The Calling
He was soaring in the sky, his cassock flapping like giant wings. He floated lower, sinking into a velvety meadow . . . Father Daniele woke up. The phone on his nightstand was ringing. He groaned, annoyed to be pulled from the solace of sleep. He glanced at his clock. 12: 30 a.m. It must be bad. He fumbled for the phone and heard a cavernous voice growl, “A man is dying at the cemetery. He needs a priest.” The caller hung up before Father Daniele could say a word.
Father Daniele stumbled out of bed and grabbed his clothes, putting them on as he crept downstairs. He carefully avoided the creaking board, to not wake up his housekeeper who slept in her first-floor apartment. From his office, he took a satin pouch containing the sacred oils and a small golden box with a few hosts. The cemetery was about ten minutes away. He hoped he could reach the man in time to give him the last rites.
He turned over his car and yawned. What a day it had been—two Masses, waves of penitents at the confessional, the Santini twins’ baptism, and finally, the last excruciating hours with her in the moonlight.
He headed out of town on La Strada di Sirmione, a black ribbon of road that unspooled to the horizon. His high beams cast two melon balls of light on the scarred pavement, and the suspension of his rushing Fiat Cinquecento whined in agony at each blow the road delivered. Nestled in a pillow of clouds, the moon spilled diffused light on the castle at the edge of town. The tulip-shaped battlements at the top of the castle were constructed of decaying, blood-colored bricks. They looked like wilted flowers the day after a funeral.
At the outskirts of town, he sat straighter, readying himself for the sinuous road ahead. As the road curved, his headlights swept across a silvery field of corn. A candlelit Renaissance villa, cut into the hill, flickered like a yacht anchored in a midnight sea. At the end of the curve, the moon peeked from behind a curtain of cypresses. A silky breeze carried the pungent scent of freshly mowed fields. A concert of cicadas filled the night.
As he neared the cemetery he slowed down in search of the entrance. When his headlights flashed on a dark bundle, he gasped. That had to be the man. He wasn’t inside the cemetery, but was lying in the dirt just in front of the gate.
The moon cast eerie shadows over the body. Moonlight filtering through the shifting sycamore branches created the illusion that he was moving.
Father Daniele knelt next to the man, who was lying in a pool of blood.
“Can your hear me, my son?”
The man’s lips made a feeble movement.
Father Daniele put his ear to the man’s mouth and repeated, “Can you hear me?”
He felt the warmth of the man’s evanescent breath, but didn’t receive an answer.
He repeated his question a third time. Still, no answer.
Since the man couldn’t make his confession or swallow the host, Father Daniele gave him the absolution. Realizing that he had left the sacred oils in the car, he stood quickly, retrieved the oils and then knelt in front of the man. While making the sign of the cross, he said, “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.” He unscrewed the vial of sacred oils and anointed the man’s forehead and hands . . .
***
On the other side of Casteletto-Veneto, a small medieval town thirty miles north of Verona, the carabinieri barracks were still. Captain Mazzuri was seated in front of a card table, forking down bales of linguini from an overfilled plate. The phone rang, rupturing the quiet. Mazzuri wiped his mouth with a napkin bloodied with tomato sauce, stood lazily and sidled to the phone.
“A man is dying inside the cemetery,” the caller said in a monotone voice.
“Who is this?” Mazzuri shouted.
The caller hung up.
Mazzuri punched the table. He rang the bell, and then waddled off like a wine vat on twigs. He grabbed his navy blue jacket, scurried outside to a van and revved it up, opening the door for Lieutenant Buratto, who hopped in next to him. They roared away in their van capped with a flashing blue light, radioing for an ambulance during the trip. Within minutes Captain Mazzuri approached the cemetery, his tires kicking up clouds of dust as he slowed down. Before killing his headlights, he noticed a tall man standing over a prone body.
Mazzuri stopped abruptly and hurried from the van, leading with his flashlight. He shined the light in Father Daniele’s face then frowned when he recognized him. “Father, what are you doing here?”
“I got a phone call saying that a dying man needed a priest.”
Ignoring the answer, Mazzuri squatted over the body, pointing his flashlight at the man’s face. “I don’t believe it,” he gasped.
