“For Theirs Is the Kingdom,” by Christopher Carlisle; Resource Publications
About 10 years ago, Christopher Carlisle, at one time the Episcopal chaplain for the University of Massachusetts Amherst, worked with two other area pastors to start a unique Christian service in downtown Northampton: Cathedral in the Night, an outdoor community open to anyone, in which people could discuss spiritual issues, share a meal, and come together outside the boundaries of a traditional church.
As Carlisle noted at the time, the idea was based on the tradition of Jesus preaching in the streets to everyone, regardless of wealth or lack of it, and the sense that the traditional church had strayed too far from that mission. Cathedral in the Night, which Carlisle later also brought to Greenfield, has worked to engage the homeless, the young and those disaffected by religion, in part to try to fight the causes of inequality and homelessness.
Now Carlisle has used that experience as the basis for his novel, “For Theirs Is the Kingdom,” in which Boston blue-blood lawyer Ben Cabot, questioning the values in his life, is sent to Montreal for his job.
One of the first things he sees is Luke Hale, a “young, wiry, shorthaired tough” who’s leading an outdoor religious service, reciting the Last Supper “in perfect French” and making Ben feel uncomfortable to be looking on because “for me, as for most of my peers, the church was at best irrelevant.”
But in Montreal, Ben soon finds himself bound up in other religious-related matters. He meets an Anglican bishop fiercely opposed to a proposal from city officials and developers to build a metro stop/shopping mall underneath an Anglican cathedral, and to construct a new building on the church campus, in return for an annual $4 million payment. The bishop says church trustees embrace the plan, but he sees the money corrupting the church’s spiritual mission — will Ben help him fight?
Ben also is increasingly drawn to Luke Hale and his unusual past — a former priest, he was once an apprentice to a shaman — as well as his street ministry. The plot thickens when an American rector becomes dean of the Anglican cathedral and money and greed increasingly threaten Hale’s community, which includes the homeless.
All of this will lead Ben to question the privileges that have underwritten much of his own life, including during a trip he makes to southern France.
“Carlisle offers his readers delicate meditations on interconnected themes, distributing his story into chapters reminiscent of Chopin’s études,” writes one reviewer of the novel. “[This] timely and important book helps to frame today’s social upheavals.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.