Wayward: Scriptourer

Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash

Amazinger!

Adrian P Conway — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:27:19 GMT

In the previous post we explored the benefits of getting our science and revelation story ducks in a row. We saw how scientific insight aids our interpretation of the Genesis creation accounts by better identifying the non-literal in the texts, ie metaphor and extended imagery. In other words, the tremendous power of these stories is amplified not diminished by contextually appropriate non-literal readings. All good.

But that’s still only one side of the equation. Whilst it’s an error roundly to dismiss science when it challenges literal readings of these texts, it’s equally erroneous to dismiss revealed truths on the grounds they’re not scientific. And as powerful as the scientific narrative is, Genesis tells the deeper, more important story aimed at addressing that cosmic Why?

One doesn’t need to be a believer to see that these stories are crammed with powerful insights over a whole range of questions which, whilst not strictly scientific in the modern sense, are nonetheless scientifically significant. An outstanding example would be Dr Jordan Peterson’s Genesis series. His analysis reveals how uncannily rooted in sound psychology these stories are. At the very least this should be cause for pause: for those attempting to use science to invalidate the wisdom found in these stories; for believers in communicating the basics of their faith to psychologically savvy truth-seekers.

We previously touched on the humour found in Hitchhiker’s. Well, it also contains more serious statements:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Although this serves as the epigraph for that large, red and unaccountably popular herring that is The God Delusion, it’s still worthy of our attention. I like it for two reasons. Firstly, it gets to the heart of the matter, and, secondly, it means I get to reflect upon Chesterton again.

On the first point, it’s a clever reworking of the invalidation argument identified above. In other words, there’s enough enchantment in nature without recourse to any fanciful supernatural stuff. It’s clever because framed as a rhetorical question which touches on a truth. It’s a fair point that certain forms of spirituality or approaches to the supernatural do falsely overshadow the natural and rob it of its rightful glow. However, it’s not so clever that it precludes the possibility of a straightforwardly honest riposte: no, it’s not enough; and, I don’t have to believe, I choose. It’s based on the false mathematics that fairies subtract rather than add. It’s also a little ironic that Adams wrote sci-fi stories: you know, stuff you make up that isn’t exactly real in order to communicate deeper realities that can’t be approached head-on. But, fair enough, it’s always worth considering what the fairies are bringing to the table.

Cue Chesterton…

My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery… The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies… compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong… I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of The Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon.¹

Chesterton is getting at a similar thing we’ve already explored about story. Fairy tales might not be intended as literal but they are intended as serious, because they are condensations of wisdom, hyper-realisations, psychological ciphers, survival traditions. They represent the right ideas about things, consensus or common sense, the various perspectives and experiences of the many gathered into a memorable tale, epic, or rhyme which is always a story echoing a journey from ignorance to enlightenment. Nonsense is often mixed in precisely for contrast.

So, do fairies exist? Highly unlikely, and, absolutely! At the very least, they’re busy discreetly ferrying about the wisdom that can’t be squeezed into test tubes. After all, the idea of the moon is much harder to quantify than the moon itself.

But, it’s Chesterton’s contention that there’s something abnormally right about religion that’s worth exploring further. Because, of course, not every idea we have or everything that can be imagined has physical reality or should be believed, or believed in. It’s much more reasonable to assume that fairies aren’t literal. But only up until the moment one shakes you by the hand. Then it becomes grossly unreasonable.

To Genesis. The writers are essentially saying: here’s a story trying to describe how God shakes us by the hand. Chesterton’s abnormally right refers to Revelation. The creation stories quite obviously aren’t scientific accounts in the modern sense. They bear more resemblance to the wisdom traditions of fairy tales and mythologies. Which is why they’re often mistaken as such. However, fairy tales/mythologies/epic sagas represent the best of human storytelling whereas, first and foremost, God is telling His own story here through inspired humans.

It’s very difficult to define the genre of Creation Story One. It’s something like a hymnal/liturgical or poetic credal reflection. As such, it presents truths figuratively. The narrative form serves to enrich not weaken the truths. So, unlike pure fables, its power isn’t merely figurative or moral, and it absolutely contains truths directly relating to history and science. But its purpose is theological not scientific. Which is just as well since I suspect the average story is generally far more accessible than the average astrophysics treatise.

What, then, is the deeper vision relating to this Chestertonian abnormally right?

It should be clear that science cannot (is not designed to) lead us to the knowledge of a loving creator God and the truth that His love sustains the universe in being. Or answer why something exists rather than simply nothing. Or why any order exists rather than utter chaos. Or especially why we humans appear uniquely hardwired to seek answers to religious questions.

Creation One comes to meet these intuitions by telling a true story in stark elemental prose. It tells of the mighty El, unrivalled and kindly king, who has built a great temple palace for his cherished people. The beauty of these ordered courts is beyond breathtaking, ever raising the spirit in praise. It is a realm of safety, a domain from which chaos has been banished, and where all things flourish according to their nature. The King has marked out humanity by giving us this blessed domain for our inheritance: an immeasurable honour. All are welcome here, held equal in dignity, and even known by name. No one is disregarded or despised but rather cherished and loved. The King is, in fact, our Father and we bear the great dignity of being his children.

