by Nell Gavin
Nevertheless, the story isn’t about Anne and Henry. It isn’t even about reincarnation. Those are just two of the allegorical layers – and many people have liked, or even loved the book without looking past them. Threads in its entirety is about spiritual evolution in one lifetime or many, and about how difficult the growth process is. It’s about good and bad, right and wrong, and learning the difference. It’s about personal accountability and obligation. It’s also about love – each of the characters in the book represents a different aspect of love – and how it never dies, even when it disguises itself as hatred.
All of my life I’d been exposed to truisms, just as everyone else has. These come in a number of forms, most frequently in timeworn sayings, such as “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” or “Power corrupts.”
Other times the truth comes to us in books with eye-opening morals, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or in books with haunting beauty and hope in the face of obscene ugliness, like “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.”
Millions of people read books or watch movies that have the potential to inspire or teach. Millions of people proclaim themselves devout followers of this religion or that, and can repeat the teachings of those religions verbatim without prompting. Everyone hears, and can recite, the timeworn sayings. It is NOT as if people aren’t thoroughly exposed to these truths and these morals.
What bothered me was how infrequently people actually listened to these truisms, and actually lived their religions, and actually learned from the morals of the stories they’d read. Even though everyone can quote, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” for instance, most people don’t believe it. They still judge people by their shoes or their hairstyles or their clothing or their careers. They care about the kinds of cars they drive. They value that cutthroat, embezzling Wall Street broker and his millions of dollars (provided he doesn’t get caught – which immediately turns a “winner” into a “loser”, and nobody likes a loser) more than the teacher, or the woman whose endless patience got that autistic child to speak, or the man who serves food to the homeless in a soup kitchen. Given a choice, they’ll take money over friendship, without even taking the time or making the effort toward any internal soul searching. They judge and dismiss and ridicule and condemn, see themselves as good people with value, and make value judgments about everyone else based on superficial things. They use a measuring stick of “success” and gauge the worth of the people they meet by how popular they are, how pretty, how much they earn, and how enviable their situations are.
I saw this, and lived it, and experienced it and got tired. In short, I lost patience with people when they acted like jerks and wrote a book. In writing that book I reminded myself and came to terms with the fact that we're, each of us, a work in progress. It was a cathartic effort.
I found a philosophy, reincarnation, which makes those truisms and morals real. Whether or not you believe in the mechanics of reincarnation, its philosophical viewpoint uses a measuring stick that is very closely aligned to the underlying message of every major religion and every basic moral code. It makes adhering to those truths and messages a tangible thing with tangible consequences. For that reason, it was a useful literary device in the story I wanted to tell.
In essence, Threads is a reminder to everyone using the measuring stick of “success” that, when you use a DIFFERENT measuring stick – probably the same one your religion uses – you have less reason to feel smug and self-satisfied because of material things…or, as the case may be, to feel like a failure.
The book doesn't preach; it just offers up another way of looking at life.
If you’re reading Threads the way I hoped you would and keep that measuring stick with you at all times until you’re finished, you will catch the message. If you aren't and don’t, it’s still a nice story about the reincarnation of Anne Boleyn.
Thanks to all of you who have written! I LOVE hearing from you!!!
The Author
Nell Gavin is married, with two grown children. She was raised in Chicago, spent many years in Texas, and now lives in Oklahoma.
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Table of Contents
PART 1
PART 3
PART 4
PART 5
PART 6
PART 6
PART 7
THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
