Stay With Me:
An Adventure in Going through It
A kaleidoscopic wander through suffering, faith, memories and thought experiments.
Stay With Me: An Adventure in Going Through It ponders the empty stage, sitting alongside the reader in the theatre and on the road, reader and writer sharing notes, and jokes, stories of love, loss, exile, wonder, and hope.
Stay With Me offers a kind of portable theatre of companionship through suffering, faith, and moments of absurdity. Part memoir, part travel journal, part thinking aloud in absurd thought experiments — broken guitar strings, Lady Bracknell's handbag and the actual chair you're sitting in now — Stay With Me, wanders through stories of grief and humour and asks the reader to compare notes with their own versions too. This is a book about theology and theatre that refuses to stop pressing into the adventure.
"Hi, how are you?"
Stay With Me starts here. It's a harder question than it seems, isn't it? Through memoir, humour, thought experiments, and questions, author and reader share an imaginative conversation.
Adventure is redefined from the Hollywood epic to a journey into the unknown. The author's own travel-writing blogs become part of the scenery, inviting readers to consider their own versions of adventure.
Stay with me could be the cry of a child. The fixed gaze of a midwife. A mountain guide calling you to dig deeper. The stranger at the roadside with someone on the edge of life and death…
A book for marginalia — for adding your own postcards and Polaroids.
Extracts:
Before the first flight to Australia, I was really scared. Well, not scared. Nervous.
I'd never flown alone before and this was a long haul flight. So I asked a very old friend who had done the trip herself.
She wasn't the kind of person who would've found this easy under normal circumstances. She gave me her advice.
Arrive at the airport and start with the cleaner.
Ask them who to speak to next.
Follow the trail,
and do the same again
and keep going.
If you hit the pilot you’ve gone too far.
She even said Jesus had come in at one point.
I asked her how she knew it was Jesus, and she laughed like I was stupid, and said,
"I know Jesus!
He was wearing Nike trainers…"
I told her I’d come in straight away.
By the time I got there she had drifted out again. I kept talking to her, and said that if Jesus ever came in again and asked her to go with Him, she shouldn’t worry about leaving Mum and Dad because we’d look after them.
And we’d all be along soon after.
Nanny used to be into boxing and wrestling. I haven't watched any since childhood.
But once
when I was lying awake, I turned the radio on to hear about the Mayweather McGregor fight,
which I'd been asked to write an article on.
The buildup, what happened, and the interviews afterwards, got me thinking about my own life and faith.
Courage, tenacity,
belief, strength, power, skill,
training, hunger,
anger, pride, humanity, history, legacy,
peer pressure,
reputation,
Celtic spirit, money, pain, fun,
death, life,
individuals, groups, sides, justice,
celebration,
physicality,
anthems, words—
and those times when being punched in the face
is just part of your day job.
I was moved by McGregor saying that he was disappointed to have the fight stopped through lack of remaining energy rather than actual damage done.
He pointed to the fact he could still speak coherently,
so he wasn't ready to give in.
He said he'd have preferred it to have ended with
his face on the mat, nothing left to give, rather than rescued
one moment before.
Audio: Eye Contact (excerpt)
