Lamplight 02: Notes on June and the First Week of July
Two Lamps Companion - Issues 05 through 09 - June and early July 2026
Dear friend,
Welcome back.
This is the second Lamplight. The first one ran long because it had to do introductory work. This one will be shorter, which means about three thousand five hundred words rather than four thousand seven hundred, although when I begin to write about the saints I tend to find more to say than I had planned. I will keep that in mind. We have five stories to cover.
A small word about scope before I begin. Lamplight covers every Friday story published since the previous Lamplight. So this one covers June’s four issues - Charles Lwanga and Justin, Ephrem and Anthony, Romuald and Aloysius, Lawrence and Francis - and the first July issue, Thomas the Apostle and Alphonsa of India, which arrived this past Friday. You will have read that one only four days ago. I will treat it with the same care as the others, but I will not try to summarize it for you as though you had not just read it. The freshness of it in your mind is a good thing.
I should also tell you what kind of month it has been on this end of the work. I spent a week of it on a cruise with our family, which was a long-planned thing and a needed one, and the Friday stories went out during our travel as I had scheduled them before leaving. Issue 06 did not quite go out, in fact - I had drafted it but had not scheduled it properly before we left and returned, and I was so relaxed when we came back that I forgot and had to publish it a few hours late on the Friday it was due. I tell you this because the publication kit calls for honesty in the back room, and the honest fact is that a man building a new publication can let a Friday slip during his vacation if he is not careful. It will not happen again. The lamp is supposed to be tended.
Now, the five stories.
Issue 05: The Water at Munyonyo
Saint Charles Lwanga and Saint Justin Martyr.
This story was hard to write in a way I did not expect. The hardness was not the research, which is well-documented in the Acts of Justin and in the various early Jesuit and White Father accounts of the Uganda Martyrs. The hardness was the discipline of not making it sentimental. The Uganda Martyrs are perhaps the most dramatically intense story in modern African Catholic history - young men burned alive at Namugongo for refusing the king - and the temptation when writing them is to make the reader weep without earning the weeping. I did not want to do that. The thirty-one boys in the long room did not weep on the page. They did not cry out. They came forward, one by one, to receive the water, and they went away again. The restraint is the witness.
What surprised me was Justin’s hand. There is a moment in the story where Charles is afraid that the water in the gourd will run out before all twelve catechumens are baptized, and Justin reaches over and lays his hand on Charles’s wrist, and the water does not run out. This was not in any draft. I did not know it was going to happen until my own hand wrote it. I have been thinking about it since. I think what the small detail does is tell the reader that Justin’s role in the story is not to teach Charles theology - it is to be physically present to a work that is being performed under enormous pressure. The hand on the wrist is everything. The Communion of Saints is not abstract. The saints lay hands on us when our hands are about to give out.
What I cut: a long passage in which Justin recounts his own death at the hands of the prefect Junius Rusticus in Rome in 165. It was historically accurate. It was theologically resonant. It was too much. The story is about Charles, not about Justin, and Justin’s death is something the reader can carry in without having it laid out. I cut almost six hundred words. The cut taught me something useful: when a saint visits another saint, the visitor must hold back what would otherwise want to be a full memoir. The visit is not for the visitor.
What I want to say about the historical Charles Lwanga: he was twenty-six years old when he died. He had been a catechist for less than two years. He was responsible, in the period between the beheading of Joseph Mukasa in November 1885 and his own death at Namugongo in June 1886, for catechizing and secretly baptizing many of the young men who would die with him. The historical record is clear that he did baptize catechumens on the night before the march to Namugongo, in conditions essentially as the story renders them. The detail about Mbaga Tuzinde being the son of Mukajanga the chief executioner is historically accurate. I have not invented this. Some things are stranger than fiction.
The story also includes, in the closing footer, an invitation to support the Archdiocese of Mbarara Foundation at 4mbarara.org. I serve as President of that foundation. I want you to know, in this back room, that I do not casually attach calls to action to my fiction. The footer is there because the story is about the Ugandan Church, because the Ugandan Church is still being built today, and because the work of the modern foundation is the direct continuation of what Charles and his brothers began. If a few readers gave because of the story, the giving is part of what the story is for. If no one gave, the story is still what it is. The asking is not the meaning. But the asking is honest.
Issue 06: The Hum at Camposampiero
Saint Ephrem the Syrian and Saint Anthony of Padua.
I had been waiting to write a quiet story.
