How an African Cardinal's Book Inspired Fear of the Sky

Silence Versus The One Who Speaks

Even after tossing a bad first draft and replotting, my story remained incomplete until I read The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Cardinal Robert Sarah. In the book, which is a series of reflections on silence as a means to relate to God, the cardinal eviscerates the noisiness of modernity, particularly in the West. To Cardinal Sarah, our world’s noisiness blinds us to the true, the good, and the beautiful, in part because it keeps us from entering into the silent, innermost depths of our souls and coming to know the God who dwells there.  

In my favorite line from the book, Cardinal Sarah calls noise a “deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer.” That one line took on a life of its own, coming to be represented allegorically by a malevolent spirit who calls himself The One Who Speaks (think of him as a scarier, less funny Screwtape).

Speaks (as he’s often called in the book) was the final piece of my story’s puzzle: the big bad who sets everything in motion and thwarts so many of my hero’s best laid plans. More importantly, he allowed me to explore the cost of souls being swept away by noise, and whether there is any hope for those of us who are so unfortunate.

Cardinal Robert Sarah

Without the moorings of silence, life is a depressing movement, a puny little boat ceaselessly tossed by the violence of the waves. Silence is the outer wall that we must build in order to protect an interior edifice. - Cardinal Sarah

To be clear, the novel doesn't attempt a deep dive into complex theology. It's not a scholarly work, and I never wanted to come off as trying to educate an audience (nor do I claim that I could). I wove themes of silence and noise deeply into the plot, and I explore them through characters' experiences (sometimes allegorically, sometimes literally). Silence and noise impact their souls in a variety of ways, and it is upon those impacts that my pages sometimes linger.

So, is Fear of the Sky “Christian” Fiction?

I get this question a lot when I start explaining how much the Cardinal's work influenced the story. And to be fair, I'm a Catholic guy who often quotes the likes of G.K. Chesterton, Flannery O'Connor, and C.S. Lewis when I talk about writing. My answer is that I’ve never called my novel Christian fiction for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s not what most readers would expect from a book labeled as such. It gets fairly dark, and the gods in it are fictitious and not direct representatives of God and Satan. They are much more limited in the good and evil they represent. The second reason is that the idea that a noisy world could blind a soul is not exclusively Christian (though it is absolutely at home in Christianity).

All that being said, it is a Christian work to me in the sense that I did all that I could to explore ideas that are true. If I succeeded at all, then I explored something of the Christian God, and maybe presented it in a way that will help other people understand it. Writing something deeply meaningful was always what mattered most to me. Take that for what you will! It’s also worth noting that I always kept my Christian readers in mind while writing. In many ways, I wrote this novel for them. It gets a solid PG-13 rating for violence and heavy themes, but is mostly free of foul language and entirely free of sex (boring, I know).

But I truly tried to write for everyone and anyone. I always suspected that the themes as presented and the father-daughter relationship would carry the read for general audiences, and so far, the feedback has suggested that I was right. Indeed, most of my beta readers and one of my two editors were not particularly interested in Christian ideas, and I never got any complaints about it being preachy or excessively religious.

Fear of the Sky Launches June 9! There’s still time to sign up to be an ARC reader (click here)! I look forward to you all reading it.

Kris