I am in the midst of deciding which of my book concepts to take up for the rest of the summer.  The following is a tentative beginning and mock up for one of my options: a fictional, semi-autobiographic, novel told with tinges of allegory.

Would you want to read more? Let me know!

Purifying Grace: The Making of A Woman

For my beloved down here, whose love
Draws me ever closer to my Beloved up there

Part 1: Beginnings

“I was born in the way of truth: though my childhood was unaware of the greatness of the benefit, I knew it when trial came.”

~ St. Ephrem the Syrian

Chapter 1: At Birth, A Name

SHE was born precisely at the stroke of three on a warmer than average autumnal morning.  Nothing about time would ever be precise for her again.

There is a quality about birth that will always remain a great mystery for us humans; even for the mothers who have been through labor, or the fathers who stood present and in awe, or the doctors who have aided in hundreds or thousands of deliveries.  No matter how many births we witness, or how many children a woman may carry to term, we will never be able to remember our own entrance into this world.  It is the fundamental event of our earthen bound lives and yet we can only learn of it through legend.  How strange a fate to know of our beginnings merely second hand.

She was no different than your average little newborn of medium length and less than memorable weight.  Overcome by her timely entrance and subsequent wails she was quite ready for a nap. Her parents, tired themselves from a long night of labor, were quite predictably also ready for some rest – yet their joy at the arrival of a person much hoped for and long waited upon compelled them to stay awake for the time being.  As they clung together in that moment the early threads of a family were woven; threads that would one day form a beauteous tapestry worthy of hanging in the grandest of halls.

So engrossed were her parents in the birth of their little family that they hardly heard the doctor enter their plain little room to inquire, “Well now, what is her name?”

What a heavy laden question!  The burden to name another rests all too easily upon the apathetic shoulders of our thoughtless generation.

There was – for a brief moment – uncertainty in the air.  In those days the methods of determining gender were not as advanced and these parents had been prepared to have a little boy.

They had no name to give.

At long last, after gazing at the little miracle she held in her arms, the girl’s mother smiled and said, “Pure.  We will call her Pure.”

Her father nodded and then added, “Her middle name should be Grace, after some of our bravest ancestors long since gone.”

Looking lovingly into each others’ eyes as only newly crowned parents can, they knew that they had found their daughter’s preordained name.

And so it was that the journey of Pure Grace in this strange place called earth ever so simply began.

This piece is cross-posted at my Tumblr blog.