Dark fantasy novels that scream theology

In divinity school I took a class with Matthew Potts, a religion scholar and Episcopal priest, called Sacramental Imagination. In it, we read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and watched Gabriel Axel‘s film adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast, mining them for their sacramental moments. The father in The Road bathing his boy in a freezing pond, pouring water over his head. The addict protagonist of Jesus’ Son, crouching outside a window, watching a husband wash his wife’s feet. Babette preparing a feast, the likes of which had never been seen in her dour little town, and foreclosing options to herself out of love for the sisters she works for.

While fictional, these are stories about real life: about the ways that the world is dark or difficult or nearly unsurvivable. And each of them contains these sacramental moments like the pinpricks of stars, showing how familiar rituals can carve out time in the darkness that is devoted to beauty and reverence and connection. Sometimes to the Divine, sometimes to other people.

I think the main thing I took away from that class is that, yes, the sacraments are things that are about God, about building and maintaining and expressing a relationship to the Divine, but they are also things we can do to and for other people, a specific way we can give of ourselves. It also taught me to read differently—in a way, to be able to pick out the threads of Christian meaning that so often lurk in the back of books, movies, popular culture, and, to be honest, my own mind. The baptisms, the communions, the little acts of care refracted through a Christian lens. And nowhere was I more surprised to find them than in Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series.