Litany Of Secrets Book Summary

Tekel: An Investigation of Faith

When many Christians are young, they think that everyone in the world is a Christian. Because they have mostly grown up around Christian people, they know only Christianity. This can lead to many awkward encounters with those of other faith as the children ask their Muslim friends about their favorite Bible story only to find out that their friend does not believe in the Bible. From that moment on, the children wrestle with the reality that everyone does not share the same experiences with faith as they have. The idea of one’s own experience with faith is expounded upon in the book Litany of Secrets by Luke H. Davis. The novel uses the lens of a murder mystery to capture the nuances of one’s relationship with

Basil’s Seminary, which follows to the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity, to examine the death of visiting diocesan treasurer. In order to conduct the investigation more efficiently, Cameron and Tori take up residence at St. Basil’s for its course and while they are there, more murders take place, bringing back memories of painful deaths in Cameron’s past and leading him to continue to question religion. The sight of Father Jonathan’s body, a resident priest who students did not like for some mistakes in his past, causes Cameron to reflect on his life and work as a detective thinking that “what truly bothered him about death was that it brought the past all too close to the present. [...] Now all he had was this vocation. [...] The problem was he didn’t know if he was fighting criminals who took life or fighting a God who supposedly defended life. Or if that God even existed” (Davis 221). While his emotions are understandable given his situation, Cameron’s continued struggle with faith seems to be rooted in his inability to reconcile the past with God. He devotes his entire life to work to reverse and bring justice to death because he of the harm it caused in the past. Cameron’s true problem with religion is not that he does not have the knowledge about the Bible to understand God but rather that he lacks the ability to let go of his past experiences and to look at God without his preconceived notions and biases. This mentality shows itself later in the book with murderer’s inability to forgive Father Jonathan’s pasts sins because they so deeply harmed them. The murderer, known to Tori and Cameron as “Tekel” which means weighed in Hebrew, kills Father Jonathan because they believe he caused all of their problems, just as Cameron turns from God because he blames Him for everything that went wrong in his life. Oftentimes, people become blinded by their past and let it dictate their future actions, as seen through