So, the universe is deep down lovely and good, and comes to us as gift. It can be experienced as something intended, nourishing, even personal. It isn’t a product of freak chance or brutal adaptation but rather of love, spoken forth in golden words. From the brightest star to the smallest blade of grass, all things are held in gently regarding hands. This can be sensed. Its vision confirmed not merely in temporal but in transcendent beauty. Even mysteriously entered into as a relationship. But not grasped or circumscribed or tightly defined in a definitive or empirical way. Because, in truth, proof has a very broad character in human affairs. How do we definitively evidence love, truth, beauty, justice, integrity, empathy, humility, courtesy, courage, resilience, reflectiveness, kindness, ambition? What final proofs are there for any of these, yet good luck living without them!

Yes, true stories can have factual inaccuracies and myths can be full of scientific errors. Yet, to dismiss them on this basis is to miss the point entirely. The point of Creation One is to engage our hearts with the most original truth of all - not, in fact, the origins of the universe and where we come from but, rather, where God is always coming from.

Photo: Greg Rakozy, Unsplash

1 Orthodoxy, Collected Works, Vol I, Ignatius Press, 1986, San Fran, p 252

Literally Amazing

Adrian P Conway — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:49:21 GMT

Evening came and morning came: the first day.

An incredible trick in absence of the sun, which doesn’t make its appearance until verse fourteen (along with moon and stars). As discussed before, it’s a clear sign to the reader that some elements of these stories aren’t meant to be taken literally!

It’s puzzling that some Christians cling to a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. It’s a problematic stance for at least two reasons. Firstly, the stories themselves don’t support a literal interpretation. Secondly, it’s based on the assumption that where there’s conflict, the science must be wrong.

Yet this seems curiously compartmentalised. Of course, God is fundamentally the author of the Genesis creation stories, but He’s also author of the actual universe. In other words, He’s written a single story in two narratives. One narrative (and perhaps the more obvious) unfolds as our natural history and the second as our spiritual history. The former focuses on the many whats and the latter on the big why. The former relies on physical evidence for the telling and the latter upon revelation. Revelation’s rightful domain is in the communication of truths that could never be elicited from an examination of the physical evidence alone.

By definition, then, there can’t be any fundamental contradiction between the two narratives even if the story plates collide as we continue deepening our knowledge. Problems only appear when either encroaches on the other’s sovereignty. Reflections on God’s existence patently lie beyond the scope of scientific enquiry: the domain of science is nature, God is supernatural. Science (not the Bible) clearly takes precedence when extrapolating the characteristics of the natural order. Discounting credible scientific evidence because it doesn’t fit with something mythic in the Bible is tantamount to denying that God is the author of both narratives.

Even if it hasn’t always been a comfortable journey, Christian understanding has been greatly enriched by scientific insight. The central scientific narrative regarding the origins and nature of our universe presents no essential problems for interpreting the Genesis creation stories. If anything it helps, since it sharpens appreciation of which elements are figurative and so serves to deepen theological understanding.

Once properly correlated, focusing upon the scientific narrative in tandem with Genesis can even help reframe our spiritual vision…

A Question of Time

There’s surely spiritual significance in the universe being twelve to thirteen billion years old rather than about six thousand years old. It’s an eye-watering recalibration and certainly redefines how we might interpret the word soon in the Bible.

The Psalmists were already onto it...

Lord…

To your eyes a thousand years
are like yesterday, come and gone,
no more than a watch in the night.
Make us know the shortness of our life
that we may gain wisdom of heart. (Ps 89/90:12,4)

Now try it again, subbing a thousand for a billion. Wisdom indeed! That of perspective.

It also makes clearer sense of this passage:

In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. (Heb 1:1-2)

The last days can sound a touch apocalyptic yet following the celebrated twenty-four hour clock analogy, modern humans haven’t just arrived on earth at the eleventh hour but more like at 23:59.59, ie with one second to go! And if it’s a question of visualising recorded human history in twenty-four hours then Jesus appears a mere quarter of an hour before the end. It turns out there’s a sizeable difference between being spiritually prepared for the end of the world and actually expecting it today shortly after one’s post-prandial nap.

So, is it really a problem that God didn’t literally take a week to create the universe but that it came into being in an instant? The Big Bang provokes important spiritual questions about the text: why is it presented as a week, then? What’s with the seven-day cycles? How do we rightly understand and organise time? What’s the correct proportional relationship between work and leisure (5/2, 6/1, 4/3 days)? What constitutes appropriate rest? What is a Holy Day? What makes it so?

To be explored in a later post

A Question of Significance

The Psalmists deliver again…

When I see the heavens, the work of your hands,
the moon and stars which you arranged,
what is man that you should keep him in mind,
mortal man that you care for him? (Ps 8:3-4)

The night sky does have a way of making us feel small. Appropriately small. But science reveals another breathtaking recalibration. It turns out these little lights aren’t mere ornamental illuminations, but other suns. And there are something like three-hundred billion in our galaxy alone. And something like one billion trillion observable stars in the known universe. And we learn that, far from being the physical centre of anything, earth is simply one planet among many others orbiting this lonesome star we call the sun.

