Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Love, Joy, Feminism

Home
Nonreligious
Voice in the Wind: Julia Cares, Y’all

Voice in the Wind: Julia Cares, Y’all

Last updated on: December 27, 2017 at 8:02 am by Libby Anne

Voice in the Wind: Julia Cares, Y’all 2017-12-27T08:02:36-04:00 Libby Anne

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Voice in the Wind, pp. 408-410, 415-17

Decimus’ illness is getting worse, despite his visits to the Temple of Asclepius, and time spent among snakes, their bodies slithering over his. So far so good—Asclepius was the god of healing, and his symbol was a snake. But then things get weird.

Columbella, a spiritualist, convinced Phoebe that physicians shouldn’t be trusted; she claimed that they used patients they couldn’t cure to perfect new methods of treatment. Columbella said nonscientific methods would restore Decimus’ vitality and recommended her own potions and herbs, which had been passed down through the centuries. Health, Columella insisted, was a matter of balance with nature.

Decimus drank her foul brews and ate the strange bitter herbs she prescribed, but they didn’t harmonize and balance the energies within his body as Columella claimed they would.

This feels oddly like something an evangelical might write about the present. I mean, did the Romans even have a concept of “scientific” and “nonscientific” methods? I don’t know the answer to that offhand, but what Rivers has written here sounds close enough to how an evangelical would describe modern New Ageism that I’m somewhat skeptical of her ability to history here.

You know the verse in Ecclesiastes that says there is “nothing new under the sun”? I think evangelicals like Rivers sometimes assume that modern things can just be transplanted like that, that the things we have today must have existed in parallel in the past. Or maybe it’s just lazy writing. Consider Decimus’ disgust for homosexuality, a disgust expressed in ways that seem strongly modern.

I’m going to skip ahead for just a moment and bring you something that I think fits just as well in the discussion here. You’ll see why in a moment—it touches on what I was saying about transplanting things from the present in the past. After a visit to Julia (which I’ll cover next week), Atretes leaves to walk home alone, angry (we’ll get to that). Hadassah follows him around. She follows him while he walks all around the city, still angry. He walks into the empty stadium, in the middle of the night.

The little Jewess stood beside him.

“We both serve Julia, don’t we?” he said, but she didn’t answer.

This has been asked before in the comments—but really? Why do we constantly need the word Jewess?

As they talk, Hadassah begins philosophizing. Because of course she does. “Maybe death is the only freedom,” Atretes says. “It’s not the only freedom, Atretes,” she says. “What other freedom is there for a man like me?” he asks. “The freedom God gives,” she says. And so on.

“So I should become a Jew?” he said sardonically.

“I’m a Christian.”

He let out his breath sharply, staring down at her as though she were a doc that had suddenly sprouted horns. Christians were fodder to the arena. … Christians were fed to the lions because it was a shameful thing, reserved for the worst criminals and the lowest cowards.

We’ve been over this. At this time, most people wouldn’t have known what Christians were. They were just one more sect, and not a large one at that. Widespread persecutions of Christians across the Roman Empire didn’t begin for another decade or so, and even those were often regional, or sprang up at specific moments (such as the famed Diocletian persecution). Yes, Christians were often persecuted during the Roman Empire. But Rivers is engaging in Christian mythology, not historical understanding of those moments.

Atretes wonders at Hadassah telling him that she is a Christian, and thinks momentarily about Julia’s contempt for Christians (it would be nice to have actually been shown that), and ponders that at a word from him, Hadassah could be sent to the arena to be torn apart by lions (what’s with the lion fixation, seriously). But Hadassah, worried about Atretes’ upcoming games, tells him that this may be her last chance to talk to him. At that she launches into an attempt to evangelize him.

“Please listen,” she pleaded. “God lives, Atretes. Turn to him. Cry out to him and he’ll answer. Ask Jesus to come into your heart.”

“Jesus. Who’s Jesus?”

WTF. Early Christians wouldn’t have told people to “ask Jesus to come into your heart.” That phrasing is a modern invention. This is a complaint I have with historical fiction in general, a complaint that goes far beyond Rivers’ writing. You can’t just transplant people or ideas from today into the past and assume that that is how people and ideas were back then. It’s simply not. And yet historical fiction authors do this repeatedly.

Hadassah never has the time to finish the thought. Instead, she and Atretes are interrupted by guards. It’s almost dawn, and Atretes turns to go.

