Lent and Dinosaurs

My short story for the anthology Ashes: Visible & Invisible is set across Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, and a Eucharistic Miracle has great significance to the plot. Thus far in the description, it sounds like a fairly logical entry into an anthology of Lenten short stories, right?

It’s also set in a future USA where dinosaurs once again roam the wilderness. So how does that fit with Lent and Eucharistic miracles, you may ask?

It actually fits very well. I wanted to portray how some things don’t change:

• Future Christians will still celebrate Lent.

• Most likely Our Lord will still bless our descendants with the occasional Eucharistic Miracle.

And how some things will have changed:

• The celebration of Lent in a rural culture that lives cheek-to-jowl with dinosaurs will most likely be slightly different than it is today.

• The reason for the Eucharistic miracle may not be one that we would expect in the 2020s.

  
  

Therefore, in A Very Jurassic Lent, the universality of certain Christian practice and experience is juxtaposed with the fluidity of enculturated aspects of the faith. The former are immutable, unchanging, while the latter shift according to culture, location, and time, bringing about many varied and beautiful expressions of Christian faith through the millennia.

One of the strengths of the Jesuit Order’s historic missions was their focus on retaining what was good from the cultures they were evangelizing. Science Fiction and Fantasy stories that enculturate real life Catholicism into future (or other) worlds pay homage, in a sense, to this powerful tradition.

Catholicism is Truth, and therefore it does not need to erase or wipe out everything in its path. It need only replace the bad with what is good, true, and beautiful. What is already good, true, and beautiful may remain. And this will continue to hold true, whatever path the future of humanity on earth, or on other worlds, should take.

Yes, even if that path includes dinosaurs!

Questions for thought or discussion:

If you’ve read the story:

How do you feel about the actions Darryl took? Do you think you would have done the same thing? Why or why not?

If you’ve just read the blog:

Have you heard of enculturation before? Can you give an example of it? How do you feel about it? Why?

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Please join us March 23rd as Antony Kolenc reflects on his story, Lucy and the Forsaken Path.

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About the author: Corinna Turner has been writing since she was fourteen and likes strong protagonists with plenty of integrity. She has an MA in English from Oxford University, but has foolishly gone on to work with both children and animals! Juggling work with the disabled and being a midwife to sheep, she spends as much time as she can in a little hut at the bottom of the garden, writing. She is a Catholic Christian with roots in the Methodist and Anglican churches. A keen cinema-goer, she lives in the UK with her classic campervan ‘Toby’ (short for Tobias!), her larger and more expensive substitute for her lovely Giant African Land Snail, Peter, who sadly passed away in October 2016.