Seeing the Holy Ghost in a Glint of Sunlight on the Water

Religious fiction aims for a sweet spot that does not exist

A man might see the Holy Ghost in a glint of sunlight on the water.

What might the world make of such an experience?

They might say that it was a moment of emotional hysteria brought on by some great want or fear, some sadness or some hope.

They might say that it was a physical aberration brought on by an aneurysm, a tumor, a birth defect, or a psychedelic drug.

They might say that it is a claim made by a charlatan seeking his fifteen minutes of internet fame.

If they were of a religious disposition, however, they might say that it is an operation of grace in the world. They might say that it was indeed the Holy Ghost appearing to the man as He did to the apostles on Pentecost, or to St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or whatever is the equivalent event in their own faith.

But they could also say that all of the merely physical explanations of the event are plausible as well, including charlatanry. In other words, even if one accepts the possibility of the apparition of the Holy Ghost, one does not have to accept every claimed instance as true.

I raise this because of a conversation in a recent staff meeting at Catholic Reads, where I am an editor, about a certain Catholic literary imprint, whose requirements have left many authors confused. And indeed, I am one of those confused authors, for the contest-losing short story that I published here last week was one I originally wrote for a contest sponsored by this imprint. It isn’t the kind of story I generally write, but I was intrigued by the luminous vagueness of the entrance criteria and so decided to see what I could do to produce a story of that kind.

At the heart of this imprint’s statement of requirements is that they are looking for works that show the operation of grace in ordinary lives. The part that is hard to understand is how they want this effect to be achieved. What literary styles and techniques do they wish to see used in order to show that operation of grace? They are, it seems, particularly interested in literary realism. But realism is a particularly difficult style in which to make this work.

The case of the man who sees the Holy Ghost in a glint of sunlight on the water is a simple example of grace at work in the world. Or at least, that is one explanation of it. It could also be an example of a man having a psychotic episode or pulling a confidence trick. The literary question is, how does the author make it plain which of these things they are writing about?

Of course, the author may not want to make that clear. Their subject may be the very doubt which attends all such claims. Thus, in Mariette in Ecstasy, Ron Hansen shows us a group of people trying to judge the case of a young nun apparently experiencing ecstatic visions. Whether these visions are true encounters with the divine or some form of hysteria or pretense is never made clear. The book is not about that, but about the problem of trying to decide what to believe concerning what is essentially an untestable claim.

But suppose that an author did want to write a story about an encounter with the divine. Suppose they wanted to explore what such an encounter might be like for the person experiencing it, and thus do not want the reader to have any doubt that that is what is occurring. How would they go about achieving this?

Let’s look first at the purely realist style of storytelling. In this style, the author is expected to report everyday things. They can say,

Dan saw a glint of light on the water.

This is what happened in the material world with which realism deals. But the reader is not likely to intuit from this that Dan has seen the Holy Ghost.

The author could say this outright:

Dan saw the Holy Ghost in a glint of sunlight on the water.

But how exactly is the reader supposed to take this? Do they take the author literally at their word? Do they think that the author is being ironic? Do they think he is giving a hyperbolic description of an emotional or aesthetic experience? Do they think that the author is reporting Dan’s mental state rather than claiming that he actually saw the Holy Ghost? Or does the reader feel that the author is expecting them to believe that sane people actually do see the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water?

But whether the readers accept either of these lines as statements of fact or not, neither seems to capture the nature of the experience. We are not with Dan in his numinous moment, seeing as he sees, feeling as he feels. We are stood back observing him analytically, wondering what is wrong with him. We certainly learn nothing about what it is like to see the Holy Ghost in a glint of sunlight on the water.

Another alternative is to set up the reader’s expectations over the course of the narrative so that when the moment comes that Dan sees the Holy Ghost in a glint of sunlight on the water, the reader immediately recognizes the Holy Ghost in that glint of sunlight without the author ever having to state it explicitly.

That would be a grand thing to pull off, to be sure. But accomplishing it in a story that otherwise obeys the conventions of realist fiction is difficult. Realism, by its nature, deals with natural phenomena in the visible world. How is one supposed to compose a story out of such ingredients that, without previously making any explicit mention of the spiritual world, makes the reader suddenly and inevitably see the Holy Spirit in the glint of sunlight on the water?

