Another look …

… Revisiting Ron Hansen’s “Mariette in Ecstasy” 25 Years Later. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Good Catholic storytelling has always been corporal: messy, strange, steeped in the sins of real people. I’m not talking about church thrift-store fare, devotional tales with covers of sunrises over mountains. Consider the profane piety of the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The lust of Obadiah Elihue Parker in Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back.” The scarred and scorned bodies searching for grace in the novels of Toni Morrison. Catholics go for crucifixes over crosses. They want their Mass wine in a chalice, not Solo cups. The Eucharist is not a symbol; it is substance.