“What don’t you believe?”
“None of your business.”
Father Daniele was not accustomed to being disrespected. He clenched his fists, but kept silent.
Mazzuri felt for the man’s carotid pulse. Thready, but still there. He reached inside the victim’s shirt and followed the trail of blood, stopping when he felt a gash an inch above his navel. He felt a trickle of blood flowing from the wound, but couldn’t figure out what artery to press, so he removed his hand and stood. ”Nothing more we can do till the meat wagon gets here.” He wiped his bloody hands with his handkerchief then turned to Father Daniele. “You’ve done your duty, now go home and get some rest. You’re gonna need it.” He patted Father Daniele’s back as if they were old buddies.
Father Daniele felt the prickle of alarm rise on his skin. He wondered why Mazzuri was suddenly so friendly; why didn’t he take his statement, and what was that remark about needing his rest supposed to mean? Father Daniele said goodbye and folded his body into his tiny car. Before starting the engine, he muttered, “What the hell is going on?” Unable to come up with an explanation for Mazzuri’s behavior, he shrugged then turned over the ignition. The car choked to a start and puttered away, melting into the night.
In the distance, the faint wailing of the two-tone ambulance siren chilled the air. Its howls grew louder and louder, abruptly stopping as the ambulance came to a screeching halt. The medics rushed to the man and checked his vital signs. “What was the damn hurry?” the head medic muttered, stuffing his stethoscope back into his pocket. “He’s too far gone.” They hoisted the man onto the stretcher while Captain Mazzuri stood nearby.
As the victim was being carted off, Mazzuri noticed that his right arm was moving. “Not so fast,” he barked. Mazzuri approached the victim and heard a hiss of breath. He leaned over and pressed his ear to the man’s mouth.
After a few short grunts, the man finally succeeded in whispering, “Quel maledetto prete, that damned priest.”
Mazzuri’s eyes bulged like giant marbles. He shook the dying man violently, pleading, “Who? What priest?”
The man didn’t answer. His body convulsed and he fell unconscious.
“Hey, buddy. Don’t cut out on me now.” Mazzuri poked the victim’s shoulder with his filthy, nail-bitten fingers.
No movement.
He felt for his carotid pulse. Nothing.
“He’s a cadavere, all right.” Mazzuri smirked, his steel cap glistening in the moonlight. “Hold on, boys. We gotta process the body before you cart him off.” He aimed his flashlight on the corpse.
“Are you ready, Buratto?”
Lieutenant Buratto flipped open his pad and clicked on his own light.
“Victim is male, around five-foot-ten. Sorry, don’t forget the date: July thirtieth, 1970.” Mazzuri fetched a toothpick from his pocket and stabbed it in his mouth. “He’s approximately fifty-five years old. I knew who he was the second I laid eyes on him. The name’s Giovanni D’Arcangelo, a retired plumber and communist scum.” He turned to Buratto and shouted, “Stop writing, you idiot.”
Buratto flashed his captain a bug-eyed look. “How d’ya know him, boss?”
“That’s my business,” Mazzuri snapped. “Get back to the report . . . Victim was found wearing black pants, a dark red shirt and open sandals. Now for the fun part.” Mazzuri pointed his flashlight at the victim’s stomach. He brushed aside the pool of blood and studied the wound that ran vertically just above his navel. “Look, Buratto, it was a knife.”
“Did he get sliced from the front or the back?” Buratto asked, stifling a Chianti belch.
“Looks to me like a head-on collision. That’s some gigante, giant, wound. Take all this down, Buratto. The blow is at the height of the solar plexus, just below the rib cage. It is . . .” He bent the first joint of his thumb and measured, “it’s approximately three inches wide.”
“Damn if that weren’t a big knife.”
Mazzuri rolled the body over. “The wound went clean through. There’s a smaller puncture in his mid-back, slightly right of center.” Captain Mazzuri pulled the sheet over the man’s head. “I’m done here,” he said.
