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret).

Incorporating actual (rather than hoped-for) intervention into a story demands a degree of sensitivity lest it becomes a mere deus ex machina. As you probably know, this Latin phrase means “a god out of the machine,” where “god” can be God or any other higher power appropriate to the fictional world. This device originated in Greek theater in a literal sense when actors playing gods were lowered by crane onto the stage to resolve a conflict “from above.”

In literary terms, a deus ex machina refers to any solution to a story problem—be it an object, event, or character—that conveniently appears out of nowhere and for no good reason. Such solutions bear no relationship to the action of the characters or even to the overall development of the plot, which often indicates a degree of authorial laziness. And without that connection to character action and without any explanation as to “why now?” those solutions effectively characterize God, divine agents, and any other higher power as merely whimsical.

In this series, then, we’ll take a look at the implications of divine intervention in stories and what is needed to make it work well, using a variety of examples of intervention that works well and intervention that doesn’t.

“God-mode” ruins the story

Video games sometimes have what’s called a “God mode” (or cheats) in which the player has complete control over everything that happens. One command is sufficient to completely heal one’s avatar (the in-game character), grant any special power or item, teleport anyone anywhere, and otherwise reset or manipulate the world however one wants. Such capabilities are usually created for the benefit of programmers, who need “backdoor” access to easily test every aspect of the game without having to slog their way through the challenges that players must face. For players, however, taking away the challenges takes away all the fun: playing in God mode makes the game too easy and it quickly becomes boring.

Divine intervention in fiction offers a kind of “God mode” for authors. As creators of the story and the story world, authors always have God-like powers: they can make anything happen whenever they want. The trick is that readers shouldn’t ever be reminded of the author’s omnipotence. Readers should be immersed in the story world and engaged with the protagonist’s quest to achieve their story goals through trials and tribulations.

As Daniel Schwabauer teaches in the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum:

The value of your story goal is determined by the suffering your hero endures in order to attain it. … Suffering is the key to establishing value. It is the currency of your story world. Without it you cannot buy the respect of the reader. Without it, the story goal won’t matter. Even if the hero succeeds in his quest, we won’t care. The quest itself will have seemed too easy, and therefore not worth doing in the first place. (The One Year Adventure Novel: The Compass (textbook), Clear Water Press, 2014, page 60.)

Stories, in other words, are built upon things not being easy for the hero. Take away the struggle and you take away the story.

Pulling a deus ex machina, especially through divine intervention that bears no relationship to character actions, suggests that an author wrote him- or herself into a corner and can’t see any other way to resolve the situation without going back and making significant revisions earlier in the story. With deadlines looming, authors don’t always have the luxury of such a degree of editing. So, sometimes they do the literary equivalent of a football quarterback throwing a “Hail Mary” pass—toss a deus ex machina out there and hope that the rest of the story is strong enough to carry readers through without serious face-palming.

Tolkien’s eagles

An oft-cited example of deus ex machina is the timely intervention of the eagles in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Like the character of Tom Bombadil, the eagles come across as agents of some kind of higher power: they’re somewhat detached from the mundane concerns of Middle Earth, they seem immune to both Sauron’s and Sarumon’s magic, and when they do get involved they prove superior to Sauron’s Nazgul and their dreaded fell beasts. That makes them available to Tolkien as convenient problem-solvers.

In the whole of The Lord of the Rings, the eagles intervene not once but three times:

1. Gwaihir the Windlord, lord of the eagles, “came unlooked-for to Orthanc” to rescue Gandalf from his imprisonment at the hands of Saurumon (Chapter 2 of Book 2 in The Fellowship of the Ring, page 261 of the Kindle edition).

2. Gwaihir, again unbidden, rescues Gandalf from the mountain-top of Celebdil after his battle with the balrog (Chapter 5 of Book 3 in The Two Towers, page 502 of the Kindle edition).

3. Gwahir and all the other eagles just appear, without Gandalf or anyone else having called for their assistance, to turn the tide in the climactic battle before the Black Gates (Chapter 10 of Book 5 and Chapter 4 of Book 6 in The Return of the King, pages 893 and 948).

The first appearance is understandable. Gwahir, as a higher being, is perhaps in communion with other pseudo-omniscient beings (such as Galadriel) who alerted him to Gandalf’s predicament. Gwaihir, in fact, tells Gandalf, “I was sent to bear tidings, not burdens,” (261) without indicating by whom. And because his appearance is for Gandalf’s sake only, we can accept that there’s likely a special relationship at work here. (The 2001 movie version of this scene adds a moth through whom Gandalf calls for help, making his rescue a direct response to that appeal.)

The second appearance is also understandable as it’s again for Gandalf’s aid only. Gwaihir’s appearance is mentioned only briefly and doesn’t have any real bearing on the overall plot of the story. That’s perhaps why the 2002 movie version leaves this bit out entirely.

The third appearance is more problematic because nowhere in the story (or the movie) do we see Gandalf requesting aid during the battle, and given that the army of men had to march for several days to reach the Black Gates, the eagles had plenty of time to be there from the start had Gandalf contacted them. Perhaps again the eagles are in communion with some other power such that they just know when to make their appearance, but Tolkien doesn’t tell of such. The eagles just show up to save the situation.

