Joe Niemczura

The Sacrament of the Goddess Joe Niemczura

Matt is a pre-med student from Dartmouth who wants to improve his medical school admission chances by travelling in a Low Income Country over the summer break.  What starts as a simple plan goes horribly wrong.  Ten years later he is still picking up the pieces from that fateful summer.           

      The Sacrament of the Goddess is an international thriller set in the last absolute Hindu kingdom on earth at the time the monarchy was ending. Under the shadow of the Himalayas and a dazzling multicultural background, a small group of doctors deliver care at a missionary hospital where there is only one missionary left.  The Sacrament of the Goddess reveals events of the Nepal civil war in layers, as we meet the medical team of Beni Nepal and see it through their eyes. 
   
Superficially, it is a classic story of star-crossed lovers, but the events unfold partly in real time and partly as flashbacks - memories that may or may not have happened, meanings that only reveal themselves through anguish or tears.

At it's core The Sacrament of the Goddess is about the choices people make in a civil war where the moral virtues of each side is ambiguous.  On a daily basis the doctors confront the clash between western-style individualistic culture and eastern-style collectivist culture. As we learn how they cope with difficult events we ponder how people's actions express their conception of God and the infinite in a culture with plural religions.  And the meaning of love.