As the ambulance silently absconded into the night, the two officers conducted an area search. Mazzuri pointed his light at the pool of congealing blood. Starting from this point, his flashlight traced the blood trail to the entrance of the cemetery and to one of the tombs, about a hundred fifty feet inside. A scarf of clouds cloaked the moon just as Mazzuri’s flashlight began to fade. He smacked it on his thigh and the light made a reluctant encore.
“We’ll have to come back tomorrow to examine for footprints and other clues,’’ Mazzuri said eagerly.
“It won’t be easy. The ground’s been dry for weeks.”
“Piece of cake,” Mazzuri smirked. “We’re gonna nail this one for sure.”
© Jamie Turndorf 2016
This is an excerpt from the novel The Calling by Jamie Turndorf and Emile Jean Pin.
He was soaring in the sky, his cassock flapping like giant wings. He floated lower, sinking into a velvety meadow . . . Father Daniele woke up. The phone on his nightstand was ringing. He groaned, annoyed to be pulled from the solace of sleep. He glanced at his clock. 12: 30 a.m. It must be bad. He fumbled for the phone and heard a cavernous voice growl, “A man is dying at the cemetery. He needs a priest.” The caller hung up before Father Daniele could say a word.
Father Daniele stumbled out of bed and grabbed his clothes, putting them on as he crept downstairs. He carefully avoided the creaking board, to not wake up his housekeeper who slept in her first-floor apartment. From his office, he took a satin pouch containing the sacred oils and a small golden box with a few hosts. The cemetery was about ten minutes away. He hoped he could reach the man in time to give him the last rites.
He turned over his car and yawned. What a day it had been—two Masses, waves of penitents at the confessional, the Santini twins’ baptism, and finally, the last excruciating hours with her in the moonlight.
He headed out of town on La Strada di Sirmione, a black ribbon of road that unspooled to the horizon. His high beams cast two melon balls of light on the scarred pavement, and the suspension of his rushing Fiat Cinquecento whined in agony at each blow the road delivered. Nestled in a pillow of clouds, the moon spilled diffused light on the castle at the edge of town. The tulip-shaped battlements at the top of the castle were constructed of decaying, blood-colored bricks. They looked like wilted flowers the day after a funeral.
At the outskirts of town, he sat straighter, readying himself for the sinuous road ahead. As the road curved, his headlights swept across a silvery field of corn. A candlelit Renaissance villa, cut into the hill, flickered like a yacht anchored in a midnight sea. At the end of the curve, the moon peeked from behind a curtain of cypresses. A silky breeze carried the pungent scent of freshly mowed fields. A concert of cicadas filled the night.
As he neared the cemetery he slowed down in search of the entrance. When his headlights flashed on a dark bundle, he gasped. That had to be the man. He wasn’t inside the cemetery, but was lying in the dirt just in front of the gate.
The moon cast eerie shadows over the body. Moonlight filtering through the shifting sycamore branches created the illusion that he was moving.
Father Daniele knelt next to the man, who was lying in a pool of blood.
“Can your hear me, my son?”
The man’s lips made a feeble movement.
Father Daniele put his ear to the man’s mouth and repeated, “Can you hear me?”
He felt the warmth of the man’s evanescent breath, but didn’t receive an answer.
He repeated his question a third time. Still, no answer.
Since the man couldn’t make his confession or swallow the host, Father Daniele gave him the absolution. Realizing that he had left the sacred oils in the car, he stood quickly, retrieved the oils and then knelt in front of the man. While making the sign of the cross, he said, “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.” He unscrewed the vial of sacred oils and anointed the man’s forehead and hands . . .
***
On the other side of Casteletto-Veneto, a small medieval town thirty miles north of Verona, the carabinieri barracks were still. Captain Mazzuri was seated in front of a card table, forking down bales of linguini from an overfilled plate. The phone rang, rupturing the quiet. Mazzuri wiped his mouth with a napkin bloodied with tomato sauce, stood lazily and sidled to the phone.
“A man is dying inside the cemetery,” the caller said in a monotone voice.
“Who is this?” Mazzuri shouted.
The caller hung up.