This time the science can leave us feeling bereft and cosmically insignificant, explored with great humour by Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker’s. Earth is due to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace expressway. The brilliant insouciant message of the rapidly departing dolphins says it all: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

But once more it’s a question of perspective. Given such vast scale, we now have greater appreciation of the mind-blowing mathematical improbability of this fragile life-laden planet ever existing. The various conditions are so unlikely that some scientists posit the fanciful existence of multiverses in an attempt to square the (we’re still not that special) circle. If you need visual confirmation of earth’s peculiarity, follow the Psalmists’ lead and look up at the utterly lifeless moon. It isn’t that far away. Relatively speaking.

And there’s more. We’ve discovered that so many things come from stardust or are related to it, including us, and how likely it is that all life on earth has a common origin. For some reason, spheres and the golden ratio seem to be the uncanny order of shape and beauty and, well, order. And at the heart of it all swirls the incomprehensible anomaly of human consciousness and reflexive intelligence.

Back to our Psalmists:

What is man that you should keep him in mind,
mortal man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him little less than the angels,
and you have crowned him with glory and honour. (Ps 8:4-5)

Yes, dolphins are incredibly bright. But they didn’t write that Psalm.

Image: Greg Rakozy, Unsplash

In The Name

Adrian P Conway — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 11:57:07 GMT

God called the light ‘day’, and the darkness he called ‘night’.

In many ancient cultures, the sovereign possessed the divine right to name and rename as an expression of ultimate power over subjects. The writers are making the point that God alone possesses this power. He is The-One-Who-Names. But this is about more than just power. In naming, He actually defines and signifies reality. The correct name confers proper shape, presence and purpose.

It’s highly significant that God Himself isn’t actually named here. In Creation Story One the given word is El which means something like Divine One: a somewhat generic and impersonal descriptor. It’s used to signify transcendent majesty. In Creation Story Two (2:4b-3:24) a new title is introduced, often translated as Lord. This is meant to be more personal, more intimate, but the Hebrew word is even trickier than El.

It appears in the text as the four letters yod, he, waw, he (יהוה),‎ roughly YHWH. Not exactly mouth friendly. Almost certainly wouldn’t pass the shout-across-the-bar test. We have to jump ahead to Exodus for context. Poor old Moses asks God for His name - to reveal to the people in order to establish his own legitimacy as leader. He needs something clear, accessible and familiar. (Ex 3:13-15) What he gets is: Tell em BEING (YHWH) sent you. Qué? In other words, the ground of all being; one beyond definition and category.

Like El, Lord isn’t really a name. In fact, this time it isn’t even meant to be pronounced! And Moses may have had a stutter!! (Ex 4:10) It simply appears in the Genesis text without explanation. The point being hammered home is that the Lord God is, in fact, The-One-Who-Cannot-Be-Named. Sound familiar?

This whole naming business, then, is a rather mystical and fundamental one. In renaming Abram as Abraham and Sarai as Sarah (Genesis 17), God effectively reshapes their combined destinies. St Gabriel literally brings the names of John and Jesus with him from heaven, (Lk 1:13 & 31). The celebrated word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah thus: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, (Jer 1:5). Because God is BEING, or total existence, He knows all of us in eternity – everyone, throughout the entire course of human history, exists to Him in eternity even before they exist in time. You might even say that His timeless knowing and naming is what actually makes us exist.

Sometimes parents talk of paring-down the names for their unborn child to a final two until one somehow surfaces over the other. Or, they wait until after the birth and then, in the face of their newborn, seem to know the right choice. Oh yeah, she’s definitely a Pam rather than our other choice, Tarquinutella. In the Bible, one’s name signifies one’s identity in direct relation to the Unnamable One. We are given our correct name, or it finds us, because it has always been our name. Weird. And also wonderful.

Which brings us to character-naming in stories. This can be a world of fun, and one might look no further than Charles Dickens for entertainment. From precisely where in the human psyche does the name Wackford Squeers emerge? But it’s a serious business, too. I’ve changed a character’s name only to change it back again because the original somehow presented as right (!) – and not even just sounded better. Of course, this may be merely subliminal, but I suspect also has something to do with this idea of timeless naming from above.

It can lead to perfect curiosities. I don’t know why Colonel Walter E Kurtz, Murphy, Ignatius J Reilly, Binx Bolling, Major Major Major Major or even Aloy for that matter are absolutely the right names for the characters as experienced, but there you go. Getting a character’s name right may not feel as solemn as naming a child, but then again.

I’m yet to discover a Bible story where someone has the wrong name. There is a near miss, though – in the account of John the Baptist’s naming ceremony, (Lk 1:59-65). The Temple priests assume that he’s going to be called Zechariah after his father. Then they’re met with his adamant mother, Elizabeth, and Zechariah himself, who intervene to ensure he’s called John, (as per God’s instructions – Lk 1:13). It’s highly significant that this allows Zechariah to regain speech or the power of word.

