Inspired to Write

by Mark Fowler

If you could prove God exists, should you? I don’t know who struggles most with that question, my fictional protagonist, Lowell Whaley, or me. If you can prove God, doesn’t that take the whole faith thing out of the equation?

My strongest emotional response is to stories with heroes that are essentially good. I’ve heard a mantra that the only interesting stories and characters are ones that have a dark, complex side to them. I like those stories and those characters too, but I remember back at the turn of the Millennium when the American Film Institute released a list of greatest screen heroes. I completely agreed with the top three choices: Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, Indiana Jones, and Rick Blaine from Casablanca.

Atticus Finch was not dark or conflicted. He was noble and honorable, and he made his children and neighbors more noble and honorable by example. The world has enough bad examples, I say. As a writer, I felt challenged to create characters that follow the example of Harper Lee’s protagonist. Maybe you’ve seen Christians with bumper stickers or t-shirts that ask “What Would Jesus Do?” For me, the literary gold standard is Atticus.

I’m not trying to be sacrilegious. I’m a man of faith, and my greater challenge was to create characters who have faith and aren’t afraid to use it. The pertinent characters and plot of The Called Ones rolled around in my head for decades, ever since meeting a pastor and his wife in 1987, recently banished from Indonesia by the Muslim government. At the time I was teaching at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando and taking pre-med courses at night. In my first biology class I had a professor who was a disciple of Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Both offered a light-hearted but meaningful ridicule for people of faith. Both thought modern science has disproved God.

I looked at medicine as a calling, a way to help my fellow man. If I was doing it because I thought it would please God, what good was it if He didn’t exist? I was a little shook up.

So, I read the publications about the experiments that disproved Creation. Stanley Miller conducted an experiment where he introduced a spark into a glass system containing water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen. Eureka! A small number of amino acids were made! “See!” said the kind of people who want to dismiss God. “The building blocks of life could have been made from the primordial ooze with lightning.”

I thought about that and something I had learned about years earlier as a student at the Navy’s Nuclear Power School. I had my own eureka moment. Entropy had to do with the randomness of molecules in any system, and one of the things I remembered was the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which said that the randomness of a system increases over time. I mentally applied the immutable law to Miller’s experiment. For the “No God” people to be right, the Second Law would have to be completely ignored to arrange primitive biochemical molecules into the most rudimentary life forms. By their thinking, you could leave an acorn and expect to return in a few million years and find a dining room set. By my thinking, this could be true, but only if furniture builders came along after the acorn grew into an oak.

But I was only a puny nobody. I knew God existed. I could prove it. What if I wrote a book about it? I had medical school to get through first. The book sat in the back of my mind for years.

You never know where inspiration might hit. Five years ago I read Roger Ebert’s review of the film “Chocolat”. He wrote “’Chocolat’ is about a war between the forces of paganism and Christianity, and because the pagan heroine has chocolate on her side, she wins.” Religion takes a beating in today’s popular culture, and if religious folks are honest, the actions of the religious have contributed to this general distrust. A few paragraphs later Ebert wrote “It goes without saying in such stories that organized religion is the province of prudes and hypocrites.” Good grief, isn’t it the truth, I thought. He concluded the review:

“I enjoyed the movie on its own sweet level, while musing idly on the box-office
prospects of a film in which the glowing, life-affirming local Christians prevailed
over glowering, prejudiced, puritan and bitter Druid worshippers. That'll be—as
John Wayne once said--the day.”

He didn’t know it, but he was throwing down the gauntlet, right at me. It was time to haul the missionary story from the back room of my mind, dust it off and start writing. What are the prospects for a story about Christians who aren’t prudes and hypocrites? I don’t know, but I decided to let my character speak his mind, then sit back and see what happens.


Mark Fowler is an OB/GYN in the U.S. Navy and has served since the first Reagan administration. His novel The Called Ones was a semifinalist in the ABNA contest.

Tags: Zen & the Art of Writing, Mark Fowler, Christianity, missionaries, abna, inspired to write

Reclaiming Our Forgotten History

by Rebecca Crandell

When I conceived the idea of the 7th Moon Chronicles, most of us relied on dot-matrix printers. I still have a stack of yellowing sheets with holes along the edges, but the story and its author have undergone so many transformations that it’s impossible to connect the initial concept with what exists now, on my flash drive or in my heart.

Originally, I had no idea that any place ever existed comparable with the fantasy world I intended to create—a make-believe country called Shamar and its mountainous neighbor, Lothean. Men governed Lothean in a familiar, traditional way. Shamar, however, was that scandalous place where women ran things.

One day, I happened to pick up a book I’d swiped from my older, more sophisticated sister. No toll of phantasmal bells warned me of the momentous change this book would bring to my life.

Moon, Moon, by Anne Kent Rush, is a collection of scientific facts about the moon plus moon-myths from around the world. It slants toward the unique relationship women have had with the moon throughout the ages.

