Word: priestly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...clear policy on relics, notwithstanding John Paul's private opinion on the shroud. They are to be venerated, not worshipped; valued not for their own divinity but because they turn believers' souls toward that which is truly holy. At the time of the radiocarbon dating, Peter Rinaldi, an American priest known as "Mr. Shroud" for his devotion to the linen sheet, wrote several letters to other devotees. In one he quoted St. Paul: "Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth." In another Rinaldi explicated, "If the shroud does have a meaning, it is because...
...local priest told him those scriptural commands required that he give up his worldly possessions. "I thought he was full of it," Tomes says. But he kept running across that sentence in other religious volumes. Finally Tomes gave in--and gave away his televisions, his radios, his Russian artifacts and even his bedroom. "I moved into the basement of a friend's house and slept on cardboard...
Throughout The Priest Fainted, we wonder how much the narrator really learns about herself. Her sojourn is so confused that her great waking moment seems to be when she ends her relationship with the Greek basketball player, who had been verbally and physically abusing her. Why she needed a trip to Greece and over a hundred pages to learn to stay away from abusive men is beyond the comprehension of most readers. Davidson herself seems to know that the narrator's soul-searching is not quite so deep, as when the narrator speaks about "the rubble of my year...
...difficult to be touched by this novel. The narrator may get on the reader's nerves all or most of the time, but the true story of The Priest Fainted actually revolves around the narrator's mother, who travels back to Greece to meet her adolescent best friend and to spend time with her daughter. The best part of the book is when the narrator's mother and her best friend meet again after over thirty years, and are afraid to face each other because they do not want to part with the past, when they were young, beautiful...
Davidson's first work is a good effort, and in future works, she will probably be able to cross the line between poetry and prose more gracefully. The Priest Fainted, for all its touching themes about the role mothers, daughters and women in general play in life--the book says next to nothing, and whose title is as random and empty as the novel itself...