Mazzuri punched the table. He rang the bell, and then waddled off like a wine vat on twigs. He grabbed his navy blue jacket, scurried outside to a van and revved it up, opening the door for Lieutenant Buratto, who hopped in next to him. They roared away in their van capped with a flashing blue light, radioing for an ambulance during the trip. Within minutes Captain Mazzuri approached the cemetery, his tires kicking up clouds of dust as he slowed down. Before killing his headlights, he noticed a tall man standing over a prone body.
Mazzuri stopped abruptly and hurried from the van, leading with his flashlight. He shined the light in Father Daniele’s face then frowned when he recognized him.
“Father, what are you doing here?”
“I got a phone call saying that a dying man needed a priest.”
Ignoring the answer, Mazzuri squatted over the body, pointing his flashlight at the man’s face. “I don’t believe it,” he gasped.
“What don’t you believe?”
“None of your business.”
Father Daniele was not accustomed to being disrespected. He clenched his fists, but kept silent.
Mazzuri felt for the man’s carotid pulse. Thready, but still there. He reached inside the victim’s shirt and followed the trail of blood, stopping when he felt a gash an inch above his navel. He felt a trickle of blood flowing from the wound, but couldn’t figure out what artery to press, so he removed his hand and stood. ”Nothing more we can do till the meat wagon gets here.” He wiped his bloody hands with his handkerchief then turned to Father Daniele. “You’ve done your duty, now go home and get some rest. You’re gonna need it.” He patted Father Daniele’s back as if they were old buddies.
Father Daniele felt the prickle of alarm rise on his skin. He wondered why Mazzuri was suddenly so friendly; why didn’t he take his statement, and what was that remark about needing his rest supposed to mean? Father Daniele said goodbye and folded his body into his tiny car. Before starting the engine, he muttered, “What the hell is going on?” Unable to come up with an explanation for Mazzuri’s behavior, he shrugged then turned over the ignition. The car choked to a start and puttered away, melting into the night.
In the distance, the faint wailing of the two-tone ambulance siren chilled the air. Its howls grew louder and louder, abruptly stopping as the ambulance came to a screeching halt. The medics rushed to the man and checked his vital signs. “What was the damn hurry?” the head medic muttered, stuffing his stethoscope back into his pocket. “He’s too far gone.” They hoisted the man onto the stretcher while Captain Mazzuri stood nearby.
As the victim was being carted off, Mazzuri noticed that his right arm was moving. “Not so fast,” he barked. Mazzuri approached the victim and heard a hiss of breath. He leaned over and pressed his ear to the man’s mouth.
After a few short grunts, the man finally succeeded in whispering, “Quel maledetto prete, that damned priest.”
Mazzuri’s eyes bulged like giant marbles. He shook the dying man violently, pleading, “Who? What priest?”
The man didn’t answer. His body convulsed and he fell unconscious.
“Hey, buddy. Don’t cut out on me now.” Mazzuri poked the victim’s shoulder with his filthy, nail-bitten fingers.
No movement.
He felt for his carotid pulse. Nothing.
“He’s a cadavere, all right.” Mazzuri smirked, his steel cap glistening in the moonlight. “Hold on, boys. We gotta process the body before you cart him off.” He aimed his flashlight on the corpse. “Are you ready, Buratto?”
Lieutenant Buratto flipped open his pad and clicked on his own light.
“Victim is male, around five-foot-ten. Sorry, don’t forget the date: July thirtieth, 1970.” Mazzuri fetched a toothpick from his pocket and stabbed it in his mouth.
“He’s approximately fifty-five years old. I knew who he was the second I laid eyes on him. The name’s Giovanni D’Arcangelo, a retired plumber and communist scum.” He turned to Buratto and shouted, “Stop writing, you idiot.”
Buratto flashed his captain a bug-eyed look. “How d’ya know him, boss?”
“That’s my business,” Mazzuri snapped. “Get back to the report . . . Victim was found wearing black pants, a dark red shirt and open sandals. Now for the fun part.”
Mazzuri pointed his flashlight at the victim’s stomach. He brushed aside the pool of blood and studied the wound that ran vertically just above his navel. “Look, Buratto, it was a knife.”
“Did he get sliced from the front or the back?” Buratto asked, stifling a Chianti belch.
