The Mysterious Furies of the God in a Tent

It is unusual for a novelist to choose God for the main ghost character of his book. Yet any truly literate reader of the Hebrew Bible will discover that the Bible is a literary book whose central character is the personality of God. The Bible opens with His revealing his powerful presence by saying "In the beginning," and going on to declaim who He is and what He has done. All the central episodes of the Biblical stories, while involving narrations of those who peopled his plans and activities, are centered on his words and his deeds. These are the main elements of the Bible even though human stories abound. Indeed, one can posit that this book is an extraordinarily long one-act drama in which there is only one character who soliloquizes his experiences of being the Father of the universe. He retells with great emotional involvement what happened to Him when He decided to make a natural world full of creatures and then decided to add surrogate beings to share it with Him. Here the soliloquy becomes very dramatic because humans rebelled in their very first instance of their being and thus became alien to him. He became angry, took destructive actions that demonstrated his powers but often produced compliance driven by fear. Despite this blemish, He tells the reader He was not ready to let go of His absolute Fatherhood. So He began to undertake prodigious but eventually frustrating efforts to win human love and allegiance. He chose one tribal family as His witness to His supreme divinity. His strategic goal was to specially develop a family covenant with a chosen people; He would be their one and only Father-counselor in all aspects their of lives. In return He would give them their own tribal land and a kingdom. It was a troubled covenant. This tactic brought Him into many human conflicts that forced Him to become variously a liberator, a general, a destroyer, even a conqueror and executioner, often a peacemaker. His plan succeeded for a period, His wishes fulfilled. At least one human tribe truly witnessed Him and Him only. But again the human side of the covenant failed, His chosen people dispersed once more into the spiritual deserts of the alien world. So full of sadness, frustration, and disappointment, the voice of the divine soliloquist falls into near silence. His soliloquy is now remembered through the echoed, hailing words handed over to his prophets. The ghost text of this Divine comedy was written down in a book called the Bible. Can these third person words have their divine author's mysterious, furious powers of his Word? The novel The Mysterious God in a Tent is about the spiritual struggle that occurs when a very dedicated reader, near his death, encounters this powerful Biblical soliloquy, the voice of a deific personality whose voice is the essence of this story-the majesty of words and the Word.