There’s another relevant story towards the end of our mythic opening section of the Book of Genesis (CC 1-11). The tale of the Tower of Babel (11:1-9) serves to provide an aetiology (a story accounting for something’s origins) for the diversity of human languages but is equally a cautionary tale about misplaced human ambition. The turn of phrase is most telling: They said to one another, “Come… Let us make a name for ourselves”… (vv 3-4). In other words, self-name; define our own status and fame; take the place of God, the rightful namer and decider. And this arrogance ultimately leads to the confusion of their language; to a disruption in the unified and consistent naming of things. Premodern postmodernism?

Any school kid who’s ever suffered name-calling immediately knows what all these stories are about. Names have power within them, inside and outside of stories. Our own name is often the very first word we learn to say. In other words, the genesis of our journey in word is our name. The Genesis creation stories teach us to treat names with the utmost reverence because they’re silvered with sacred realities.

I’ve no idea if Wackford Squeers found his name recorded in the Book of Life but, for inventiveness alone, I certainly pray Charles Dickens found his.

Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash

Truth! What is that?

Adrian P Conway — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 08:21:31 GMT

If you could address the relationship between the Bible’s creation account, and that of other cultures in the surrounding area. I’ve heard many people question the Bible’s authority and veracity by saying things like “well a lot of it is just copied from the people groups that lived near the ancient Israelites.” Is this even a valid criticism?

With thanks to William Collen for the question.

I touched on this subject here but it is well worth exploring more thoroughly. It is probably best to answer the question directly and then explore the context.

No, this is not valid criticism. The writers of Genesis are not just copying chunks of contemporary literature. Whilst they make use of such stories for frames and foils, they very explicitly tell a crucially different story - that of one, all powerful God. Moreover, Genesis is not presented as a hypothetical alternative but rather as revealed truth in contradistinction to all other false narratives.

It is fallacious to question the authority or veracity of these accounts on the grounds that they use source material. All writers do as much. The truth of a story is a distinct consideration to whether parts of it are copied or bear similarities to other stories. Truths may be re-expressed, after all.

As enriching as it is theologically to compare the linguistic and stylistic similarities between parts of Genesis and, say, The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Enuma Elish, it is the dissimilarities that scream the heavens down. Not only is biblical monotheism unique in ancient mythologies, it is not even the most obvious choice given the vagaries of human existence. Crucially, though, it draws a line in the sand. Various polytheisms can co-exist and even merge but this is one of those binary distinctions we have observed: there cannot be only one God and also many other gods. Monotheism precludes polytheism.

However, there are good questions sitting beneath these sorts of criticisms. Don’t all peoples simply create their own gods? For the Babylonians, Egyptians and Canaanites there were many, for the Hebrews only one. Yet, don’t they all think they’re telling the true story? How would one know which, if any, is ultimately true?

Fair enough. But then how do we judge any story as true? And what precisely do we mean by true? Not wishing to get too Fr Ted, but, that would be an epistemological matter, and there is no high ground there. It is encapsulated in Pilate’s pitch-perfect question to Jesus. What is truth? (Jn 18:38) For Christians, the word truth means more than mere accuracy or consistency. Jesus had already revealed this to Pilate but Pilate missed it even whilst sensing its authenticity: all those who listen to Jesus’s voice will hear the truth. (Jn 18:37) But you have to trust Him. This is the only guarantee of what is true.

Back to Genesis. The difference with the Bible tradition is the claim that all the other mythologies are ultimately false. In other words, truth is something revealed, given, imparted or communicated and not created, concocted or constructed. This is a crucial distinction for two reasons.

Firstly, it represents a direct challenge to syncretism and other forms of relativism. The opening of Genesis is not written as just another creation mythology. It makes a claim on the reader. Here’s the Truth. Reflect on it attentively, studiously and mindful of context and tradition and you will encounter the difference. It challenges the shrugged shoulders of: I don’t know if there are many gods, one God, or just plain nothing. It states: you will know, if you read this properly. The answer is here.

Secondly, it offers a more holistic vision. Ah, I’m not a plaything of capricious deities, or an irrelevant collection of atoms, or born to be slave to human whims. I’m a free and beloved child of the benevolent creator God. Ah, the universe was created ordered and not out of conflict - that’s its fundamental meaning. Ah, the world is good and beautiful, and death and destruction are not its destiny, etc. In other words, one that meets the longings of the human heart.

Once grasped, we can revisit the matter more subtly. In their various forms, other creation mythologies are echoes of the human longing for the divine. They are not wholly false, as truths can be discovered within them. For example, that there are spiritual realities beyond normal human sight, that good and evil are real, that we each have a destiny and will be judged in relation to it. The Bible provides the vision to see and appreciate Truth wherever it is found.