As a girl whose father openly displayed disgust toward females, I found this celebration of women mind-altering. Learning about historical places and times where women were revered as the superior sex made me energized and excited.

I had no idea where Moon, Moon would ultimately take me. I often wonder if I would have started my quest had I known how much work it would take, how long, how much of me it would consume, and how dramatically I would be changed.

Moon, Moon introduced me to many firsts: historic paintings and figurines, including the so-called “Venus of Willendorf.” A chapter about symbols changed the way I looked at common designs and creatures. The circle…the crescent…the serpent… the spider. And, of course, the moon.

Rush’s book also delved into the origins of common holidays and religious beliefs. This proved shocking yet enlightening. For the first time, but far from the last, I read about the “year-god.”

In a chapter titled The Mother of the World, I learned of the belief that Mother Goddess provided everything needed by mortals. Celebrated as the source of opposites, She held titles of bride and lover as well as mother. She gave birth to a son who later became her lover, and whom she offered in sacrifice. Necessary for the world’s fertility, this youthful year-god had to die in winter and be resurrected in the spring. “One man a year must be sacrificed to honor her source,” is how Anne Kent Rush words it. “From his blood, the blood of a king, all men will be guaranteed fertility.” The similarity to the later death and resurrection of Christ struck me. I wondered if this older religion had influenced Christianity, perhaps subliminally.

Moon, Moon described moon/women beliefs among Africans, Native Americans, South Americans, Chinese, Anatolians, Egyptians, Celts, and…the Cretans.

I next found the wonderful book Dawn of the Gods, by Jacquetta Hawkes, and embraced the author’s well-considered theories that women ruled Bronze Age Crete, property passed from mother to daughter, and peaceful prosperity reigned. Even slaves enjoyed high status. Here was Shamar, my imaginary country, but real.

Books seemed to magically appear as I became ready for them. From Hawkes I moved on to Robert Graves. The Greek Myths embellished tales of the year-god along with other myths far older and surprisingly different than those of Classical Greece.

Over a span of thirty years, I have read hundreds of books, fiction and non-fiction, archaeological to theoretical. Truly, unearthing the past is a never-ending task.

As I absorbed knowledge, my mind worked on the story I wanted to tell. I abandoned Shamar and Lothean for Crete and the Pelasgiotis, that part of Greece later to be called the Peloponnesus.

What happened to Crete? What caused its successful, unique culture to vanish?

No one knows nor ever will…not definitively. Archaeologists once believed the terrible Theran volcano destroyed Crete. Not so. Crete survived. But it was changed.

Research offered tangible ideas upon which I could build, and the result is my fictional version of what might have happened on Crete. Even as I wrote, however, the final goal transformed.

Why insert fantasy into what could have been straight historical fiction?

The decision to leave pure realism and step into magic grew from a question many have pondered: “What would we be like today if that archetypal power on Crete had lived on?” Since western society is largely a result of Classical Greece, this question is relevant. Before Classical Greece could exist, the Bronze Age culture on Crete had to die, for Crete was a mighty force in the Mediterranean when Athens, the seat of Classical Greece, was a collection of mud huts.

I have long imagined our world as it might be now if Crete had been the dominant ancient influence upon us. I wanted others to imagine the world that “could have been.”

As I constructed my chronicles, I thought about women as I know them to be—not as vampire killers, Lara Croft, samurai-sword wielding murderers, or at the other extreme, helpless victims, but real beings who operate from quiet strength, and in some cases, quiet desperation. Those are “my” women. I am one with them and one of them. I want to speak to women who spend busy normal days with work, family and community, yet who suffer, as I did, hidden wounds and damaged spirits, and especially to those who don’t even recognize or acknowledge such feelings, but who are weighted down by them. I want my stories to resonate especially with these women.

What I have written is neither a feminist manifesto, nor judgment toward current religions, which have earned legitimate places in our hearts and are here to stay. My protagonists are “real, ordinary women” caught up in and changed by extraordinary circumstances. They are helped and hindered in their journeys by “real, ordinary men,” as I attempt to show the symbiotic triangle of earth, men, and women—each part equally imperative.

I would love it if my stories inspired women to learn about their “forgotten” history, return it to the open and celebrate it, much as African Americans now celebrate their “roots” and once-suppressed history. Women ought to know that once upon a time, places existed where women “ran things,” and ran them very well, indeed.

Worship of the Goddess lasted thousands upon thousands of years before it was suppressed. It claimed at least that many devoted followers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if appreciation and recognition of this venerable, complex belief-system, which surely left its subtle mark on our present consciousness, took its rightful place again, alongside other religions of the world?

Rebecca Crandell writes non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, and owns a home-based business specializing in editing. She has studied ancient matrilineal societies especially in the Mediterranean area, and has authored a speculative fictional series based upon those cultures. An excerpt from the fourth book in the series was a semifinalist in the ABNA competition. Her website is 7thmoonchronicles.googlepages.com.

Tags: Rebecca Crandell, 7th Moon Chronicles, Goddess Worship, abna, Zen & the Art of Writing