The first five issues had all happened on the edge of something terrible. Stein on the night before the train. Joan in the field after the jump. Newman in the carriage of his old age. Margaret Pole at the hour of her execution. Charles in the night before the march. Each one carried real weight, and each one carried it well, but I had begun to worry that Two Lamps would settle into a single mood - intense, late-in-the-life, on-the-eve-of-something. I wanted to find out whether the project could also do quiet.
Anthony and Ephrem turned out to be the way in. Anthony is dying, yes, but not in crisis. He has weeks left, not hours. He is in a small chapel on a summer afternoon at La Verna’s quieter cousin, the hermitage at Camposampiero, with a walnut tree outside the door and a small bar of late light on the stone floor. Ephrem comes in and hums. The whole story turned on that hum. The hum was the texture I had been looking for. Two Lamps could be quiet. The Communion of Saints could be quiet. Saints could visit each other not in extremis but in the slow afternoons.
What I cut: about four hundred words at the end where Anthony reflects, internally, on what it has meant to be visited by an Eastern brother. The reflection was true to who Anthony was but it was Anthony explaining the story to the reader, which is a thing I do not want stories to do. I cut it. I let the closing image of the walnut tree and the brothers going down the stone path do the work. The reader can do the reflecting; the story should not.
What surprised me: the dryness of Ephrem’s humor. I had expected an Eastern hermit to be solemn. The historical Ephrem was apparently not solemn - the Syriac hagiographical tradition gives him a wry tongue, and the bnoth qyama (daughters of the covenant) whom he formed into singing choirs are remembered as joyful even in difficult conditions. I let Ephrem be a little funny. “They do not undeacon you in the place where I am now.“ “It would be tiresome to know everything.“ These small lines were the most enjoyable to write in the whole issue.
I want to say something theological about this issue that I think matters. The Western Catholic imagination, especially the American Catholic imagination, has a habit of underestimating the Eastern Catholic churches. We forget the Maronites and the Syro-Malabars and the Melkites and the Chaldeans. We forget that the Catholic Church is bigger than the Roman rite. Ephrem of Edessa is a Doctor of the Church. He has been since 1920. Most American Catholics could not tell you who he was. Two Lamps will continue, quietly, to push back on this. Issue 09 (Thomas and Alphonsa) is the most recent push. There will be more. I think this is part of what the project is for.
Issue 07: The Infirmary in Rome
Saint Romuald and Saint Aloysius Gonzaga.
This is the story I most want a particular kind of reader to read.
The reader I have in mind is the modern Catholic who has spent years wondering whether the shape of his life has been the shape the Lord wanted, who has compared his active vocation - in business, in family, in the world - with the contemplative vocation of monks and hermits, and who has come away suspecting that the contemplatives are doing the real work and that he himself has been compromising with the world for the sake of convenience. I know this reader because I have been him. I think many of us have.
The story is Romuald’s answer to that worry. The old hermit, who spent fifty-five years in the cells of the Apennines, comes to the dying young Jesuit who spent his eight years of formation in the plague houses of Rome. The hermit says: we did not do the same work, brother. We did the opposite work. The opposite work is the same work. The Lord does not need everyone to be Romuald. The Lord needs each of us to refuse what is not Him, and to go where He sends us. The going is the office. The where is not the office. The shape He gives each of us is the shape He wanted from us.
I think this is one of the most theologically important sentences Two Lamps has produced so far. It is also one of the most pastorally useful. I am giving it to you in Lamplight because I would like you to carry it with you the next time you wonder whether your life has been wasted on something other than what you imagined as a young person. It probably has not been. The Lord uses what is given to Him.
What I cut: about three hundred words at the beginning in which Aloysius reflects on his father’s purchase of his court position at age nine. It was historically accurate and contributed to the renunciation-of-patrimony theme, but it pulled the focus away from the cell where the story actually takes place. The cell is where the story is. The reader needs to be in the cell, not in the back-story.
What surprised me: how much Romuald wanted to be funny. He was, by all historical accounts, a severe man, and I had written him severe through most of the story, and then at the end he gave Aloysius the small dry humor about how the hermits of the Apennines know about everything because we are paid to know. I had not planned the joke. He simply said it. He was, it turns out, like Ephrem - a saint with a dryness in him that the icon-painters never quite captured. I am noticing, several issues in, that the historical saints were funnier than they are remembered. I think this matters. The Lord laughed, Thomas told Alphonsa. So did His friends.
