“It is a complex situation and a volatile one,” O'Brien said. “Pope Benedict has said very clearly that what is needed in the Middle East is a just solution for the three major parties, Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian people.”

“This will take much prayer and sacrifice because the spirit of hatred and murder is at work,” he said.

O’Brien rejects either/or solutions that resemble choices between the devil and the deep blue sea.  He said there is a third, God-given alternative that must be sought.

“Hezbollah are clearly the bad guys in the present situation,” he said, but  Israel and Western nations must be extremely careful about resorting to a lesser evil to stamp out a bigger evil.

An interview with the internet journal Ignatius Insight, on the writing of Sophia House and other  novels in The Children of the Last Days series.
 
Ignatius Insight:  Sophia House is the sixth novel in the series. How has that series of novels evolved over time? What has surprised you or intrigued you about the development of the series over the years?

Michael O’Brien: In the late 1970s I wrote two novels, A Cry of Stone and Strangers and Sojourners, simply responding to an interior prompting to write down these stories which just kept fountaining up in my imagination. They were overtly Catholic in content, and I was young enough, naïve enough too, to think it was possible for them to be published in Canada. Over more than a decade I amassed a hefty collection of rejection letters from publishers, who usually said something like, “Loved the characters and the writing, but the reading public is no longer interested in this worldview.” Translation: no orthodox Catholic vision of reality is acceptable in the mainstream of culture. I didn’t even ponder venturing south of the border, just tucked my novels away in a box, chalking it up to experience, an exercise in writing, and no more. Years later a friend high up in the Canadian literary establishment, who was himself an agnostic, assured me with utmost conviction that the problem with my books was their Catholic vision.

Everywhere I go I meet incredibly gifted young people in all the arts, yet the overwhelming majority of them feel that they have no hope for realizing their talents. This is a colossal tragedy and loss for the Church and the world. We are not producing a culture of life because we are not willing to pay the price. And therein lies our problem. Catholic people want God and Mammon. This is our crisis and this is our test. By and large, Catholics and Christians as a whole are failing their test.

There are consequences to this failure. Each generation has less and less genuine culture, each coming generation feeds more and more on false culture, or at least on corrupt or greatly flawed culture, and thus each generation becomes less able to recognize truth and to understand the nature of love. It’s a two-fold problem. Gifted people must be willing to respond to God’s call to engage, sacrifice, and commit their lives to creating no matter what the cost, and to entrust their lives and their vocations to God. Parallel with this, our people (the non-artists) must understand that unless we support genuine Christian culture, the next generation is going to be starved at some fundamental level.