This intervention leaves one with the impression that Tolkien wrote himself into a difficult place and realized that he was pitting a small army of men (from Gondor and Rohan) against overwhelmingly superior forces. He’d already decimated the former in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, and although he also destroyed Mordor’s armies in that scene, he probably realized that Sauron still had a great many reserves available to him. So, unless Tolkien wanted to go back and rewrite other parts of the stories to suitably weaken Mordor’s host, the only other option remaining to him was to bring in some reinforcements on the side of the Gondor and Rohan.

And the eagles were about the only option where reinforcements were concerned. As Tolkien’s appendices reveal, the other allies of Gondor and Rohan—the Elves and the Dwarves—were already engaged in battles of their own. Nor was there sufficient time for them to make the journey from their lands to the Black Gates. The eagles, on the other hand, could move swiftly and, given their relationship with Gandalf, it’s not unreasonable that they’d offer aid. It’s just never explained.

Thus, Tolkien probably felt justified in pulling this particular deus ex machina,1 and given that the rest of The Lord of the Rings is so strong and engaging, I think readers easily grant Tolkien an allowance.

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Picard’s God-like choice in Star Trek: Generations

A similar situation occurs in the movie Star Trek: Generations, which doesn’t concern divine intervention per se but does involve the character of Picard having a God-like power to intervene in the story world.

The main plot of the movie revolves around the efforts of the hero, Captain Picard (played by Patrick Steward), to foil the ambitions of the villain, Soran (superbly acted by Malcolm MacDowell). Soren is obsessed with getting back to the extra-dimensional reality called the “Nexus,” from which he was forcibly yanked at the beginning of the story. His obsession stems from what he experienced in the Nexus, which is explained by the character Guinan, who was also ripped away with Soren. The Nexus, she says:

…[is] like being inside joy, as if joy were something tangible and you could wrap yourself up in it like a blanket. And never in my whole life have I been so content.

Soran’s obsession echoes the real-life quest for Satchidananda, as explored in Everyone is seeking God but most don’t know it: he seeks everlasting joy like the rest of us, making him a deeply sympathetic villain (and one of my all-time favorites). As a villain, of course, he carries this relatable quality to the extreme, shedding all moral conscience in pursuit of his goal. His extremism is demonstrated about a third of the way into the movie when he destroys a star—and thus its entire stellar system and presumably all life inhabiting its planets—in order to steer the Nexus to a place from which he can reenter. When Picard discovers that Soran is planning to destroy another star—and in the process obliterate a planet that’s home to 230 million pre-industrial humanoids—he sets off to intercept and stop the villain from launching his second star-destroying missile.

Picard initially fails in this attempt but is swept into the Nexus along with Soran, where he delights in the opportunity to live out every joy he ever dreamed about, such as having a family. In the timelessness of the Nexus, too, he learns that he can go forward or backwards in time however he wishes. All joy, it seems, will be his, just as Guinan had said. That joy, however, is tainted by the memory of what it cost, which forces Picard to realize that he could never truly enjoy an eternal existence in the Nexus.

He then learns that he can leave the Nexus if he so chooses and that he can also choose to return to any place in the universe at any time, past, present, or future.

The screenwriters thus gave Picard a truly God-like power about when and where to intervene in the lives of others. And Picard has plenty of reasons why he should deliberate about this choice.

For one thing, he’s in a place where he literally has all the time in the universe to ponder his options. Second, when we consider the whole canon of Star Trek: The Next Generation that precedes this movie moment, Picard has surely witnessed a long stream of tragedy and suffering that he could have the power to alleviate (such as everything to do with the Borg and the meaningless death of Tasha Yar in the early episode, Skin of Evil, to name just a few). And even limiting ourselves to the context of Generations alone, consider what’s already happened:

• The embattled Enterprise has crash-landed elsewhere on the planet, hurting if not killing people in the process.

• Earlier, Picard watched his chief engineer, LaForge, get kidnapped by Soren and transported to the rogue Klingon warship.

• Before that, Picard saw Soren destroy the first star and its entire stellar system, possibly destroying another civilization.

• And only a day or two previously, Picard was utterly heartbroken to learn that his brother and his beloved nephew on Earth were killed in a fire.

But, when Picard is given this choice, we’re already about 80% through the movie’s allotted screen time and the writers knew they had to move quickly to the final showdown. Thus, they have Picard choose—with literally zero deliberation—to return to the planet maybe a half-hour before Soran launches his missile. He also learns that he can enlist the help of the legendary Captain Kirk, who was caught in the Nexus at the beginning of the film, thereby changing the outcome of his previously unsuccessful confrontation.

This choice is all well and good for bringing the movie to a heroic conclusion, which includes Kirk’s noble self-sacrifice and on-screen death. To do anything else—even to have Picard stop and think for a few seconds—would have killed the movie’s tension. And sending Picard back any earlier would leave no story to tell at all. So, the writers did about the only thing they could do, and the rest of the movie is engaging enough that most viewers—especially seeing the movie for the first time in a theater with all the sound, music, and effects—didn’t even notice Picard’s uncharacteristic squandering of his power in the moment. By the time they thought about it, the movie was over and they were ready to get on with the next activity.

Written stories must withstand tighter scrutiny

Such is the advantage of the medium of film over written stores. Although well-crafted stories are often very engaging, readers always have the ability to pause, ask questions, and go back and review pages they’ve already read. In the case of divine intervention, then, or even a choice like Picard’s, authors will do well to provide at least some reason why the intervention happens when it does and not at some other time that would seem better for all the characters involved. Authors must also preserve character agency in the process.

We’ll take up these matters in Part 2. Until then, as always, your comments are welcome.

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