“Looks to me like a head-on collision. That’s some gigante, giant, wound. Take all this down, Buratto. The blow is at the height of the solar plexus, just below the rib cage. It is . . .” He bent the first joint of his thumb and measured, “it’s approximately three inches wide.”
“Damn if that weren’t a big knife.”
Mazzuri rolled the body over. “The wound went clean through. There’s a smaller puncture in his mid-back, slightly right of center.” Captain Mazzuri pulled the sheet over the man’s head. “I’m done here,” he said.
As the ambulance silently absconded into the night, the two officers conducted an area search. Mazzuri pointed his light at the pool of congealing blood. Starting from this point, his flashlight traced the blood trail to the entrance of the cemetery and to one of the tombs, about a hundred fifty feet inside. A scarf of clouds cloaked the moon just as Mazzuri’s flashlight began to fade. He smacked it on his thigh and the light made a reluctant encore.
“We’ll have to come back tomorrow to examine for footprints and other clues,’’ Mazzuri said eagerly.
“It won’t be easy. The ground’s been dry for weeks.”
“Piece of cake,” Mazzuri smirked. “We’re gonna nail this one for sure.”
© Jamie Turndorf 2016
This is an excerpt from the novel The Calling by Jamie Turndorf and Emile Jean Pin.
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Jamie Turndorf was not able to come into our studio for an interview so we'll be talking to her by phone today. Apologies in advance for any problems with the quality of the connection.
TN: Hi Jamie, and welcome to The Strange Recital.
JT: Hi. So nice to be with you.
BR: Well, first let's talk about the content of your book. We just heard Chapter 1 and it's clear we're being set up for a murder mystery. But how does the rest of the book depart from standard detective story conventions?
JT: Well, the murder mystery format is just a way of making the book more palatable to the mainstream so that it doesn't just become a treatise on religious philosophy and so on, and the problems within the Catholic Church. So the murder mystery pulls the story along but there's this underlying theme that runs throughout the book and that is that so many of the young priests, especially years ago, did not have a calling, a true calling. The calling was imposed on them by the priests, by their mothers. You saw in the beginning of the book there was a quote by Andrew Greeley that said the decline in priestly vocations is due to the lack of recruitment by the two principal recruitment officers: priests and mothers. So the name of the book The Calling is really ironic because we reveal that the main character here never had the calling but it was imposed upon him through his mother and this very dysfunctional relationship that he had with his mother.
TN: Hmm, well you know, that touches on my next question. You and your late husband, who's noted as the co-author, really wanted to deliver a message about that age-old dysfunction within the Catholic Church, namely the celibacy of priests.
JT: Right. So that in and of itself – you know, Jean, he was one of the most famous Jesuit priests in history. He had taught at the Vatican. He founded the liberation theology movement designed to fight church oppression from within and he actually launched to international fame when he publicly opposed the Pope and the Catholic Church as they were trying to block the legalization of divorce in Italy. And he fought on the grounds of liberation theology, religious freedom, the church should butt out of the private sector. He told me years later he didn't want to see women trapped in marriages where they were being abused. So he fought the pope and the Catholic Church on the grounds that they should butt out and he won and he got the divorce bill passed and changed the course of Italian history. So he was always a very radical priest working within. And one of the things that he greatly objected to was the mandatory celibacy rule and he was actually fighting that as far back as the 1940s. He had written greatly about it. He really, really was opposed to the celibacy rule. And he says, as we said in The Calling, you know, the traditional belief behind why priests, Catholic priests, should be celibate is it frees them for their mission and for their ministry when in fact as we describe in The Calling it doesn't free you at all you just become obsessed. Don't think about a pink elephant – it's all you think about. Don't think about sex – well, what are you going to be thinking about, you know.
BR: Right. Well I purposely withheld a full introduction of you until this point in the interview. The cover of The Calling says Jamie Turndorf but your other identity is Dr. Jamie Turndorf, also known as Dr. Love. You're a psychotherapist with a long term practice and several nonfiction books primarily focused on relationship skills. So how has your husband's death changed your therapy practice?