Issue 08: The Mountain at La Verna
Saint Lawrence of Rome and Saint Francis of Assisi.
This is the issue I wrote with the most weight on me.
It published Friday, June 26 - the fifth anniversary of my ordination to the diaconate. The pairing of Lawrence and Francis was intentional - two of the great deacon saints of the Catholic tradition, separated by nine hundred years, both having lived the office in radically different ways.
I have been a deacon for five years now. Before I was a deacon I was many other things - an Adobe executive for eighteen years, a husband, a father of four sons, a Knight of Columbus, an Eagle Scout. The diaconate did not replace any of those things. It is not a step on a stair. It is a third order, alongside the priesthood and the laity, and it has its own shape. The shape, for me, has been about the body. The bread at the altar, when I assist. The lepers of my own century, who do not look like the lepers of Francis’s century but who are still there, in the small offices of the parish and the family rooms and the hospitals and the prisons. The dead, when I bury them. The body of the parish, when I preach. The body has been my office. I had not always known how to say this. The story said it for me.
The line I have not been able to stop thinking about is the line Francis says to Lawrence near the middle: Deacon is the name for the man who washes the lepers. I think that line will travel. I hope I will hear it quoted back to me, some day, by another deacon who read this issue and recognized himself in it. That is what stories can do. The saints are the medium. The doctrine of the office travels through them.
I want to say one more thing about the anniversary. When I consider Lawrence’s line near the end of the story - the deacons of the centuries to come are already being prepared - I remember that I am part of a long line. The line includes Lawrence, who was grilled in Rome in 258. It includes Francis, who washed lepers in Umbria in the early 1200s. It includes the deacons of every century in between - the ones who served at the great basilicas of Constantinople, the ones who served at parish churches in medieval France, the ones who served at mission stations in the Americas, the ones who served at the cathedrals of nineteenth-century Europe, the ones who were ordained in the renewal of the permanent diaconate after Vatican II, the ones being ordained this morning somewhere in the world, the ones not yet born. The line is real. I am on it. The five years I have been ordained are five years of being on a line that began with Stephen and will not end until the Lord comes back. I had not always felt the line. I felt it that night. I felt it again on the morning of June 26 when the story published. I am still feeling it now.
Thank you, brother deacons, for being on the line with me.
And thank you, Lawrence and Francis, for the visit.
Issue 09: The Convent at Bharananganam
Saint Thomas the Apostle and Saint Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception.
You received this one only a few days ago. I will be brief.
The story does something Two Lamps had not done before: it goes to India. I had been wanting to push the project geographically since Issue 06, when Ephrem the Syrian opened the East to us, but Ephrem’s story is set in Italy, not in Syria. Issue 09 is actually set in Kerala. The Bharananganam convent is real. The infirmary cell is renderable from photographs. The polished red oxide floor that I describe in the story - if you have ever been in a Kerala house or convent, you know that floor. The brass ceiling fan that is not turning is the kind of brass ceiling fan you would have found in a Franciscan Clarist convent in 1946. The coconut palm beyond the wall is what is actually there.
The theological premise of the story is exact: Thomas the Apostle, according to the unbroken tradition of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, arrived in Kerala in AD 52 and was martyred at Mylapore in AD 72. Alphonsa was the first canonized saint of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church. She was therefore, in a real historical sense, the first canonized fruit of Thomas’s nineteen-hundred-year-old planting. The story imagines Thomas coming to attend her on the night before her death. This is not a poetic conceit. This is the doctrine of the Communion of Saints applied to a real historical lineage. The apostle is still attending the church he founded. The first canonized daughter of that church was attended by him before she went home.
What I wrote most carefully: the line Thomas gives Alphonsa about the Lord’s laughter. I knew when I started the story that I wanted Thomas to give her something only an apostle could give - something specific to having walked with the Lord in the body. The choice was to give her the laughter. The theological warrant is real (Clement of Alexandria argued that Christ laughed; von Balthasar argued it; the medieval painted tradition of the perpetually-sorrowful Christ is a partial distortion). The pastoral warrant is real also: many dying Catholics have asked, at the end, what will He be like. The answer to give them is that He laughs. He has been laughing for two thousand years. The laughing is the welcome.
What the five reveal together
A few things I am noticing after this month.
