Excerpt from “The Angel Scroll” by Penelope Holt
Prophecy, Destiny, Love. Grief and The Hero’s Journey at the Center of “The Angel Scroll”, a Spiritual Novel.
Claire Lucas, lead protagonist of The Angel Scroll, is a talented, young Manhattan artist, who lives in sad isolation after the death of her husband, Jake. The grieving painter’s life takes a mystical turn as she begins to experience haunting dreams and visions that she channels into a mysterious masterpiece.
Claire’s magnificent artwork upends her life, drawing her into an international scavenger hunt for two other supernatural paintings that ancient prophecy predicts will, when combined with her own, create a visual gospel that brings healing to a broken world.
Beyond this outward quest to usher in worldly miracles, Claire is also on the brink of an inner quest that will take her beyond trauma and loss to learn what exists in the unfathomable depths of her own psyche. On her hero’s journey, Claire is called to adventure that leads to inner and outer discoveries.
Guided by an Inner Voice
Done in a totally different style, more like an old master than the pastel landscapes she typically paints, Claire’s astonishing new canvas thrusts the reclusive artist into the limelight.
The painting, entitled Absent a Miracle, portrays an intriguing vignette: a Christlike figure kneels, centuries ago, at the death bed of a young Indian woman. The dying beauty is soothed by the holy man’s healing presence, even as her bereft husband pleads for a miracle that Claire knows will not come. Like Jake, this enigmatic young woman from a different time and place will pass away, and her grieving husband will tread the same path of mourning that Claire now walks.
Despite its painful depiction, observers find the painting surprisingly soothing, healing even, and buyers compete to own the coveted masterpiece, offering a fortune for the canvas. Claire is tempted. A now impoverished widow of a former New York City public school teacher, she could certainly use the money, but instead she listens to an inner voice that cautions her not to sell.
A Call to Adventure and Revelation
When antiquarian Richard Markson turns up on Claire’s doorstep with outlandish claims of hidden prophecy that foretells supernatural paintings, Claire first waves off his invitation to join him in the hunt for the other two other paintings that will combine with hers to form a miraculous triptych. But again, an inner compulsion pushes her towards action in the direction of the unknown. With a strong sense that destiny is calling, she sets out on both a material and spiritual quest.
Deciphering and Discernment
Bereft and longing to see her husband again, Claire is tempted to believe in the prophecy of the Angel Scroll, a Dead Sea parchment that predicts miracles and healing for the new age. The lonely widow secretly hopes fulfillment of the prophecy will bring an easy and immediate cure for her own existential suffering. Grief is teaching her that as humans, we enter the world “in medias res”—in the middle of things. We are born to take our place in an ancient story whose beginning we do not know, whose ending remains a mystery, and whose meaning we struggle to decipher.
Why are we here? What happens when we die? Will we ever see again the loved ones we have lost? Haunted by the unknowable, Claire, alongside Richard, pursues the elusive paintings across the ancient capitals and cities of Europe. Along the way, she encounters philosophers, prophets, and holy men who point to answers she must ponder and weigh in her personal search for truth.
Love Is a Constant
When Jake died, the love that sustained Claire was lost. A life filled with optimism and light suddenly turned shadowy and cold. The artist lived on in a state where remembering brought pain, and looking ahead spawned only dread. Until Richard and his determination to find the world-changing triptych arrived on her doorstep, Claire’s world had been stagnant, except for the energy that flowed unbidden through her paintbrush as she channeled her divinely inspired painting born from dreams and visions.
At journey’s end, with all three paintings collected and under investigation by the Vatican in Rome, Claire’s relationship with Richard grows more intimate. She is now better able to decipher the symbols and messages that have emerged from her unconscious to guide her art and drive her towards adventure and new beginnings.
Claire recognizes love as the eternal force that generates life, sustains existence, and creates meaning. A new love, she sees, cannot replace an old one, but love, if we allow it, is ever ready to flow into our lives, coursing through the arid channels of a contracted heart, restoring abandoned hopes, animating new possibilities, taking on different forms but always retaining its wondrous essence.
###
For more information on “The Angel Scroll” and Penelope Holt please visit https://www.penelopeholt.com/
