Book #4

Just finished the next book in The Hawk and the Dove series by Penelope Wilcock. She continues with deep transformations in her characters and starts on Ash Wednesday , writing a chapter a day, to end at Easter. She continues to show the theme of forgiveness in this Benedictine monastery who has a new Abbot. It is not easy in the story. It is not easy in life. 

Walter Wangerin said in this Q&A with  his grad students: The Teacher Responds to His Students , (  my students copied in this sentence in their   Commonplace Books.. we were in   Medieval and Renaissance history period and literature). A cathedral makes the heart soar and good writing should too. 

Good description is like Chartre Cathedral: it makes the reader move forward, move, you see, in the direction (narratively and emotionally and interpretively) that the author intends. 

THE FORTIETH DAY from The Hardest Thing to Do

      In the delirious sunshine of the day, birds feverishly gathered twigs for nests taking shape in every hedgerow. The wood dovs, who had their dovecote supplied, occupied their hours in ostentatious courtship, throats puffed to the huge maximum, sidling and bowing in pursuit of desirable favors. 

     The primroses had all opened , and the wildflowers were scattered among the trees above the burial ground, where also wild daffodils had advanced to full bud. 

     Over the bare hilltops of the moor, the lark flung into the wide arch of the sky , a dizzy, exulting blue. Brother Stephen, on his way up the farm track to look over his lambs before the Palm Sunday liturgies began, paused for a moment just to feel the day. "O God, it's warm,:

he whispered . "Deo gratias. Thank you, thank you, thank you."

     On this one day the wind dropped, and it felt like a different world. Everything, even summer, 

seemed possible. Hope had woken.