The way that history repeats itself brings Diana DeLuca serious angst — and deep personal comfort.
That’s because DeLuca believes that it’s not only societal problems and ignorant patterns that cycle and recycle over time. It’s individual human beings. Each and every one of us.
DeLuca was born in England and raised in the reformed church there, but she’s always preferred the mysticism of the East, where faith in reincarnation is pretty standard. It’s not just a matter of wishing to cheat death, as anyone might, she said — it’s based on personal experience.
When DeLuca was a girl, she used to accompany her mother, a nurse, on rounds caring for dying patients. She witnessed some inexplicable things while people were struggling through their last gasps, she said — including detailed visions of other times and places and, one time in particular, definite visitations by bodies and voices that simply could not have been there.
DeLuca didn’t used to share these shady experiences. She grew up to be a college professor and scholar of the Italian Renaissance. Scholars like details, evidence and facts, not ghosts and miracles.
But then, while they were living in Denver, DeLuca’s husband died of lung cancer. During his final decline, he described what some would consider “morphine dreams” but DeLuca believes were far more profound: detailed views of a former self. On a Civil War battlefield, she said. Bringing supplies to troops.
It would have been easy to shrug off this end-of-life reverie, DeLuca said, except for the way it resembled her mother’s patients’ mystical experiences. In the end, DeLuca’s late husband learned something important about the larger meaning of his life; his surviving wife firmed up a decidedly non-Western faith in reincarnation and “soul groups.”
That’s not Sly & The Family Stone or Earth, Wind & Fire; “soul groups” means clusters of individual beings who remain linked together, and who reincarnate together, across many lifetimes. They’ll change identities and roles from life to life — so it’s possible that your current child used to be your parent, and your wife was your husband, and your brother was your sister. The exact working science behind all this is, as you can imagine, ever so slightly ambiguous. DeLuca knows that Western religions scoff at such ideas.
But to many Eastern sects, such beliefs may seem no more fantastical than, for example, the resurrection of Jesus or the transubstantiation of bread and wine into his flesh and blood.
Death and freedom
DeLuca, who lives in east Vancouver, spent 10 years blending a version of her husband’s death and her own Renaissance scholarship into a uniquely gripping philosophical story called “A Dream of Shadows: A Novel of Reincarnation.”
In it, Bill del Veccio is not only dying — he despairs that he’s been a remote father and husband, and his life amounts to nothing in the end. His Catholicism has long since lapsed, but his old-fashioned mother is observant of every church rule to the point of near-panic, especially now. A hospice nurse is helping Bill and his family through the physical and emotional pain of these last days.
Bill’s wife, Anna, is a college professor who tries to save her sanity during this crisis by being a model wife while also pursuing her own work. That’s research into a real Italian Renaissance figure, a radical professor and orator named Aonio Paleario.
Imagine Bill’s amazement, then, as doses of morphine start transporting him to the Paleario home, circa 1570, where he watches the free-thinking rebel strive to preserve the real meaning of his life: intellectual freedom. Paleario famously challenged Catholic Church doctrine and even assented to being tried by the Italian Inquisition because he thought he could reason with the pope.
“Human beings are responsible for their own souls,” he argues in DeLuca’s book.
One bishop gently retorts: “I have never known the church to entertain the possibility of being wrong.” And then things start getting ugly for Paleario — and his family.
Ugly and wonderful
In a world of chaos and ambiguity, that bishop insists, what people want is certainty and safety. They must be told what to believe, what the rules are and how they’ll get to heaven.
This was especially true after the dramatic Sack of Rome in 1527, DeLuca said, when the center of the Christian universe was besieged and the population decimated. Then-pope Clement VII surrendered, ransomed his own life and eventually fled.
Unscrupulous political leaders have long known, DeLuca said, that the best way to unite and recover after such a disaster is scapegoating and misdirection: ” ‘How could God let this happen? God must be punishing us for tolerating heretics. Let’s declare war on them. Our tribe must defeat their tribe.’ ” Never mind the failings and corruption of the church itself, she said; hangings and burnings have a miraculous way of focusing the mind.
“The Catholic Church decided that the people’s only stability would be the Catholic Church,” she said. “It must not be undermined.”
There are too many parallels with the modern world, DeLuca said — like the misguided American invasion of Iraq, and political leaders who vow to build walls and keep “that other tribe” out. That’s the terrifying part of history repeating itself, she said.
The part that delights DeLuca is her faith in “soul groups” extending past this lifetime, she said. “It’s wonderful if you can open yourself to this kind of thinking,” she said.
This novel “is a very heavy book,” DeLuca acknowledged. With its unflinching, overlapping examinations of suffering and death, faith and reason, reincarnation and self-discovery, families in crisis and violent historical upheaval, it never found a willing publisher. So DeLuca published it herself, and also submitted “A Dream of Shadows” to the Reader Views Literary Choice Awards, which honor self-published books. It won first place in the “Relationships and Spirituality” category for 2015.
You can find “A Dream of Shadows” at Amazon.com. Meanwhile, DeLuca said she’s working on two more novels: just-good-fun murder mysteries.
