THE LETTER
A Novel
A sequel to The Forbidden Sermons — by Mike Hillebrecht
Leon Scheffield, 68, a Vietnam veteran turned itinerant preacher, has spent twelve years driving from one dying congregation to the next, delivering a single unrepeatable sermon that leaves each church permanently changed. He never returns anywhere, and he has let almost no one close since Carl Jenson — the mentor who trained him — died eleven years ago, three weeks after writing Leon a letter whose meaning Leon still hasn’t fully found.
Then a letter arrives from a stranger, Marguerite Fontaine: a composer who has moved through six Christian traditions in thirty years, unable to stay in any of them, and who has spent seven years unable to finish a piece of sacred music she can hear in her head but not on the page. She isn’t asking Leon to bring her anywhere. She’s asking him to sit at the table with her — the same phrase, nearly word for word, that closed Carl’s last letter. She has no idea who Carl was. When Leon meets her that same afternoon, she accounts for her whole religious history — Catholic in Quebec, Baptist in Charlotte, Methodist in Cincinnati, Pentecostal in Columbus, a progressive justice community in San Francisco, Reformed in Portland, and back, uneasily, to a Catholic parish three miles from Leon’s apartment. Leon names what she’s been circling without knowing its name: chesed, the love that does not stop being what it is, present before any tradition existed to point toward it.
Over the year that follows, Leon’s circuit becomes a series of encounters that will not let him alone. In Asheville, a dying Reformed elder named Howard Marsh asks him plainly what was there before he believed, and Leon’s best answer isn’t enough. In San Antonio, a Pentecostal worship leader named Yvonne Castellanos watches a room fall silent, unbidden, for four full minutes, and asks Leon why the presence she trusts still feels absent most mornings. In San Francisco, a progressive pastor named Daniel Chen — who never agreed to see Leon, until Marguerite arranged it behind both their backs — comes to understand that the forty people who still show up to his shattered community were never a failure. In Memphis, a furious, dying Baptist deacon named Raymond Fletcher refuses every sermon Leon has ever given; Leon sits with him in near-silence for two hours and finally says the word aloud for the first time in his ministry. Raymond dies within hours of Leon’s departure. In Portland, a Catholic priest named Tomás Villanueva asks Leon to witness his decision to report a diocese’s decades-old cover-up of abuse. And in Minneapolis, a United Methodist bishop named Elaine Hartwell — leading a congregation through a bruising denominational split — is in the room when Leon, addressing her congregation, stops mid-sentence, having arrived at the exact edge of the thing he has spent the whole year circling, unable to say it there.
Through every encounter, Marguerite keeps appearing — in back pews, in worship services, gone before Leon can reach her, always already connected to the people he is about to meet in ways neither of them can fully explain.
From the Minneapolis airport, Leon calls Tim Bussle, the pastor he changed eight years earlier, and asks him to gather everyone at his kitchen table in the small town of Clairmont: Tim, his wife Sarah, Bill Jensen — a hundred-year-old D-Day veteran who has carried something wordless since the night before the invasion — and Marguerite. Bill tells the story he has never told anyone. And Leon finally gives the address he has spent his whole life becoming capable of giving: the prior grace not as a destination reached at the end of a sermon, but as the ground that was always underneath it — underneath every room, every tradition, every collapse the year has shown him.
Marguerite finishes the composition she could not complete for seven years, right there at the table, and hands it to Tim for his choir. Bill dies three weeks later, at peace, having finally heard the word for what happened to him in 1944. And in the novel’s closing pages, a new letter arrives for someone else entirely — written in a stranger’s hand, carrying the same phrase down an unbroken chain from the preacher in Clairmont, through Marguerite, to a name neither of them will ever meet.
The chain continues.