Finally, this has important implications for a correct Christian reading of Genesis. In what sense are the creation accounts true? Are we expected to believe God created the world in seven days a few thousand years ago? Or that serpents talk? It quickly becomes clear we are not expected to take everything literally but, rather, are called to discern how Truth is imparted within and through story DNA. This comes from paying close attention to the ways in which the actual stories are constructed. In so doing, we learn to open our hearts to the One Who Is Truth ever speaking through the pages and down the ages.

Header photo: What is Truth? 1890, Nikolai Ge, Wikimedia Commons

Breaking Grey

Adrian P Conway — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:11:10 GMT

Here is the message of the Amen, the faithful, the true witness, the ultimate source of God’s creation: I know all about you: how you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other, but since you are neither cold nor hot, but only lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth. (Rev 3:14-16)

Even in the final book of the Bible, this whole one thing or the other is still going on. Tepid doesn’t go down at all well in Divine circles and, so it would seem, neither does grey. The first words issued from God’s mouth are: Let there be light! And then He divides the light from the darkness so that there’s day and night. He doesn’t simply create a single thing called daght or lirk, and after all, there’s dawn and dusk for those in search of subtleties. But equally He hasn’t said: let there be dark. The darkness is somehow a side result of the original indistinctness of creation.

The bringing forth of light serves to box-up the darkness into a manageable place called night. God sees that the light is good but has no matching feeling for the darkness. Still, He looks back over His handiwork on the sixth day and sees it’s all very good. (1:31) Because it’s ordered. Order is good and beautiful. That’s the message and why rebelliously mixing the things God has rightly delineated is bad and ugly.

Now, all this might sound a bit black and white; a little too binary for the complexities of real life and a good story; precisely more like the childish categories of goodies and baddies. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the point being made here.

One of the most haunting novels I’ve ever read is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s brilliant on many levels, and rightly recognised as such, but I’ll confine myself to our reflection. It portrays the greying of collective existence in a post-apocalyptic world. The particular disaster is never named but a hidden root cause seeps from the pages like an open wound: appropriate protecting lines have been crossed. Virtually all that’s left thereafter is for us to be consumed, figuratively and literally. Grey is present on nearly every page as the outward sign of transgression. It’s relentlessly rammed down each character’s throat and also every reader’s.

By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.1

The world has to get really mixed up to produce this sort of grey. In the absence of clear day and tender night, it creeps in through fitful sleep and waking nightmare. Right from the opening paragraph the father looks eastward with withered hope for the smallest sign of the rising sun. A possible Resurrection allusion (Jn 20:1). The reader knows what’s in the father’s mind: please, let there be light!

We look to the novel’s final paragraph for a clearer sense of this collective sin. We failed to cherish the ordered beauty of our world: its cool mountains and living streams, its healing smells and incredible creatures. The mystery of creation surrounded us like a mantle, vastly exceeding our meagre presence, but we simply exploited it. And now things can’t be put right by a people that barely remembers the difference between right and wrong; who are numbed and jaded as much by the day as by the night. What’s the sense even in surviving when hope itself hangs by a noose?

The writers of Genesis are reminding us that even though life is complex, it’s no fable that light and dark are distinct and nothing’s to be gained by reducing everything to grey. For it is only by seeing light and dark aright that there can be any proper discernment of those innumerable shades of grey in between.

Header photo: Author’s own

Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Picador, GB, 2006, p 32.

Seeing The Light

Adrian P Conway — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 09:05:56 GMT

God saw that the light was good.

God sees the light rather than merely seeing by it. What mystery in such regarding? It’s certainly not the way we normally speak of seeing the light.

At Shaw’s Corner, the house where George Bernard Shaw lived and wrote, there’s a hut in the back garden set upon a revolving platform so that the writer could follow the sun’s daily arc as he wrote. Seeing by the light the better to find it. The case for light is perhaps obvious, and beautifully portrayed in T S Eliot’s Choruses from ‘The Rock’(X).

We’ve already seen that God is Word before ever a word is spoken. So too with light.

This is what we heard from him, and the message that we are announcing to you: God is light; there is no darkness in him at all. (1 John 1:5)

The light spoken forth comes from the God who is light: created light from Uncreated Light. This is reworked in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to describe the flow state between Father and Son – Light from Light.

Before we’re all blinded by the light, I’d like to present a case for the darkness. Of course, with everything happening in the world one might feel the darkness already has more than enough representation. But I have a different darkness in mind.

Light and dark are, of course, as much image and analogy as physical realities. From a psychological and evolutionary point of view it isn’t hard to see why for us largely diurnal beings the light illuminating the hidden predator is preferred to the darkness concealing it. Still, the story of saving light often has far more dramatic power for the fireside bard when all around thick night presses in. Nonetheless, the standard is: light equals clarity equals truth, goodness and beauty; darkness equals confusion equals falsehood, evil and ugliness. This is certainly the prevailing imagery of Christianity and of much epic storytelling.

