Excerpt from “The Angel Scroll” by Penelope Holt

Prophecy, Future, Love. Grief and The Hero’s Journey on the Middle of “The Angel Scroll”, a Non secular Novel.

Claire Lucas, lead protagonist of The Angel Scroll, is a proficient, younger Manhattan artist, who lives in unhappy isolation after the dying of her husband, Jake. The grieving painter’s life takes a mystical flip as she begins to expertise haunting desires and visions that she channels right into a mysterious masterpiece. 

Claire’s magnificent paintings upends her life, drawing her into a world scavenger hunt for 2 different supernatural work that historic prophecy predicts will, when mixed together with her personal, create a visible gospel that brings therapeutic to a damaged world. 

Past this outward quest to usher in worldly miracles, Claire can also be getting ready to an interior quest that can take her past trauma and loss to be taught what exists within the unfathomable depths of her personal psyche. On her hero’s journey, Claire is known as to journey that results in interior and outer discoveries. 

Guided by an Internal Voice

Finished in a completely completely different model, extra like an previous grasp than the pastel landscapes she sometimes paints, Claire’s astonishing new canvas thrusts the reclusive artist into the limelight. 

The portray, entitled Absent a Miracle, portrays an intriguing vignette: a Christlike determine kneels, centuries in the past, on the dying mattress of a younger Indian girl. The dying magnificence is soothed by the holy man’s therapeutic presence, at the same time as her bereft husband pleads for a miracle that Claire is aware of won’t come. Like Jake, this enigmatic younger girl from a distinct time and place will cross away, and her grieving husband will tread the identical path of mourning that Claire now walks.

Regardless of its painful depiction, observers discover the portray surprisingly soothing, therapeutic even, and consumers compete to personal the coveted masterpiece, providing a fortune for the canvas. Claire is tempted. A now impoverished widow of a former New York Metropolis public faculty trainer, she may actually use the cash, however as a substitute she listens to an interior voice that cautions her to not promote.

A Name to Journey and Revelation 

When antiquarian Richard Markson turns up on Claire’s doorstep with outlandish claims of hidden prophecy that foretells supernatural work, Claire first waves off his invitation to hitch him within the hunt for the opposite two different work that can mix with hers to kind a miraculous triptych. However once more, an interior compulsion pushes her in direction of motion within the route of the unknown. With a robust sense that future is looking, she units out on each a cloth and non secular quest.

Deciphering and Discernment

Bereft and longing to see her husband once more, Claire is tempted to imagine within the prophecy of the Angel Scroll, a Lifeless Sea parchment that predicts miracles and therapeutic for the brand new age. The lonely widow secretly hopes success of the prophecy will deliver a straightforward and speedy treatment for her personal existential struggling. Grief is instructing her that as people, we enter the world “in medias res”—in the midst of issues. We’re born to take our place in an historic story whose starting we have no idea, whose ending stays a thriller, and whose which means we battle to decipher.

 Why are we right here? What occurs once we die? Will we ever see once more the family members we have now misplaced?   Haunted by the unknowable, Claire, alongside Richard, pursues the elusive work throughout the traditional capitals and cities of Europe. Alongside the way in which, she encounters philosophers, prophets, and holy males who level to solutions she should ponder and weigh in her private seek for reality.

Love Is a Fixed

When Jake died, the love that sustained Claire was misplaced. A life stuffed with optimism and light-weight all of the sudden turned shadowy and chilly. The artist lived on in a state the place remembering introduced ache, and looking out forward spawned solely dread. Till Richard and his willpower to seek out the world-changing triptych arrived on her doorstep, Claire’s world had been stagnant, apart from the vitality that flowed unbidden by way of her paintbrush as she channeled her divinely impressed portray born from desires and visions. 

At journey’s finish, with all three work collected and underneath investigation by the Vatican in Rome, Claire’s relationship with Richard grows extra intimate. She is now higher in a position to decipher the symbols and messages which have emerged from her unconscious to information her artwork and drive her in direction of journey and new beginnings.  

Claire acknowledges love because the everlasting pressure that generates life, sustains existence, and creates which means. A brand new love, she sees, can’t change an previous one, however love, if we enable it, is ever able to move into our lives, coursing by way of the arid channels of a contracted coronary heart, restoring deserted hopes, animating new prospects, taking over completely different varieties however all the time retaining its wondrous essence.

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For extra info on “The Angel Scroll” and Penelope Holt please go to https://www.penelopeholt.com/