Episode 23: Ivan Arthur on his books Pavement Prayers and Saynt Lachmi (Part 2) (March 7, 2023)

WCAT TV is an en air wing of En Route Books and Media working with WCAT Radio to share the joys of the Catholic faith. To support the station, please visit our Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/wcatradioIn this episode of The Catholic Bookworm, Kiki Latimer interviews Ivan Arthur on his books Pavement Prayers and Saynt Lachmi (Part 2)In Pavement Prayers, Kalia confessed to murder last night amid a hushed silence that lasted only a short while before he went into detailed account of the events that led to it . . .Thus begins one of the prayers in this book.This is a book of prayers that tell a story. But, of course, all prayers – all personal prayers – tell stories. Prayer is, in many ways, the spiritualization of incident, and in every fervent prayer one can find a short story of an epic sticking to it. The Mumbai pavement is wonderfully rich in story. For every twenty-or-so-steps that you take over it, your feet could be shuffling through chapters, or, perhaps, volumes of intricate plot, moving human drama and the most thrilling narrative. This book is those twenty-or-so-steps of narrative and plot, the story of a pavement dweller and his patch of pavement told in the most intimate form of narration: his personal prayer.Pavement Prayers | En Route Books and MediaIn Saynt Lachmi, A young street child named Lachmi is whisked into prostitution, rescued, and led by her spirit and providence through the use of her extraordinary gifts to the brink of sainthood. The body, she shows us, is a prism, revealing through its gradations the range between depravity and divinity. What the reader sees through Lachmi is a view of this prism through the side that reveals our divinity, that sees the body as a channel of grace in the manner in which St. John Paul II described in his Theology of the Body, a manner that sanctifies our sexuality, which we so often allow our lust to soil and obliterate.Saynt Lachmi | En Route Books and Media