Tolkien’s peerless The Lord of the Rings is a good illustration. There’s a Shadow in the land and Gandalf the Grey senses a return of the Dark Days, fearing it as the ‘Shadow of the Past’ (Book I, Chapter II). Soon his very worst fears are realised with the establishing of the Land of the Shadow (VI:II) behind the Black Gate (V:X) and the Dark Lord come again in his Dark Tower and with the despatching of his Black Riders. After the long ‘Journey in the Dark’ (II:IV) of Moria, Gandalf encounters the entity of destiny described as ‘fiery shadow’ and falls into the abyss ‘beyond light and knowledge’ (III:IV). Later, Galadriel states that a grey mist veils him from her sight and Aragorn informs her that he’s fallen ‘into shadow’ (II:VI).

By contrast, Lord Celeborn and Lady Galadriel are described as being clad wholly in white, and, after his trial of strength with the Balrog, Gandalf himself returns as the White Rider (III:V). And let’s not forget the White Tree and White Tower in the White City of Gondor.

Only occasionally does image work against type. The entombing fog on the Barrow Downs is described as ‘thick, cold and white’, the fell Wight’s eyes are ‘lit with a pale light’ and the deathly hobbits all ‘clad in white’ (I:VIII). Most notably here, the good shadowing trees of Lothlórien hide the company from pursuing orcs (II:VI).

For there is such a thing as sacred shadow or darkness celebrated in the Christian tradition. In fact, there’s a whole day in the liturgical calendar that used to be called Black Saturday. It commemorates Jesus’s body lying in the darkness of the tomb and the descent of his soul into the shadow realms of the dead. It’s a stripped time of stillness and extinguished flames; a very different silent and holy night. But it’s a tremendous celebration nonetheless, even if ultimately outshone by the blaze of the Resurrection.

Its understated story tells of the liberation of the long hankering faithful, all the great heroes and heroines of old whose many days were hung with messianic hope. As prefigured in so many mythologies, Jesus descends into the underworld and in so doing makes all darkness sacred. After all, it’s only up from the lowest point. This is the poised spirituality of Tenebrae. Tolkien, of course, has his own pale echo of this Harrowing of Hell in Aragorn’s quest to the undead oath-breakers, exceptionally rendered in the film version.

With Genesis One, we see the light and give thanks for its radiant goodness. Yet, we are also called to celebrate the truth that the darkness too glows with God’s abiding presence. Let’s find ways to make our stories shimmer with sacred shadow.

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High,
who abides in the shadow of the Almighty,
will say to the Lord, “My refuge, my fortress;
my God, in whom I trust.” (Psalms 90/1:1-2)

Header photo: Patrick Hendry, Unsplash

The Sound Of The Big Blue Whale

Adrian P Conway — Mon, 12 May 2025 13:29:41 GMT

What’s striking about hearing God first speak, so to speak, is the sheer univocal power of His voice:

God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.

This is the opening example of that speaking-into-being we’ve noted. Where’s that voice gone? Is it only rolled out for universe-making and special occasions? Why is God so comparably quiet these days? I distinctly remember St Mother Teresa, in her latter years, describing her sense of God’s absence - His silence. My bones literally quivered at the words. What hope is there for any of us? The great nun appeared to be enduring the mystic experience that is The Dark Night of the Soul.

One of my absolute favourite novels is Shūsaku Endō’s, Silence - essentially a story length meditation on God’s silence. Or perhaps not. You can explore it with me here:

It took me a couple of reads to grasp the wisdom being imparted by Mr Endō – define silence. Which naturally brings us to the Blue Whale.

I’m no cetologist but it’s my understanding that their sounds can be heard at distances exceeding five hundred miles. Even taking into account sound travelling better in water than air, that’s five hundred miles! And what would we hear? Exactly nada. The sound is half as loud again as a passenger jet taking off but the frequency so low that only other Blues (and highly specialist equipment) can detect it.

There’s an old proverb (Portuguese, I believe): God writes straight with crooked lines. It’s appealing for its combined literary and spiritual power. I understand it to mean that only an infinite God could be present through a sense of absence, in the deafening silence. Hence, the Prophet Elijah in the First Book of Kings. Whilst in the presence of the hidden God there’s a mountain-shattering gale but that’s not where Elijah finds Him. Then there’s an earthquake, and then raging fire, but He’s not in them either. Then there’s the sound of a gentle breeze and Elijah recognises God’s appropriate presence, (1 Kgs 19:9-12). It’s not that God is absent from the other epiphanies. The point is about expectations of where to find Him.

I don’t hear God speaking at the volume of those first words of Genesis and I don’t personally know anyone who does. But, equally, it isn’t true that I don’t hear God speaking to me at all and obviously I know He could speak just as loud if necessary. If His booming voice can be found in the faintest whisper, then it must surely depend on your measuring instruments. In other words, your vocation. We hear what we’re meant to hear at the appropriate volume. If we’re listening.

