Themes of faith are nothing new for writer Jamie Quatro, who was raised in fundamentalist Christianity but is now Episcopalian. Her first novel, “Fire Sermon” (2018), delves into both relational and spiritual longing, and her second novel, “Two-Step Devil”(2024), follows an aging prophet and his unlikely companion in conveying an urgent spiritual message.
In the article “For Jamie Quatro, There’s ‘Something Mystical’ About Writing,” interviewer Nicole Graev Lipson asks Quatro about her process and her experience of the spiritual in writing, noting her own appreciation of the moments in Quatro’s work when the otherworldly becomes a presence in the text.
Quatro affirms, “I would like to say that I experience a firm line between the material and immaterial. Or that I believe in only the material. This seems the rational, sane response. But I’m more of a mystic than I often like to admit.”
She mentions her recent reading of Anglican bishop N.T. Wright’s book “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church”(2018), and she explains how it has influenced her view of eschatology and of where the boundaries between heaven and earth are, actually, to be found.
“Wright argues that heaven, ultimately, is here,” Quatro states. “This planet, these bodies. Not to downplay darkness and evil, but ultimately good theology, good eschatology, says that this is not a throwaway planet inhabited by throwaway bodies. Our future immortality is not some floating-cloud state of bliss; nor is it annihilation. The radical Christian idea is that heaven has already begun to break into earth, almost as if through a scrim or a veil, in the form of the resurrected body of Jesus.”
But this porousness of the boundary between the physical and the transcendent is not limited, Quatro argues, to the Christian paradigm or to people of faith.
“I’ve read just enough quantum physics,” she argues, “to understand that the miraculous and the scientific are not mutually exclusive. In some way, we’re creating these miracles ourselves. There’s a collaboration going on with God, the Universe, the Muse … some passage back and forth between the veil.”
That great mystery, the act of collaboration with the divine that lies at the heart of the creative act is something that fuels and astonishes us all. The veil is thin indeed.