First-time novelist views border crisis through his beliefs
By Stephanie Innes
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
The Rev. Gordon McBride has always had a knack for telling stories to his parishioners, subtly using biblical characters and scenarios in his own modern tales.
It was a natural progression, then, for the 61-year-old rector of Grace St. Paul's Episcopal Church, 2331 E. Adams St., to begin writing down some of his fiction. The result, a novel titled "Flying to Tombstone," was released by Baltimore-based PublishAmerica this month.
"I'm a real believer that fiction is a way of getting closer to the truth, perhaps more than any other kind of writing," McBride said in an interview last week.
And like his sermons, which use stories to relay values and lessons found in the Bible, McBride says his fiction is a way to portray a deeper message. In the case of his book, the message is the crisis of illegal border crossers dying from thirst and heat exhaustion in the Arizona desert.
"I've tried to be fair in treating it. I really have not tried to construct enemies or villains to tear down. In terms of the Border Patrol being bad guys or even vigilantes as a group being bad guys, there are different points of view," McBride said.
"And reality is messy. There aren't just good guys and bad guys. If there's anything about the border that I'd like people to learn, it's that the issue on the border is really complex."
In the novel, a community of faith struggles with how to cope with the border crossers. Though he doesn't mention Tucson's Samaritan Patrol by name, McBride says he very much admires its work. The Samaritan Patrol is a faith-based group that patrols the desert looking for illegal crossers who need water and medical aid.
McBride's novel is also an attempt to put religious fiction from a liberal perspective into a market that he finds saturated with fundamentalist points of view. He doesn't classify his book as a political one, but he stresses that it's impossible to distinguish politics from theology.
"The church as an institution and the state as an institution can be separate, but I don't believe that an active Christian life can be divorced from life in the public arena," said McBride, who spent about two years on his first piece of fiction.
"An active life of faith, whether you are Christian or not, needs to have some kind of conscious presence in the world around them. . . . What I did want to do consciously was to be a writer for the liberal or progressive voice."
In his book, McBride writes the story of an Episcopal priest's move from the Midwest to Arizona with his 9-year-old daughter after the death of his wife. The story takes place during a single season of Lent, and, in addition to the border crisis, the book talks about religion, redemption, love and the priest's passion for flying small planes.
Tucson, Bisbee, Tombstone, Mexico and the Tohono O'odham Reservation are all prominent in the book, which McBride stresses is not an account of his own life, even though he is an Episcopal priest who enjoys flying small planes.
"He is not me. I'm a good bit older, a good bit heavier, shorter. I've never been widowed; we have had entirely different career paths," said McBride, who spent nearly 20 years as a history professor before he became a priest.
Author and noted theologian Marcus Borg has given the book a positive nod, describing McBride's novel as "an exciting addition to religious fiction." And the Massachusetts-based Center for Progressive Christianity has McBride's book on its Web site listing of new releases.
It was Borg's book, "Jesus: A New Vision," that McBride said was a source of his inspiration for "Flying to Tombstone," which intersperses quotations from "The Book of Common Prayer" at the beginning of several chapters.
McBride's wife, Kari Boyd McBride, a University of Arizona women's studies professor, was the book's editor.
Though the book is too new for him to have much feedback right now, McBride is optimistic: He's putting the final touches on a second novel, "The Ghost of Christ's Pieces," and he's writing a "Flying to Tombstone" sequel that will focus on the theological struggle of fundamentalism and mainline Christianity, human greed and the force of "natural evil" as represented in summer wildfires in the Sonoran Desert.