As a Christian story writer one of my main concerns is finding the right frequency. It’s a challenge, (to put it mildly). As ever, the good Flannery already considered this many moons ago:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across… to the hard of hearing you shout.1

Each writer must work out the frequency appropriate for their work and which distortions to address. Flannery used exaggeration, wry comedy and shock to highlight such distortions in belief and character. Amongst many other things, Shūsaku Endō’s Silence portrays the fragility of triumphalist forms of faith and the inner strength of seemingly broken versions. It is deeply uncomfortable seeing faith and despair so closely aligned. William P Young’s The Shack tackles faith, personal revelation and utter trauma head on. The God dialogues in it felt a little too apologetic or high frequency for my taste but the redemptive character struggles were as good as it gets. Interestingly, it seemed to work better as a film because of the boiling-down imposed by time and moving image. Well, that’s what my blubbering told me anyway. The film Silence, on the other hand, whilst brilliantly acted and visualised, felt like a silhouette of the novel.

Perhaps the key phrase in Flannery’s statement is getting the vision across. I’m not so sure the modern assumption is always: no whale song therefore no whale. My own sense is that there’s still a deep longing to hear even the faintest sound of The Big Blue Whale in the endless oceans of the human heart. Maybe what’s required in order for that to happen is our silence - there’s a lot of surface noise around! Then, for those willing to listen, His eternal rumblings might be heard once again in the depths and received with joy, as with the coming of first light.

Be still, and know that I am God. (Ps 46:10)2

Header photo: Greg Becker, Unsplash

Mystery & Manners, Faber & Faber, London, 1972, p 34

With thanks to for the closer.

Easy! Easy! Easy!

Adrian P Conway — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:19:27 GMT

God creates a pristine universe. Yes, but there’s still this primordial chaos. How can that be? Where does it come from? As discussed, the idea in the text itself seems derived from rival creation stories. Yet in using it as a foil to portray God’s unparalleled power, the writers inadvertently introduce a rather large problem. The chaos is given significance. It needs managing. Otherwise, why mention it at all?

It isn’t simply a story device. The whole meaning of the account is based upon this idea of division/separation and the bringing of order out of watery chaos. The unstated reason appears to be the difficulty of squaring God’s omnipotence with the world as experienced, where things fall apart. Second verse in and the writers of Creation One are already facing the ultimate story dilemma: no antagonist, no story.

All the surrounding religions are polytheistic and their epics tell of good gods and bad gods and mixed gods slugging it out for supremacy. The divine sphere simply echoes the good v evil struggles of human existence and, let’s face it, Dualism is a far easier way of giving account of ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. What makes the Bible story so unique is that no concessions are made here. The revelation is: there’s only one God and He’s good and absolutely without rival. At first sight, then, it looks like Monotheism is a storyteller’s nightmare.

Creation Story Two (Chapters 2 & 3) seems more conscious of this whole problem and explicitly introduces an arch-villain in the form of a fork-tongued serpent with an appetite for destruction. Over time, he’s given a name that serves to describe his character and actions: The Adversary. Right, but not The Rival. It’s an attempt to account for the origins of evil in light of God’s omnipotence, (more on this later).

In comparison, Creation One might start to look a little naive. Except - chaos. It turns out there’s some very clever storytelling tightrope walking going on. The chaos is the first faint acknowledgement of the existence of evil later made explicit in Story Two. But why not just name it?

Well, for the writer’s of Creation One, God is the One-Who-Names. When He names something it is brought into being. The purpose of the story is to show how God speaks Creation into existence in all its beauty. There’s no room for ugly. The chaos must lurk within the originating formless voids, something like a byproduct or, indeed, a no-thing. Unnamable.

The writers are subverting reader expectation from the off. Everyone knows all too well what the world is really like. That reality is addressed head-on in Story Two. What’s being expressed here is something like: don’t dwell on the all-too-familiar darkness, don’t allow the chaos to have significance, or any greater sway than necessary, don’t even waste your time comparing evil to good – despite any temporal association, they’re in completely different ballparks. That’s why chaos must be presented as a privation, the lifeless silted bottom of a beautiful lake.

Moreover, it’s why the Spirit soars like an eagle in the summit of heaven. We’re being called to fix our gaze upon the goodness in the ordered spaces all around. The paradoxical tightrope here is: the significance of chaos ultimately lies in its insignificance. Understood this way, Story One suddenly doesn’t feel naive at all but, in fact, good psychology and even has the makings of a richer narrative.

George Bernanos expressed this point supremely in his stories. For a writer who expended so much energy plumbing the psychological depths of evil, he was ever at pains to portray it as a dead-end. From the point of view of literature, he was aware of this profound paradox: can’t do anything without it yet can’t do anything with it! In other words, a story that fails to take evil seriously, fails. But equally, a story that attempts to understand and portray evil simply by exploring evil itself, also fails. It’s like asking someone if they’re a liar. Evil’s goal is to obfuscate, to void and reduce to banality precisely because its origins are in chaos and disorder. You only begin to see it for what it truly is by looking squarely in the opposite direction.