JT: Oh, well I say we don't die, we just leave our bodies. The minute my beloved left his body while we were on vacation together in Italy, very close to where the novel is set, the minute Jean left his body he made his presence known to me. He started moving things, turning lights on and off, machines on and off. Here I had been a mainstream shrink. I didn't believe in God or the afterlife. And he and I never discussed religion. But the minute he made his presence known to me, often in front of witnesses, and I've actually captured many of his manifestations – you can see them on the YouTube channel Ask Dr. Love. He said to me, tell our story, let our love shine like a torch that lights the path for others. And so I did tell our story in – it's a three-part book that Hay House published, Love Never Dies: How to Reconnect and Make Peace with the Deceased. The first part is my memoir of my spiritual reconnection with him. The second part is helping people overcome their own blocks, the false beliefs that block most people from reconnecting, and then the third part, I really show you how to reconnect. And because I'm a shrink by training what I'm doing here is a form of spiritual relationship therapy because I know that the Western approach to grief therapy – grieve, let go, and move on – leave the bereaved at a greater loss, so my Trans-Dimensional Grief Resolution Method shows everyone how to reconnect with a loved one in spirit, and then the additional piece is, because I know Western grief therapy gives us no way of working out our unfinished business with those in spirit and most everyone has unfinished business. So the Trans-Dimensional Grief Resolution Method and the cornerstone technique in the method, the Dialoguing with the Departed technique, enables you to talk back and forth with your loved one in spirit until you achieve a resolution to the unfinished business, and then as you heal you can go on to use the relationship for guidance to achieve prosperity and healing in every area of your life.
BR: Well okay, I'd like to return to the topic of your novel now. So our focus on the podcast is primarily fiction and is often about the writing process,so tell us a little about your experience of writing The Calling – how it differed from your non-fiction books, for instance.
JT: Well, what's interesting is, this is a book that Jean and I started writing from the very beginning of our life together, because he had a lot to say about the Church, about mandatory celibacy, about false callings, and so we began traveling to Italy which, you know, a lot of the very creative descriptions of the scenery – I wrote those because I very much like doing descriptive fiction writing and you can feel, you can actually smell, you know, the tomato sauce wafting down these twisted medieval alleys, you can feel it but that it was really written by an author or authors who were there. And so we began writing the book in, I would say 1981, and this was a birth that never happened. This baby never wanted to come out. This book we could not publish, we couldn't find an agent for it, even though we were both well-known authors, I had published other books. It just wasn't the right time. Then, this comes full circle now to the question of what you asked regarding the more woo-woo aspect of my life. So a couple of years ago, while I was in one of my coaches training groups, we kept hearing a male voice speaking, and we're only women. And it was a voice that was clearly audible, and I sent the recording to an afterlife researcher and I said, can you use your technology to raise the audio and see if you can hear what this male voice is saying. And he writes me back and he says, it sounds like "They're calling, they're calling, their calling." And I said, oh my God, it's not "they're calling" it's The Calling. Jean's saying, publish it now. (laughter) After decades and decades, Brent – I listened and I contacted a publisher and within 24 hours I had a contract.
TN: Yeah, it must be quite a challenge to write a European story for American readers. For example I noticed the cops said that the knife was three inches wide. Of course an Italian would say seven or eight centimeters. So you had to decide how far to go with such cultural translations.
JT: Well, the way we tried to keep the flavor, the Italian flavor, is you'll notice, like "magare" – you know, "Oh, don't I wish." And then we would translate it, so just pepper it with little turns of phrases that will give you a sense of what they might have said, like "porca madonna," (laughs) you know. And then we translate it. Little things like that. Or stories that would have been part of the culture.
BR: Actually embed the translation in the sentence or in the dialogue, right.
JT: But just to give you a feeling of the flavor, and then of course, the setting, which is very realistically depicted and the, you know, the scenes within the church ceremonies the smell of the sweet and peppery scent oozing from centuries of solemn masses – the incense oozing from the stone – details like that that are very very rich and very real, you know.
BR: Yeah, well, I've read the whole novel and I trust this is not a spoiler. How about that very explicit sex scene later in the book?
JT: Hell yeah, baby! (laughter)
BR: Quite a male fantasy – do you want to say anything about that?