Some readers might, of course, if they have brought to their reading of the work spiritual beliefs and the predilection to see the operation of grace in everyday things. But in that case, the effect is only likely to occur for those kinds of readers in particular. The rest of the reading public is likely either to be confused or to assume that the reference is to a purely natural occurrence.

An alternative is for the writer to set their story in what Tolkien called a subcreated world with its own laws and its own conventions of reality. The trick here is to separate the story from the ordinary world in which the reader lives so that they are willing to accept and recognize that the story world operates by a different set of laws, and to accept those laws as fact for the duration of the story. The advantage of such a story world is that it allows the writer to posit the possibility of the Holy Ghost being seen in the glint of sunlight on the water, so that when the reader gets to that scene, they instantly know and accept what is occurring. Even if they doubt the existence of God in the real world, they can readily accept the existence of the Holy Ghost in the story world, and thus focus not on the question of whether the vision is real but on the question of what it is like to have such a vision.

Establishing such a story world generally requires some kind of separation from the normal world, enough of a rupture with the here and now that the reader recognizes that they are somewhere else and can accept that here, different rules apply.

There is a stand-alone story in The Wind in the Willows in which Kenneth Graham tells of a meeting with the Holy Spirit. The story is so structured that the reader has not the slightest doubt that this is what is occurring, or that, in the world of the Riverbank, it could occur, and thus the story can focus on the nature of such a meeting. Rat and Mole are looking along the Riverbank for a missing baby otter when they hear a pipe playing music that strikes them to the heart. They follow it and find the baby otter lying asleep between the feet of their god.

Perhaps he [Mole] would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”

The god here is not the Holy Ghost, or, at least, not within the subcreated world of the Riverbank where Rat and Mole reside. Their god is Pan, of course. But the nature of their meeting, of their recognition of the divine, of the feelings they experience in his presence, are not specific to Pan. Would they be different at all from the experience of the man who saw the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water? Probably not. But by telling the story of Mole encountering Pan in the moment of dawn, Kenneth Graham can capture the nature of the encounter of a man who sees the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water without any confusion about which of the possible interpretations of this event the reader might consider if the story were told in the normal world.

You don’t have to tell a tale about animals to achieve this effect. In my contest-losing story, Caedda’s Cross, I devised the same kind of subcreated world using human beings, achieving separation from contemporary reality by placing them in a time and place in which it would be very natural for people to believe that they had seen the Holy Spirit in the glint of sunlight on the water. I told the story of two Christian Anglo-Saxon warriors, brothers, fleeing from a great military defeat, who meet Christ in disguise on a mountain pass.

The setting is in itself a natural one, but as my warrior brothers flee, I begin the work of separating their world from ours to create the subcreated world in which the reader will not question the nature of the encounter to come. The first step is to establish how different their beliefs are from ours, not religiously but in the code they live by. One brother is wounded, but far from pitying him, the other brother is jealous of the wound, which he sees as a mark of honor. He is ashamed that he himself has fled from the battlefield unwounded.

I then introduce a supernatural element by having one of the brothers declare that he hears the voices of the dead on the wind. This then leads to the encounter with a stone carver called Oswine the Maker. Oswine is a name formed from two Anglo-Saxon words. Os and wine, which mean God and friend, respectively. So friend of God, or, in this case, friend and God. And God, of course, is the maker. While most readers won’t know the etymology of the name Oswine, this signal is still clear enough, even if it is not yet fully resolved, as it is not yet fully resolved for the characters.

They meet with Oswine as the sun is setting, but through their time together, as they prepare a meal, eat, and sing songs to each other, the sun remains stationary on the horizon. This is, of course, another sign that the encounter is supernatural in origin. But people familiar with Christianity will also recognize a reference to the sun standing still in the sky in the book of Joshua and to the miracle of the sun at Fatima.

Oswine offers them fish to eat, but no matter how much they eat, they cannot finish their meal, a reference to the feeding of the five thousand. He offers them water, which tastes like wine, a reference to the wedding feast at Cana. Finally, he blesses a loaf of bread, breaks it, and shares it with them, and they recognize him, a reference to holy communion and to the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

All this, however, is couched in terms of the Anglo-Saxon gospel poem, the Heliand, which portrays Christ as a chieftain and the disciples as his warrior band, thus setting the God of the story apart from the modern notion of God, albeit not nearly so far apart as Kenneth Graham does in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Far enough, though, I believe, that no reader is going to wonder if Caedda is having a psychotic break or an aneurysm when he has his great moment of recognition and declares, “Lord, you are the Heliand, the King of Kings.”

