Words to bridge the gap between faith and life…
began with honeysuckle and clover,
the constants of the winter yet
rendered more redolent by the scents of September
and a bee buzzing about a flowering cactus
and ended with a downpour
that sent me rushing to the clothesline
while my son stood in his raincoat and listened
to the rain
with all things – rain, sun, bee,
child and flowers – held in the same sentence
and each given its time.
I.
Delighted by animals, God and rain,
my son finds kinship in Noah’s ark,
commentating the story as I leaf through his Bible:
“Rain! Giraffe. Boat. Noah. Wet. Monkeys!”
How to convey what
a rainbow’s about, or how I long
for him and his brothers to be
kept safe in the ark
as the flood passes by.
II.
After the night’s deluge, I spot
a raven atop a traffic light,
tree-branch in beak,
heralding the hope of dry land.
The lights change, I drive ahead.
No flood will overwhelm today.
III.
This afternoon he found
some joyfully fluffy infant ducks
in a book and, excited, pointed them out:
“Clucklings!” he exclaimed, and how I wished
that our language could change
to make them be clucklings forever.
IV.
Reading a story of sloths, I asked,
“Do you think there were sloths in Noah’s ark?”
While he gave this all his toddler’s thought,
I amused myself with images of
the haste with which Noah packed the ark
the sloths sabotaging all his speed,
yet saved, thank God, all the same.
For this demon who harms men and corrupts them is particularly anxious that his servants not gaze up to heaven but instead that they be bent over to the earth and make bricks inside themselves from clay.
(Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses)
At the moment of exhaling, he sanctified
the clay he shaped by his outbreathing, yet
sacred clay was only ever for shaping, not
to be shaped by. Instead
my eyes are always turned groundward and I
play in the mud pies of my mind despite
the heavenly witness that clamours for me with its voiceless speech
and, for lack
of willing human witnesses, rocks
clear stony throats to shout.
This afternoon, though I’d planned
a much-needed rest, many tasks overtook and
somewhere amidst assembling IKEA furniture I found
the afternoon gone and dusk charcoaling the sky,
so instead I walked
my toddler to the compost heap and there
we shredded paper scraps to balance the mix
and pulled weeds from the side garden while
my son trialled his latest words and declared “I want!”
as the evening air bristled and my fingers let go.
Well, after seven years of writing and an intense few months of preparation, my book The Swelling Year: Poems for Holy and Ordinary Days is finally available for purchase. I was very excited this week to discover that, as well as being available directly from lulu.com, it can also be ordered at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and even from the Danish store Saxo.com. You can also preview it at Google Books if you want to see what it’s all about. I’m looking at ways of getting it into physical bookstores in Australia too, and I’ll update local readers on this when it happens.
Also, if you happen to be in Melbourne in November, drop by Christ Church Anglican in Brunswick at 2pm on 30 November for the official book launch. There’ll be readings by me, book signings, and live music from some of my very talented friends. I hope to see you there!
Meanwhile, once you’ve read The Swelling Year and want to tell others what you think, perhaps you could take a couple of minutes to review it at your online store of choice.
I’m very excited to announce that my crowdfunding campaign to publish The Swelling Year is ready to go. It is live now at Pozible.com, and will be there for the next 31 days for you to donate to. Check out the campaign page to find out about project details and rewards. We’re already underway with contributions, and there’s an opportunity for me to expand the first print run for the book if I get more than the budgeted $1250. So please be generous! I’m looking forward to seeing people get on board with a project that is close to my heart and that I hope will be an encouragement to many others.
I’m also excited to share for the first time the cover art designed by the talented Matthew Duncan. Find out more about his work here.
“Not too many poets has it been given…to live one of their own poems.”
(G.K. Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi)
If I would be Francis, troubadour to God,
before I can sing Creation’s canticles, I must tend
to the sleeping children in my room
and die again, again to the self
that craves to be higher than them.
Only then can poetry shine,
until then being only words.
Sadly, literature that brings faith authentically to bear on the world is a rare thing. But here are ten novels that use the narrative of conversion to show faith and grace colliding with the ordinary, the sordid and the plain broken. Not all are by professing believers. Not all are orthodox. But all are compelling in their own way, and all make faith feel very real.
9 & 10: A Pure Clear Light and The Essence of the Thing – Madeleine St John
Sydney girl turned wry and urbane Londoner, St John was most famous for her first novel, a witty depiction of a lady’s department store, The Women in Black. But she also wrote three other novels, a kind of loose trilogy, sharing some characters, the same inner London cultured set and a darker and more cynical tone. Yet St John, a late convert, managed to take her characters just to the threshold of faith in utterly unexpected ways. Characters cheat on each other, lie, doubt, and then approach belief without even noticing themselves get there. The last novel in the trilogy, Stairway to Paradise, was the weakest but also hit the faith note with greatest subtlety. Had she lived longer, who knows how deft her touch might have grown.
8: Life After God – Douglas Coupland
A series of vignettes of post-religion North America, this early Coupland slowly arrests you with its quiet ache of longing until you cry out with its narrator, “I need God.”
7: The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
The only Tolstoy I have finished (and amongst his shortest), Ivan Ilyich packs a punch. Mostly the death-bed resentment of a sick and bitter man who trusts no-one, including his family, this novella takes you right into the psyche of an embittered soul and leads you imperceptibly to redemption.
6: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
Percy is a curious figure in Catholic literature. Equal parts Kierkegaardian philosopher and satirist of American culture, he sometimes seems strangely lacking in faith. Many readers may find some of his treatments of women to be uncomfortable. But his first novel is a tour-de-force examination of the modern quest for physical sensation and the discovery of grace in the sacrament of everyday life.
5: Barabbas – Pär Lagerkvist
It might be a bit much to call this a conversion novel, but this story of the man who Jesus replaced on the cross has some of the most intriguing discussions of faith that I’ve encountered in 20th century literature. A Swedish Nobel laureate, Lagerkvist explored characters touched by the cross twice in his work, via mythology in The Death of Ahaseuras and more directly in Barabbas. He wasn’t, to my knowledge, a believer, and some theological details here are dubious, but Barabbas’ life after his unexpected exchange with Christ is a fascinating reflection on what it means to be a believer and a reprobate.
4: Saint Maybe – Anne Tyler
Also not a Christian herself, Anne Tyler makes raw and unvarnished Christian faith and redemption the central force of change in this touching family drama by one of the greatest living novelists working in English.
3: Lila – Marilynne Robinson
The third in her Gilead novels, Lila is in my opinion the best. Both a delicate love story and an unpretentious, warts-and-all tale of grace at work in a wounded life, Lila tells the story of Reverend Wilmot’s much younger wife and how she came to experience and trust the love of God expressed in an unexpected person.
2: Viper’s Tangle – François Mauriac
Almost any of Mauriac’s novels could be here but I’ve picked my favourite. Mauriac’s characters are almost always ugly, mean or pathetic, and yet he always portrays them with a tenderness approaching love. The marvel of this one lies in watching the vipers’ nest within its protagonist untangle with God’s hand. Few other Christian writers have explored the depths of humanity with as much grace and honesty as Mauriac.
1: Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
When Andrew Davies adapted this book for film he said he was getting rid of the “God stuff”, which is rather like taking the running out of Chariots of Fire. He failed, because God is central to this novel. All he managed to get rid of was the conversion, which was like taking out Eric Liddell’s gold medal. Don’t watch the film. Read the book instead.
“Our life does not consist in making up beautiful phrases but in performing beautiful deeds.”
Athenagorus
The Consolations of Writing 