Last year I worked hard to consolidate the theme of a story I want to write. At first it was simple. A Carmelite nun, after seven years of contemplative retreat, considers that she has reached the unitive state with God and that the monastery will give her nothing more. She leaves the convent and goes out into the world with only one purpose, to find the way of no self. She claims to have found it and adds that Christianity has misunderstood the Christ revelation. However, she does not renounce Mass and the Eucharist. The novel really begins when a Venezuelan detective, exiled, who came to the United States to support the case of a state prosecutor, against some generals and head of government in Venezuela. Everything hinges on the extradition of a former intelligence chief of the Venezuelan military apparatus. The extradition is frustrated. The detective is left as an uncomfortable agent and the prosecutor asks to be neutralized, to be assigned false intelligence tasks. He is abandoned in Pittsburgh, where he is involved with a Jesuit priest who plays the role of devil’s advocate for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. He wants to gather information about some contemplative priests who have an active movement, which according to the father’s criteria, “are de-Christianizing Christianity” “they have diluted it in the syncretism of the new era, Christ is universal, he is Krisna, Buddha, Olodumare. Christ is yoga and pilates, is resurrection, reincarnation, karma, forgiveness, nirvana.

All this is even more complex as the plot weaves, for through the study and reconstruction of the life of a former Carmelite nun, too, the detective and the Jesuit priest will navigate the patristic tradition of the church, the former nun having returned to the principles of the Council of Nicaea. On the other hand, a bishop of the church, together with a mediatic Jungian psychologist, launch a crusade that captivates those who demand a conservative position from the church and denounce the pope as a puppet of world progressivism. The bishop does not agree with many of the approaches of the Jungian but tries to manipulate him, as the psychologist has a large network of followers. Then he is faced with a dilemma when the Jungian compels him to attract young people who have abandoned the churches by offering them an easy mystical path of faith: “we must not put more obstacles to those who seek a sense of faith, let’s use ayahuasca and we will fill the churches: this is a flawless path to ecstasy and Grace”

As you can see, the novel is becoming complex as the times in which we live. I have spent time and resources, hours of immersion in theological readings, research, knowledge about Christianity and its denominations in North America, research on the Christian mystics of the last century, Merton, Keating, Roberts and the groups of contemplatives that were formed with them. And then all the derivations and interpretations of their followers, many of them drifting towards Gnosticism, pantheism and panentheism.

At this point I stop and say, how will I be able to carry out this project without it ending up being a bombastic pretension of an intimidating density that fails and falls, full of ideas that suffocate the actions of the story? Now I’m tired and I’m thinking more about a volume of short stories and the traps I set for myself not to write, nothing at all.