Word: communion
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...learned. And grew up, calamitously and against long odds. Both achievements shine in a graceful sentence early in her story, as she explains her communion with unresponsive fish: "I had patience, the sort I suspect God has with people like me." Patience with her own demons came slowly. As a young woman, "a booze-sucking, pill-popping, dope-slamming druggie," she turned 18 in jail, jugged on a possession charge. She seems not to have known Grand-Papa Ernest well (and would say, no, no, not that Hemingway family, not me), though later she adored his younger brother, her great...
...sojourn in Spain is recounted with panache and subtlety in Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Seville Communion (Harcourt Brace; 375 pages; $24), one of those infrequent whodunits that transcend the genre. The investigating priest is soon dipping into an olla podrida involving cupidity, lost love and sudden deaths at the church that may or may not have been accidents. Among those defending the church is the imperious noblewoman Macarena Bruner, whose Carmen-like beauty disturbs the celibate priest. She's the estranged wife of a banker who faces financial ruin if a sneaky real estate deal that would raze...
...veteran TV journalist, Perez-Reverte is Spain's most popular author--understandably so. Besides its page-turning pace and vivid characters, The Seville Communion sensitively explores the lonely quest of priests and nuns for assurance in a world where God's voice is heard barely as a whisper, if at all. The novel's evocation of Seville's magic may well inspire readers to order round-trip tickets to an ancient city redolent of jasmine and orange blossoms...
...given 20th century humanity's ravenous hunger for literal certainty. Transubstantiation is well and good, but the tantalizing notion that the red spatters on linen are Christ's actual blood, rather than wine as blood, and that the imprint on cloth was left by the resurrected body, not a Communion wafer, is intoxicating...
...Another diversion: The religious ruckus brewing over whether the President, as a Baptist, should have taken communion back in Africa. New York?s Cardinal John O?Connor said it was wrong, ?however well-intentioned,? for a priest to give Clinton the sacrament. Any Christian can take part, replied the White House. But such a no-win debate took them about as far off-message as it was possible to be -- and the week has only just begun...