Welcome to my website!
I am Bradley A. Poole, aspiring fiction writer, traditionally-minded Catholic, and all around odd-ball. I certainly would have to be, to name my blog “The Sword in the Skull.”
For any still reading this, allow me to explain the image. No, it is not satanic or occult. It was actually painted by Blessed Fra Angelico, a Renaissance artist. That beam of wood sticking out of the puddle of blood is the Holy Cross. The blood belongs to Jesus Christ. The hill in which that creepy skull is entombed is Calvary, the Hill of the Skull. And that skull, according to ancient tradition, belongs to Adam. Yes, that Adam.
Whatever the truth of the tradition, the image it paints is a perfect meditation on 1 Corinthians 15:21-22:
“For by a man came death, and by a man the resurrection of the dead. And as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.”
As for the sword, well, did you ever notice how medieval Europeans swords are shaped like crosses?
As prophesized, the Seed of the Woman (Genesis 3:15) strikes the head of the Serpent, with a wooden sword, no less.
This is the sort of thing you can expect here: a kind of traditional, macabre Catholicism. I have no interest in writing stories of “positive messages” or of feel-good, pious sugar. The Catholic Faith certainly has that, but it is not the heart of the matter. The real heart of the Catholic Religion is in the image above: that spectacle of unyielding horror and undiminished beauty that is the death of the God-Man upon an instrument of torture. Human happiness required that sacrifice, that courage to face every evil devised in the darkest hearts of the damned, and from that stupendous conflict Divine Love emerges unconquered, bidding us follow to conquer and rein with Him forever.
These are the stories I tell: mythologies shot through with the grandeur and monstrosity of that supreme sacrifice, with the knowledge that because Light has conquered, we may “go gaily in the dark” (G.K. Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse). It is not my goal to preach a sermon, but to present a worldview, one almost entirely foreign to Modern Man. Whether I produce great art, or at least great entertainment, thereby, let the reader judge.
God Bless.
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