WRITING
Alongside books and longer-form projects, I write shorter pieces that 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 Different Logic
Songs of Peace in Times of War
War doesn’t always mean bombs, invasions, or even bloodshed.
Often, it’s suffering of another kind.
Brokenness. Bereavement.
Ongoing tragedy that never makes the headlines.
But these days, it’s not just my mother.
I know for myself,
that peace
that transcends.
It comes in the eye of the storm. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that. Sometimes, you need a song.
The world-famous Vera Lynn was a young British singer who bravely went to the troops on the front line during World War Two to boost morale with songs of hope:
We’ll meet again…
There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover…
Vera Lynn was singing
to appeal to the soul of humanity,
in metaphors of homecoming,
and enduring love.
Vera Lynn was fighting
for peace, using the only weapon she had.
And the only one she needed —
her voice.
Her performance.
Her calling.
Songs change our perspectives.
They lift heads and hearts.
And not just songs.
Poems. Sermons. Imagination. Creativity.
The theopoetic has power beyond literal words,
to set the record straight
and steady our feet on firmer ground.
There’s a depth, an intimacy, a presence in some songs
that stir and move us.
They proclaim a different paradigm,
causing eyes to open to the unseen.
As we preach, write, make music,
we can change the temperature of the room.
That is Deborah’s song.
And David’s song.
It’s Vera’s song.
May it be our song too.
Because, just as the experience of war is ours, not just in wartime,
so we as preachers, poets and creatives
wield a greater power
than that of bullets
or bombs.
May we sing songs of a different logic —
to the tune of Your Spirit,
in the language of peace.
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.
“Mind the gap,” says the railway announcer—who might just as well be speaking of the space between the fingertips of Adam and God in Michelangelo’s mural. Not because God’s arm isn’t long enough, but perhaps because the same finger designed the cosmic separation of Genesis 1. That space between heaven and earth is the site of juxtaposition: perichoresis, the choreography of Trinity, the condition for encounter. What it is not, is nothing.
To watch what happens on the screen, you have to be far enough back—though not too far. Bullough’s old insight still holds: the sweet spot is where disbelief is suspended, neither pressed up against the stage nor wandering off down the street. Proximity. Psychical distance. Everything depends on it. Theatre director Peter Brook made the same point. How easy it is to make it too much about performance, or too much about the textbook. Holiness abides somewhere in between.
This special kind of nothingness carries its own charge—something qualitatively different from sheer absence. What’s certain is that you can’t force it, rush it, or fake it. You can only—well, and that’s the question. Observe the effects of magnetism when it can’t itself be seen? Intuit how the sentence ends, even when it doesn’t? It’s as if meaning has a life of its own. Perhaps knowing without having things spelled out is part of what makes humans such peculiar conduits.
Talking about these spaces between—these “non-spaces"—quickly takes us to the edge of language. We keep circling the same resistance, trying to pin down a silence that slips away as soon as we name it. Pretentious-sounding abstractions pile up until you wonder if anything is really being said at all. Especially now. Language has become a commodity. Cheap content stuffs, pads, thickens, saturates.
And yet—on a hard day—you can grab a coffee and rustle up an instant AI pep talk in the style of Joel Osteen. It may almost as well be him. It’s all words, isn’t it? Words, words, words.
You know the real luxury?
Silence.
Sacred space.
Elbow room.
Talk may be cheap.
And King David said, “I will not offer to God that which costs me nothing.” His sacrifice of praise did not assume God needs our money—or even our blood. God is Spirit, and those who worship must do so in Spirit and in Truth. Whatever that means, it cannot just be more words, even the right ones. And even signs and wonders don’t count if we do not actually know Him, says Jesus. Relationship. Intimacy. Presence.
Scripture repeatedly refuses substitution. Job is given no explanation. Naboth’s vineyard is an inheritance, not a commodity. AI, for all its exponential scope, is incapable of this kind of knowing. It can do words—no problem. But when AI is silent, it always means something very different from human silence.
So much for parlour games with magnets and wordplay. What does this mean for ordinary life? It may all sound too high-brow to matter. But here is the thing. AI is an incomparable tool for pattern recognition, yet it cannot practice discernment. It has no skin in the game—nothing to lose, no cost to pay, no way to witness. It cannot be held accountable, or addressed, and it cannot answer.
And yet, precisely here, AI offers theology an unexpected gift. Like a camera lens that renders light visible by arresting it, AI reveals—by absence—the incarnate trajectory of human speech and silence. A litmus test, perhaps, for whatever might be meant by Spirit and Truth.
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” (O’Donohue 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.
That’s the trouble. Free-flow play can lead to swastikas even if you don’t know what one is. Another day, I lingered, as in pink ink His Hallowed, Holy Name bled, felt-tip flesh into virgin sketch-pad snow. Wastefully safe, I thought, but trying to show willing.
This time, she whisper-roared,
“We never EVER do that! Making fun of Jesus! Bubble-writing blasphemy!”
No wonder, when I started writing worship songs and blogs, it was in secret. Cat out of the bag though, one elderly pastor took me aside. Said I was a game-changer in his view. Predicted I’d be the one to reawaken the wildness in church. Gave me a book called, ‘Now, let’s move into a time of nonsense.’
Another said, “To be honest, behind the scenes they’re calling your insights, ‘Armageddon’ – but, please, never pretty it up on my account!”
An actual veteran fighter pilot beamed like a proud father. “You’re a prophetic poetic 007. Licensed to kill,” he said.
But incoming pastors and their teams told me sternly not to stray beyond their line. I was called ungodly; asked to promise never to speak aloud. So, for now, pen down, I’ve left church to itself and gone away on my own to pray. (Invisible Jesus still stands in plain sight in the corner of my room. He says nothing, apart from his eyes. They whisper, I know. I know.)
Priests in the Old Testament knew all too well about God’s danger. Their job was to hold the holy space and be personally implicated. Where are those priests? Who safeguards the integrity of the page, the canvas, the stage? In my view, theopoetics offers renewed permission to an exiled theopoet, taking their vision seriously, while ushering them as potential prophet, back to their own crucible and cross for yet another humble draft.
Entrusting myself to that poetic gaze, I continue to wander. And, in a vintage bookshop in Redruth, Cornwall, I stumble over ‘The Empty Space’ by the English director, Peter Brook, who died this year aged 97. It is subtitled, ‘A book about theatre: deadly, holy, rough, immediate.’
The closing paragraph says this:
“In everyday life, ‘if’ is a fiction, in the theatre ‘if’ is an experiment. In everyday life, ‘if’ is an evasion, in the theatre ‘if’ is the truth. When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theatre and life are one. This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work. To play needs much work. But when we experience the work as play, then it is not work anymore. A play is play.” (Brook, 1978)
Substitute ‘the theatre’ for ‘theopoetics.’ A wonderfully dangerous theatre, indeed.