When he reached the opening into the corridor that led to the stairs out, he looked back. Hadassah was still standing there.

He’d never looked into such eyes before, eyes so full of compassion that they pierced through the hardness of his heart.

We are constantly told of Hadassah’s compassion, but does she show compassion? Sure, she’s tended Julia when she’s been ill, but her reaction to Julia’s abortion was certainly not compassionate. She knew at that point that Caius was abusive. She still told Julia off and judged her up and down for having an abortion. She’s judged Julia for much more than that, too.

This is a problem that goes deeper than this book. We need to have a wider discussion about what compassion means, in the evangelical world. I think there’s a definitional disagreements bout what this concept means taking place.

Now we return to Decimus’ suffering and illness. Marcus takes Decimus to the baths to no effect. Julia visits Decimus repeatedly, trying to help him cure himself by tapping “into the resources of his own imagination and mind” on Calabah’s suggestion.

First, let’s be clear right here that Julia cares about her father.

Throughout this book we’ve seen both Decimus and Phoebe and, hell, even Marcus act as though Julia doesn’t love her father. But we’ve also seen, in several points, indications that Julia does love her father. Does Rivers think Julia doesn’t love her father, even as she writes in bits suggesting, contrarily, that she does? Or is Rivers writing Decimus, Phoebe, and Marcus as obtuse, and judgmental toward Julia, even though she seems to see these characters as the “good” characters in contrast to Julia’s selfish foil?

Second, even here Decimus can’t take her at face value. Julia, remember, is trying to help his father cure himself by tapping into “the resources of his own imagination and mind.” Decimus thinks the whole exercise ludicrous from the beginning—if he could will himself to be well, he would have done it already, he reasons. And so we get this:

With each visit, he saw in his daughter disappointment and subtle accusation and knew she believed he lacked whatever “faith” it took to cure himself.

Does Decimus know that Julia is blaming him for lacking the faith to cure himself? Or is that just his biased read, once yet again, of a daughter the has never taken the time to try to understand? This is told from Decimus’ perspective, and we already know that these perspectives are not infallible—but does Rivers know that? We are not given Julia’s perspective or thoughts.

And so we have Julia trying to help her father in the only way she knows how. And we have her father responding by reading judgement onto her, choosing to assume that she has taken his measure and found him lacking. Julia never catches a break.

“Try this,” she said one day and put a carnelian crystal around his neck. “It’s very special to me. It vibrates in harmony with the energy patterns of the gods, and if you can give yourself up to those vibrations, you will receive healing.” Her voice was cool, but then her eyes flooded and she lay across his chest weeping. “Oh, Papa…”

Let no one ever suggest that Julia does not care about her father.

Her visits became less frequent and brief after that.

Decimus cast no blame upon her. A dying man was depressing company for a beautiful young woman who was so full of life. Perhaps he had become a grim reminder of her own mortality.

Rivers makes it seem as though Decimus is not reading negative reasons onto Julia for not coming, but he’s still reading his own ideas about her onto her. He assumes that she keeps away because “a dying man is depressing company” and because “he had become a grim reminder of her own mortality”—but what if she is simply so stricken by her grief that seeing her father wasting away and being unable to help him has become too painful to see? Even here, Decimus assumes he knows his daughter when we already know he does not.

As the illness progresses Decimus sometimes contemplates suicide, but he is afraid of death: “what [he] saw ahead was darkness, obscurity, an eternity of nothingness, and that terrified him.” Unsurprisingly, this is an evangelical interpretation of how the unsaved view death. It also seems predicated on the assumption that Decimus does not believe in any gods. Why doesn’t Decimus at least have a philosophy? There is no exploration, here, of how the Romans approached or understood death.

At this point, Phoebe despairs. And so she begins to pray, “not to her own gods, but to the unseen god of a slave girl.” I imagine we can all see where this is going. Who wants to sketch out the rest of this storyline, and see how much you can get right?

Next week we return to Julia.

I have a Patreon! Please support my writing!

Uncategorized

Voice in the Wind

Previous Post

December 21, 2017

Evangelicals: Moral Rectitude No Longer Required

Next Post

December 23, 2017 Saturday Link Love: Hunger, High School, and the Hulk

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Atheism Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism Family Feminism Homeschool Meta Parenting Patriarchy Politics Purity Quiverfull Social Justice Uncategorized Worthwhile reads

Select a Month February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What principle about debt is found in Proverbs?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Ignore money Never lend Debt is always good The borrower is slave to the lender