When I'm zooming along, writing a story, unexpectedly a spiritual issue raises its head.
I'm not at all a religious person; in fact, I am probably closest to being a complete agnostic, or more accurately a
don't-care-ist. It's not that I want to actually declare that
there is no god, but it seems very much a non-issue. But sometimes it becomes important for one of my characters to at least
think about what drove him or her to do something. Of course, this makes
me have to think about it, and I have to temporarily suspend not caring. For instance, I think of Helen as being someone with strong moral values that flows from her religious upbringing. But her mother is dead, and her father is probably an agnostic, though he never gets asked the question. But Helen has strong feelings about things that seem to amount to a de-facto religiousness, and I have to write appropriately.
Most of my other protagonists are essentially non-religious.
Jane, who starts out being a reluctant rebel, quickly reveals herself to be an extremely empathetic woman, who simply can't turn away from a person who needs help. She likes to attend church with her girl friends, but simply to enjoy their company in yet another way. I think she connects church attendance with domesticity, which she craves.
Maia, the slave in
Prisoner, is a sort of religious cynic. Her approach to religion is to consider it a cultural thing, and a soothing ritual. She urges the princess to allow her and her fellow slaves to observe the midwinter Festival of the Sun, simply as a comforting ritual. Remember, this is the Bronze Age, and most people were not accustomed to thinking about religious philosophy. Of course, she was in exile, and I considered that she could easily believe that both her gods and the gods of the local people were in charge, each in their own way. Complicated.
Alexandra, the young queen in the story of that name, is a passive Roman Catholic. (Catholicism has evidently survived into our distant future, and is the state religion in this story set on a colonized planet several centuries in our future.) Being young, and her responsibilities occupying most of her thought processes, with just a little mental energy left over for her to worry about her personal relationships, she has absolutely nothing to spare for religious conjectures.
Helen in
The Music of the Stars is essentially the same Helen as in the Helen stories; she is just technically a different person, because the facts are not consistent. The future of
Stars is much more front and center than the future of
Alexandra, for obvious reasons. In
Alexandra, the fact that the story takes place on another planet only serves to support the fact that
it isn't Earth. In
Stars, the environment of Space, the fact that they're traveling between the stars, is central to the background of the story: we need new thoughts to handle these circumstances! So
Stars-Helen's philosophical base is probably very much like my own: the moral principles that religion supplies —especially Christianity, since that is the most familiar— are crucially important, because shipboard society is so fragile, but the superstitions that accompany religious beliefs are a mere nuisance.
Lalitha, in the Helen stories, and her sister
Sita, are a pair of Indian girls, sisters, who are closely involved with Helen and her activities. Lalitha believed in a very personal god, or rather goddess. Without consciously meaning to, I emphasized the fact that Lalitha saw, in Helen, the goddess Saraswati. This is not too far-fetched; becoming a vehicle for one of the gods is something that many Hindus perceive in people they feel are good, or being good for a particular purpose that they themselves might not be aware of. Because Helen was so good and kind to Lalitha, and because she seemed to glow with unearthly beauty, (and I always imagined Helen as being larger than life,) she immediately concluded that the goddess was residing in Helen. It was always temporary. Sita was an outsider to this whole Goddess business, except that she was horrified when Helen cursed the goddess on one occasion. (Helen disguised herself as a fictitious actress, Sharon, in order to act in a movie that might have compromised her reputation. In the end, her reputation bites the dust anyway, for a mostly unrelated reason.)
Christine and
Kelly, in Christine's Amazing Christmas. These are two young girls, around 15, who are chosen to sing in a Christmas choral festival. They would consider themselves mainline Christians, but ones who are just beginning to look closely at what that means, and how they feel about it.
Of course, each book contains numerous characters, for instance the Czech model, Sofia, with whom Helen's sister Tomasina makes friends over the Internet. Sofia turns out to be an utterly affectionate young woman, a total doll, as they used to say in the fifties. I get the impression that they don't take religion quite as seriously as we do, out there in Eastern Europe; again, it is mostly comforting ritual.
Kay