JT: You know what's really funny, Brent, when we tried to have it published back, I don't know, in the 80s or the 90s, we sent it to a big New York City editor and he wrote back, I have the highest praise for the sex scene, and Jean I cracked up, like, highest as in erectile. (laughter) Very erotic, very erotic.
BR: Yes. Well, with that it's time for us to wrap up. So thanks for joining us.
JT: You too. Loved being with you. Take care.
TN: Yeah. Thanks again for talking with us today. Have a great holiday... No, that was, that was a few weeks ago wasn't it? Right, Brent? Brent?
BR: Jamie Turndorf was not able to come into our studio for an interview so we'll be talking to her by phone today. Apologies in advance for any problems with the quality of the connection.
TN: Hi Jamie, and welcome to The Strange Recital.
JT: Hi. So nice to be with you.
BR: Well, first let's talk about the content of your book. We just heard Chapter 1 and it's clear we're being set up for a murder mystery. But how does the rest of the book depart from standard detective story conventions?
JT: Well, the murder mystery format is just a way of making the book more palatable to the mainstream so that it doesn't just become a treatise on religious philosophy and so on, and the problems within the Catholic Church. So the murder mystery pulls the story along but there's this underlying theme that runs throughout the book and that is that so many of the young priests, especially years ago, did not have a calling, a true calling. The calling was imposed on them by the priests, by their mothers. You saw in the beginning of the book there was a quote by Andrew Greeley that said the decline in priestly vocations is due to the lack of recruitment by the two principal recruitment officers: priests and mothers. So the name of the book The Calling is really ironic because we reveal that the main character here never had the calling but it was imposed upon him through his mother and this very dysfunctional relationship that he had with his mother.
TN: Hmm, well you know, that touches on my next question. You and your late husband, who's noted as the co-author, really wanted to deliver a message about that age-old dysfunction within the Catholic Church, namely the celibacy of priests.
JT: Right. So that in and of itself – you know, Jean, he was one of the most famous Jesuit priests in history. He had taught at the Vatican. He founded the liberation theology movement designed to fight church oppression from within and he actually launched to international fame when he publicly opposed the Pope and the Catholic Church as they were trying to block the legalization of divorce in Italy. And he fought on the grounds of liberation theology, religious freedom, the church should butt out of the private sector. He told me years later he didn't want to see women trapped in marriages where they were being abused. So he fought the pope and the Catholic Church on the grounds that they should butt out and he won and he got the divorce bill passed and changed the course of Italian history. So he was always a very radical priest working within. And one of the things that he greatly objected to was the mandatory celibacy rule and he was actually fighting that as far back as the 1940s. He had written greatly about it. He really, really was opposed to the celibacy rule. And he says, as we said in The Calling, you know, the traditional belief behind why priests, Catholic priests, should be celibate is it frees them for their mission and for their ministry when in fact as we describe in The Calling it doesn't free you at all you just become obsessed. Don't think about a pink elephant – it's all you think about. Don't think about sex – well, what are you going to be thinking about, you know.
BR: Right. Well I purposely withheld a full introduction of you until this point in the interview. The cover of The Calling says Jamie Turndorf but your other identity is Dr. Jamie Turndorf, also known as Dr. Love. You're a psychotherapist with a long term practice and several nonfiction books primarily focused on relationship skills. So how has your husband's death changed your therapy practice?
JT: Oh, well I say we don't die, we just leave our bodies. The minute my beloved left his body while we were on vacation together in Italy, very close to where the novel is set, the minute Jean left his body he made his presence known to me. He started moving things, turning lights on and off, machines on and off. Here I had been a mainstream shrink. I didn't believe in God or the afterlife. And he and I never discussed religion. But the minute he made his presence known to me, often in front of witnesses, and I've actually captured many of his manifestations – you can see them on the YouTube channel Ask Dr. Love. He said to me, tell our story, let our love shine like a torch that lights the path for others. And so I did tell our story in – it's a three-part book that Hay House published, Love Never Dies: How to Reconnect and Make Peace with the Deceased. The first part is my memoir of my spiritual reconnection with him. The second part is helping people overcome their own blocks, the false beliefs that block most people from reconnecting, and then the third part, I really show you how to reconnect. And because I'm a shrink by training what I'm doing here is a form of spiritual relationship therapy because I know that the Western approach to grief therapy – grieve, let go, and move on – leave the bereaved at a greater loss, so my Trans-Dimensional Grief Resolution Method shows everyone how to reconnect with a loved one in spirit, and then the additional piece is, because I know Western grief therapy gives us no way of working out our unfinished business with those in spirit and most everyone has unfinished business. So the Trans-Dimensional Grief Resolution Method and the cornerstone technique in the method, the Dialoguing with the Departed technique, enables you to talk back and forth with your loved one in spirit until you achieve a resolution to the unfinished business, and then as you heal you can go on to use the relationship for guidance to achieve prosperity and healing in every area of your life.