The first is that Two Lamps now has a vocabulary. Certain phrases are recurring. The lamp burns out at dawn, as lamps do has appeared at the close of several issues. The room above the room (from Issue 10’s Kateri, which will publish next week but which I am already thinking about) is a phrase I expect to use again. The not-knowing is enough (from Issue 02’s Matthias) recurred in Issue 07 when Romuald says the not-knowing of what you have done is a mercy. These are not quotations the saints are making of each other. They are phrases the project is generating as it goes. I think a publication that runs long enough generates its own vocabulary. Two Lamps is starting to do this. I think it is a good sign.
The second is that the Communion of Saints is bigger than I had been giving it credit for. The first month of the project was Western - Holland, France, England. The second month opened East and South. We have now been to Uganda, to Syria-by-way-of-Italy, to Italy, to Italy, to India. Each time the project leaves Western Europe, it gets larger in a way that is not just geographical. It gets larger in who counts as a saint to write about. I had been raised, like most American Catholics, on the Western lives. I am beginning to understand that the Western lives are perhaps one-third of what is there. Two Lamps will continue going out. There will be a Maronite story before the year is out. There will be a Chaldean story. There will, eventually, be a Japanese story and a Korean story and a Vietnamese story. The Catholic Church is much larger than the parish bulletin or the statues around the sanctuary and nave generally imply. The saints have been quietly waiting to be visited.
The third is that this project has changed my prayer in a particular way. I said something about this in Lamplight 01. I want to say it again with a small refinement. The change is not that I am praying more. The change is that I am praying to specific people more often. Before this project, my prayer to the saints was generic - all you holy men and women, pray for us. It was a list I prayed at, not a community I prayed with. Since the project began, I have been praying specifically to the saints I have been writing about, by name, daily. Aquinas. Stein. Matthias. Joan. Vincent. Newman. Edith of Wilton. Margaret Pole. Justin. Lwanga. Ephrem. Anthony of Padua. Romuald. Aloysius. Lawrence. Francis. Thomas. Alphonsa. The list grows by two each Friday. The list is a real community. They are praying for me. I am praying for you. The communion is practical. I had been told this since I was a child. I had not lived it the way I am living it now. I tell you in case the same thing is happening to you, in the back of your reading. The saints become real when you spend time with them. Two Lamps is a way of spending time with them. The time is doing something.
A look ahead
This Friday, July 10, you will receive Issue 10 - The Room in Turin, featuring Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati and Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. Two laypeople who died at twenty-four, one in 1680 and one in 1925. I think you will like it. The motto Verso l’alto - “to the heights” - has been with me a long time, and I am glad to put it into a story.
The rest of July:
Friday, July 17: Issue 11 - Saint Benedict of Nursia and Saint Brigid of Kildare, the small wooden cell at the monastery of Kildare, Ireland, an evening in the late summer of 524. Two near-contemporary monastic founders, Italy meeting Ireland.
Friday, July 24: Issue 12 - Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Charbel Makhluf, the hermitage at Annaya, Mount Lebanon. Two contemplatives across eighteen hundred years.
Friday, July 31: Issue 13 - Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Bridget of Sweden, the small room at the Society’s headquarters in Rome, 1556. Two mystics who used vivid imagination as a path to God.
Lamplight 03 will arrive on Tuesday, August 4, covering July’s remaining four issues.
A closing word
Thank you for being here. Lamplight is for you, and it is also for me - the thinking-out-loud helps me see what the project is becoming, and that seeing makes the next month’s stories better. If you have notes, please send them. Some of what was in this issue came from a reader who wrote in after Issue 03 to ask about Newman’s seven notes of authentic development. I had not been going to write about Newman in Lamplight 02 at the length I did in Lamplight 01, but the reader’s question made me think more carefully about how Two Lamps handles theological substance, and that thinking shaped a few of the choices in Issue 07 and Issue 09. You are part of the writing. The lamp burns because of all of us.
Until Tuesday, August 4, may the saints we have read together pray for you - and for me.
Pax,
Deacon Michael Halbrook
Two Lamps is a weekly short story braiding the lives of two or three saints across the centuries. The Friday stories are free. Lamplight is the monthly companion piece for paid subscribers, arriving the first Tuesday of each month.
Two Lamps is written by Deacon Michael Halbrook, a permanent deacon of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, serving at St. Elizabeth Parish in Granite City. He writes personally at DeaconMichael.net, serves families through Domus Formation, and publishes the serial novel Ordo: A Chronicle of Lux Perpetua at LuxPerpetua.net. Two Lamps is co-conceived with his son Joseph.