REFLECTIONS
Alongside books and longer-form projects, my shorter pieces explore faith, imagination, culture and the ordinary world — sometimes through theology, sometimes through story, and sometimes simply by following a question, idea or object, and seeing where it leads.
A Safe Place to Rest
An excerpt from the Virtual Camino journals, 8 October 2016
On Iona there are so many beautiful tiny stones, and hand-sized pebbles, and so many rocks to climb over, but now and then you find the occasional very big boulder.
I'm not great at estimating, but in the case of the ones above, I would say at least 10 or 12ft high, or more. These immense rocks were leaning on each other in such a way that, of course there was no chance of them moving, and yet you could see they were balanced. That in itself threw up lots of metaphors and creative thoughts for me.
Mind the Gap
AI, Silence, and the Cost of Meaning
Take two magnets, snapped together, like you did at school. Now pull them apart, and turn one around, if you can. Feel that jump, the slide—the invisible cushion that seems impossibly tangible. Its rounded edges mesmerise as you stare at the space between, where something seems to be, and yet isn’t.
Now think of Bach, who famously couldn’t bear to leave a musical phrase hanging in the air. Or the Two Ronnies sketch where each man finishes the other’s sentence with the wrong wellingtons. Curious sensations like these come flooding back sometimes when you’re using conversational AI. Have you noticed? A kind of unspoken glass ceiling—disorienting, slightly adrift. Like you’re handed a new thought, but as you chase it, the rabbit hole swerves like a gaslighting frenemy.
A Wonderfully Dangerous Theatre
Theopoetics, Theatre, and the Wildness of God
The Irish poet John O’Donohue once said,
“I think there is a wonderful danger in God that we have totally forgotten. People like to bring in the theology tamers to tame their deities down. They don’t like the idea of a wild God because it could get very awkward and deeply embarrassing.”
John O’Donohue, interview with Krista Tippett, On Being,
“The Inner Landscape of Beauty” (2007).
Banished to hide in personal journals and closed workshops, God’s ‘wonderful danger’ may not be so dangerous.
CS Lewis’s ‘Footnote to all prayers’ could simply be invoked (to deal with what Meister Eckhart would agree was our inevitable blasphemy) and all would be well.
But beyond the private, out into the world, matters of Spirit and Truth are double-edged swords, dividing even bone from marrow. Whatever resonates will have unending ripples of consequence. For those who have ears to hear, the same poetic intuitions that enrich the poor, comfort those who mourn, and liberate the captives, will be felt by the worldly rich and comfortable, to trespass, expose - to know and say too much! Ruthless as a stand-up comedian at the Golden Globes, theopoetics can cause trouble, even when poesis flows in innocence.
Nearly six, clicking a spiky spiral from a jumble of Lego bricks, I truly thought I’d invented a flower that God missed! But suddenly, she (my mother) looked so horrified, I crumbled the new-born form immediately back into brick dust.