BR: Well okay, I'd like to return to the topic of your novel now. So our focus on the podcast is primarily fiction and is often about the writing process,so tell us a little about your experience of writing The Calling – how it differed from your non-fiction books, for instance.
JT: Well, what's interesting is, this is a book that Jean and I started writing from the very beginning of our life together, because he had a lot to say about the Church, about mandatory celibacy, about false callings, and so we began traveling to Italy which, you know, a lot of the very creative descriptions of the scenery – I wrote those because I very much like doing descriptive fiction writing and you can feel, you can actually smell, you know, the tomato sauce wafting down these twisted medieval alleys, you can feel it but that it was really written by an author or authors who were there. And so we began writing the book in, I would say 1981, and this was a birth that never happened. This baby never wanted to come out. This book we could not publish, we couldn't find an agent for it, even though we were both well-known authors, I had published other books. It just wasn't the right time. Then, this comes full circle now to the question of what you asked regarding the more woo-woo aspect of my life. So a couple of years ago, while I was in one of my coaches training groups, we kept hearing a male voice speaking, and we're only women. And it was a voice that was clearly audible, and I sent the recording to an afterlife researcher and I said, can you use your technology to raise the audio and see if you can hear what this male voice is saying. And he writes me back and he says, it sounds like "They're calling, they're calling, their calling." And I said, oh my God, it's not "they're calling" it's The Calling. Jean's saying, publish it now. (laughter) After decades and decades, Brent – I listened and I contacted a publisher and within 24 hours I had a contract.
TN: Yeah, it must be quite a challenge to write a European story for American readers. For example I noticed the cops said that the knife was three inches wide. Of course an Italian would say seven or eight centimeters. So you had to decide how far to go with such cultural translations.
JT: Well, the way we tried to keep the flavor, the Italian flavor, is you'll notice, like "magare" – you know, "Oh, don't I wish." And then we would translate it, so just pepper it with little turns of phrases that will give you a sense of what they might have said, like "porca madonna," (laughs) you know. And then we translate it. Little things like that. Or stories that would have been part of the culture.
BR: Actually embed the translation in the sentence or in the dialogue, right.
JT: But just to give you a feeling of the flavor, and then of course, the setting, which is very realistically depicted and the, you know, the scenes within the church ceremonies the smell of the sweet and peppery scent oozing from centuries of solemn masses – the incense oozing from the stone – details like that that are very very rich and very real, you know.
BR: Yeah, well, I've read the whole novel and I trust this is not a spoiler. How about that very explicit sex scene later in the book?
JT: Hell yeah, baby! (laughter)
BR: Quite a male fantasy – do you want to say anything about that?
JT: You know what's really funny, Brent, when we tried to have it published back, I don't know, in the 80s or the 90s, we sent it to a big New York City editor and he wrote back, I have the highest praise for the sex scene, and Jean I cracked up, like, highest as in erectile. (laughter) Very erotic, very erotic.
BR: Yes. Well, with that it's time for us to wrap up. So thanks for joining us.
JT: You too. Loved being with you. Take care.
TN: Yeah. Thanks again for talking with us today. Have a great holiday... No, that was, that was a few weeks ago wasn't it? Right, Brent? Brent?
Music on this episode:
License CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US
Sound Effects used under license:
Italian ambulance by Soundsexciting
License CC BY 3.0
Italian police siren by Tim Kahn
License CC BY 3.0