But there is a downside to this method if your aim is not simply to describe a numinous experience, but to assert that it is what you are claiming it to be. In the context of Caedda’s Cross, the reader is not apt to doubt that Caedda has experienced a meeting with Christ. But Caedda exists in a subcreated world in which such things are credible by the rules of the story. Acknowledging that Caedda has met Christ in that subcreated world does not require the reader to believe that when a man sees the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water in this modern world of ours, that he has indeed seen the Holy Ghost and is not having an overdose or a psychotic break.

The point of realism in a story is precisely to assert that everything in the story is real, possible, and in proportion to its weight in the lives of ordinary, everyday people. A story of a rat and a mole meeting Pan on the Riverbank, or of an Anglo-Saxon warrior meeting the Heliand, the King of Kings, on a cold mountaintop while the sun sits motionless on the horizon, does not assert or require the reader’s assent that the Holy Ghost may appear in a glint of sunlight on the water in the year of grace 2026. If that is the writer’s aim, to make a truth claim rather than simply to describe an experience, then it would seem that nothing but realism will do.

And yet the problem remains: how does one assert and cause the reader to accept the truth claim you are making without departing from the conventions of realism? If you want to describe the nature of the numinous experience without the reader’s doubts clouding the question, you can establish a secondary world in which the possibility of an encounter with the divine is established by the rules of that world, and then you can focus your story on the nature of that experience alone. But if you want to set that experience in this world using only the techniques of realist fiction, you are going to struggle mightily with the reader’s doubts.

You can certainly deal with matters of religious faith in realist fiction, as Evelyn Waugh does in Brideshead Revisited. But nothing in Brideshead requires that the reader accept the truth of the Catholicism that its characters believe and practice. Indeed, by using the skeptical Charles Ryder as narrator, Waugh steps the reader back from the nature of the Flytes’ religious experience, and when Charles converts at the end of the book, it happens off the page and is referred to only by a single, simple religious gesture, which is reported without emotion and without any kind of numinous experience. This approach makes no attempt to convincingly assert the truth claim that the Holy Ghost could appear in the glint of sunlight on the water in 2026.

Establishing any general truth proposition in fiction is difficult, even for the things of Earth, which are visible, let alone the things of Heaven, which are invisible. Stories are particular. They present one incident or, at best, a small cluster of incidents, and much as some academics like to see in an individual character or an individual incident a condemnation of entire social systems, industries, and empires, one incident, particularly a fictional one, does not really prove anything to anyone who is not already a believer.

How much more difficult is it then to assert a truth proposition about the things of heaven, which are invisible? Any such claim is contrary to common experience and therefore unlikely to trouble the doubt or disbelief of the average reader. This is why preachy fiction does not work. It convinces no one who is not already a believer. It is not only preaching to the choir; it is preaching to that subset of the choir that feels the need to be constantly affirmed in their faith by hearing preached that which they already believe.

And this is perhaps the crux of the problem. The choir that is desperate to be preached to is not interested in subtlety and suggestion. They want an outright and unambiguous statement of creedal loyalty. Conversely, for the reader who is not creedally aligned with the author, or even one who is but does not want their nose rubbed in the creed every time they pick up a novel, no amount of subtlety is subtle enough, and any subtle suggestion that escapes their vigilance will be far too subtle to sway their opinion on whether or not our man really saw the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water.

Too many writers and too many imprints, I fear, are trying to find a subtle sweet spot between two opposing poles of desire: for explicit creedal affirmation on the one hand and for firm creedal neutrality on the other. But that is not the sweet spot where both sides meet. It is the barren ground that both sides shun. In a society that was pervasively culturally religious, such a sweet spot might have existed. But in a society polarized by religious views, or anything else, there is no sweet spot in the middle. Thus any attempt to ask for work that sits in that spot is going to be hard for writers to get their heads around. You cain’t get there from here.

