We remember Palm Sunday and Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost, but we forget the ten days between the Ascension and the coming of the Spirit, when the eleven sat together in Jerusalem with the doors closed and the future unopened. They had been told to wait. They had not been told what they were waiting for. They knew only that something was coming, and that they were not yet ready to receive it, and that their readiness was not the point. The Spirit would come when the Spirit came. Their work was to remain in the room.

I have been thinking about that room.

My last day at Adobe was last week. Eighteen years ended quietly, the way long things end, with emails and video calls and people saying kind things I wrote down because I want to grow into them. The calendar is different now. The inbox is different. The shape of the days has changed in ways I am still learning to notice.

Now I know what I am building. I know why I am building it. But there is a difference between knowing the direction and inhabiting the motion, and I have not yet crossed from one to the other. I am in the room. The doors are closed. The Spirit has not yet descended on the new thing in the way the Spirit descends when the new thing is fully alive.

This is not a complaint. It is a location.

In 1994, at an Order of the Arrow vigil in the woods of southern Illinois, a group of my peers gave me a name. They did not know they were prophesying. They were teenage boys following a ritual, choosing words that seemed to fit the quiet kid who read too much and wrote things down. They called me Diligent Writer.

I carried that name for thirty years without fully knowing what to do with it. I wrote a Theme Show for the Order of the Arrow's national conferences. I wrote emails and strategy documents and performance reviews. I wrote homilies after I was ordained. I wrote blog posts and newsletters and reflections that people seemed to find helpful. But the name sat in me like a seed that had not yet found its soil, and I wondered sometimes whether the boys in the woods had seen something that would never fully arrive.

This year the seed is sprouting.

Last week I launched a project called Two Lamps.

It is a weekly short story, published every Friday morning, that braids the lives of two or three saints from different centuries into a single narrative. Saints who never met in life but whose charisms answer one another when imagined together. Thomas Aquinas sitting with Edith Stein in the library at Echt, the night before the Gestapo came. Vincent of Lérins boarding a train in 1888 to ask Cardinal Newman what he meant by development of doctrine. Matthias appearing to Joan of Arc in the field below the tower at Beaurevoir, to tell her about another time the eleven had to choose.

The stories are fiction. The Communion of Saints is not. The doctrine holds that the saints are alive, that they pray for us, that the Church on earth and the Church in heaven are one body across time. I am not inventing meetings. I am imagining what the meetings might look like if we could see them, which we cannot, which does not mean they are not happening.

The first four issues are live. The second publishes this Friday. I do not know yet how long the project will run. I know only that it is the kind of writing I was named for, and that the name is finally finding its soil.

There is another project, older and stranger, called Lux Perpetua.

It is a serial novel unfolding in two tracks - one set in the present day, one reaching back seven centuries. A man inherits his grandfather's house in Alton, Illinois, and finds something in the basement that changes everything he thought he knew. The story is about custody and memory and the ordering of the world under God. It is about what has been lost and what has been kept and what might yet be recovered.

I have been building toward this novel for a long time. The name Diligent Writer was given in 1994. The story began to take shape in 2018. The first chapters published this spring. The seed is in the ground. The shoots are above the soil. I do not yet know what the full plant will look like.

I am telling you about these projects because they are where the writing is going. The newsletter you are reading, the homilies I preach, the reflections I post - these are not going away. But they are no longer the center. The center is shifting toward the fiction, toward the long-form work, toward the thing the name was pointing at all along.

This is what the upper room is for. The disciples did not know, in those ten days, what the Spirit would empower them to do. They knew only that they had been told to wait, and that the waiting was not wasted time. The waiting was preparation. The waiting was the final loosening of their grip on the old thing so that their hands would be open to receive the new.

I am in the room. The doors are closed. The Spirit is moving in ways I can feel but cannot yet describe.

Pentecost is this Sunday.

The same Spirit who descended on the eleven will descend again, as He descends every year, as He descends every day on those who ask. I do not know what He will set on fire this time. I know only that He is not finished, and that the waiting is not wasted, and that the name given in the woods twenty-two years ago is finally becoming what it was always meant to become.

If you want to see where the writing is going, here is where to look:

TwoLamps.org - Weekly short fiction braiding the lives of the saints. Free to read. Fridays at 6 AM Central.

LuxPerpetua.net - The serial novel. Present-day mystery meets seven centuries of history. The light that was never put out.

The upper room is not a place of despair. It is a place of attention. The disciples were not idle in those ten days. They were praying. They were waiting. They were keeping the doors closed until the doors were blown open.

That is where I am.

Come and see what happens next.