The Cruciform Key

How do you get to a place you don't know, by a way you don't know? St. John of the Cross asked it from a prison cell in Toledo in 1577. Matthew Cross stumbles toward an answer in parish bulletins and lottery tickets.

When a dying professor hands Matthew Cross a velvet pouch and tells him to buy a lottery ticket, a chain of events begins that a Tribune journalist cannot file under coincidence - no matter how hard she tries.

What follows is forty days - a philosophy teacher who finds forgotten needs in church bulletins and offers anonymous lottery tickets, a journalist who has been standing in the doorway of faith for twenty-two years, a hedge fund manager tracking a statistical pattern he doesn't understand, and an ancient artifact hidden in a Yale archive since 1932.

The Cruciform Key moves from the archives of Yale to the monasteries of Texas to the ancient calculations that guided three kings to a stable in Bethlehem - and beneath all of it asks the question every restless soul eventually arrives at:

What if God has been pursuing you all along - in the only language you would notice?

A novel about encountering God in the ordinary things you almost drive past without looking.