A writer who wishes only to capture the nature of the experience of seeing the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water can do so by creating a subcreated world in which the truth proposition that the Holy Ghost exists and appears to people in this way can be assumed by the rules of the subcreation, and thus accepted by every reader regardless of their opinions about the existence or behaviour of the Holy Ghost in this world. But if the aim is to assert a truth proposition about the operation of grace in this world, the literary tools are limited. The aim becomes ineffable and therefore indescribable. This is perhaps why this particular imprint has struggled to make clear to authors what kind of work it is looking for. But if this is the case, I fancy that it is not alone in this difficulty.

Indeed, one might say that this is the problem for all religious fiction, for all fiction of ideas and beliefs really. Religious communities, and other forms of association, are formed around their doctrines, their sacraments, and their shared stories. With their sacraments and shared stories, they turn inward. It is their doctrines that they project out into the world. It is their doctrines that give meaning and credibility to their sacraments and context to their shared stories. But stories are too particular to be good vehicles of doctrine, and no one voluntarily reads a story that leads with someone else’s doctrine. You can say that the glint of sunlight on the water that Dan saw was the Holy Ghost. But who will believe you except those already desperate to believe?

What you can do is describe what it is like, in particular, to have a religious experience. Regardless of the correctness of any particular religious doctrine, human beings do have religious experiences, experiences that seem not to belong or be entirely explicable within this mortal frame. This is a common and widespread phenomenon, and thus many people are interested in what such an experience is like, both those who have had one and wonder if theirs is like other people’s, and those who have not had one and wonder what all the fuss is about.

This is the proper subject of fiction, the thing that fiction does better than anything else. This is the universal thing, the thing that speaks to the whole world and asks that most poignant question of the human mind: do you see it too? But while this kind of story may have widespread appeal, it will not win you much in the way of denominational brownie points. This is the cross you must learn to bear if you want to frame yourself as a denominational author, or a denominational publisher. It is why you may struggle to express exactly what kind of books you write, or what kind of books you want to publish.

Of course, you can write about the experience of seeing the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water in a modern realist novel. But your character, being a modern realist man, should properly have doubts about the nature of the experience they are having. Even if they are a believing Christian, they will still wonder, am I really in the presence of the Holy Ghost, or am I having an aneurysm? Have I breathed in too much incense and am now letting my imagination run away with me?

And the reader, certainly, will have doubts, doubts not only about whether it is possible to see the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water, but also doubts about whether the author intends them to believe that Dan has really seen the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water, or whether he intends them to believe that the character is actually having an aneurysm or is suffering from nervous exhaustion or a severe blow to the head.

These doubts cannot be avoided, for they are the doubts that belong to the age and the place and the style with which the tale is being told. Storytelling depends on the totality of the reader’s experience, knowledge, and expectations, and the author cannot arbitrarily demand that the reader interpret the scene placed before them in any way other than what flows from their experience, knowledge, and expectations. Storytelling is a fundamentally social art. The storyteller must work within the framework of social expectations that belong to their time and place, or else create a subcreated world in which different expectations apply.

The framework of expectations that belongs to our current time and place says that in a realist novel, the claim that a man has seen the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water is subject to all the doubts that I have enumerated above, and that the notion that he has actually seen the Holy Ghost is to be dismissed almost out of hand. It is vain, therefore, for a publisher, however sincere their motives, to ask authors to produce a kind of work which it is not possible in their time and place and culture to produce by the method specified.

You can, certainly, tell the story of a man who sees the Holy Ghost in the glint of sunlight on the water, but you must do so by the methods that the culture of our time makes available to you. Religious publishers and religious writers should take note. So, for that matter, should any publisher and any writer that wants to use fiction to advance truth propositions rather than to create experiences.

But then again, this may not be what the imprint in question is looking for. I am still not certain quite what that is, and it appears I am not alone in my puzzlement. But it is relevant, certainly, to the attempt to produce a Christian or Catholic literary revival, or any other kind of literary revival, in the current age. In an age that thrives on abstraction, we are purveyors of the concrete. In an age that thrives on ideas, we are the purveyors of experiences. But our trade is a valuable trade all the same, and we will thrive in the end by practicing our own trade and leaving philosophy to the philosophers, politics to the politicians, and theology to the theologians.