Despite the chaos, then, Creation is a romantic comedy, not a tragedy – the happy ending is endemic. Not the puerile naivety or pie-in-the-sky optimism of, and they all lived happily ever after, but something more akin to the reconciling and resurrectional beauty of The Winter’s Tale or the gilded words of Mother Julian of Norwich: All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Once understood, the many turgid God v Devil sermons I endured as an adolescent were instantly reframed. They aren’t Biblical. In fact, I may have learnt more about this truth from the legendary wrestling bouts of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. The Bad Guy (Haystacks) appeared even bigger than Big Daddy and was often on the verge of winning. If you focused on him and his beardy scowl you’d never doubt the outcome.

But glance across the ring and you’d witness the genesis of something that would have you out of your seat with nose to the TV, chanting along with the whole ringside crowd: Easy! Easy! Easy! It was all part of the turnaround narrative, of course, but equally, as a mantra, with adrenaline firing as Big Daddy thumped the air, a deeper power framed the entertainment.

Goodness is never easy in that sense, but there is something easy in being on the right side of the cosmos; on the winning side. There is such a thing as a light burden, (Mt 11:30). Sensing that final victory, and believing in it before we can see it, and singing its praises to usher it in, well, that’s actually the start of getting us all to that final victory bell.

Creation One reminds the Christian storywriter that whilst it’s incumbent upon them to tell the honest tale of evil’s domain, the deeper story is always to be found in conquering love. Breathtaking beauty is only a second glance away and, as George reminds us, all is grace.

Header photo: Freestocks, Unsplash

Formless Voids

Adrian P Conway — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:46:25 GMT

We noted previously that a key theme of Creation Story One is creation by separation or division. The writers are keen to make necessary distinctions and story serves this purpose. The first implicit distinction is between God and Creation. We might express this now as the difference between infinite being and contingent being. That’s massive. Technically, beyond comparison. As contingent beings we really have no idea what infinite reality is like.

This is important for story because it means the first truth of our existence is mystery. What cannot be stated always holds greater power than what can. In classical terms, wisdom consists in knowing you know nothing. Mystery, in this sense, isn’t merely a rule for Agatha Christie stories but for all stories. If sales are a guide to getting it right, it’s Bible (gold), Shakespeare (silver), and Christie (bronze)! Properly defined, then, story is a journey through mystery towards some tentative revelation. That unveiling sharpens rather than removes the mystery itself. A deeper appreciation of mystery leads to awe, reverence for beauty and appropriate humility. This is why good stories don’t preach. They don’t need to.

We also explored the first explicit distinction between the heavens and the earth, or, spiritual and physical reality and how this indelibly shapes Christian story writing. The writers of Creation One are showing us that stories are made of contradistinctions: every word, one to another; every connecting yet contrasting sentence; distinct paragraphs that unfold chapter by numbered chapter, page after each sequential page. Proposition, collision, resolution. There’s a structure. You can play around with it but only because it’s still there, floating in the background.

In verse two, we encounter another crucial contrast: formless void and Spirit.

Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water.

How’s that for a follow up sentence? So, God didn’t initially create the universe in its present form but rather as an undifferentiated blob. Or, as I like to think of it - a first draft. Space is left for evolution or editorial: God, this is a good start showing great promise but it’s going to need a lot more work if you ever expect your universe to reach a receptive audience.

Despite being ancient stories, there’s an uncanny correspondence with the findings of modern science. Bible scholars inform us that, for the original writers, this formless void represents the forces of chaos. Thus, the Spirit is contrasting order. In context, the writers are presenting an image of God’s majesty. He effortlessly imposes shape and form without struggle or opposition. It’s a corrective to the competing creation narratives of Mesopotamia which portray gods that are born and die in divine conflicts and where the world is made from the carcass of a slain deity.

Two powerful insights flow from this. Firstly, God creates something pristine and unsullied. Secondly, Creation is from the outset in a state of emergence. In other words, perfectibility is realised over time. For the Christian writer or, indeed, any creative person, this is deeply consoling…

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit.1

Order can come from chaos. Something crystalline can evolve out of the murky darkness. It’s important for us to see there’s no struggle for God because the final written form (ideally publishable) reflects His perfection. Equally, it’s important for us to see that we must strive over and over, edit after edit, because we are part of the universal journey into perfect form. Yes, the first draft might feel like nothing, but, as they say, without it there will never be a final one!

The story writing process, like life itself, is precisely this episodic struggle. It’s that featureless block of marble transforming under the hands of Master Bernini. Of necessity, it’s a painful chipping away in order to produce a purity of word and destiny of telling.

Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.2

This is the calling, then - to contend with our formless voids; the forces of chaos within. There’s a primordial antagonism hidden inside them. It holds sway over us. Bringing form and coherence to the story of our lives and art is within our powers, but only with God’s spirit sweeping through the darkness. The soaring Spirit is the wellspring and archetype of all inspiration, the One who infuses our words with grace. All that’s required is to look up, above the briny swell.

Header photo: Émile Séguin, Unsplash

Arnold Samuelson, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba, Random House, New York, 1984, p 11. Cf. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/09/20/draft/

T S Eliot, Choruses From ‘The Rock’ (IX)

Story Story

Adrian P Conway — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 16:53:17 GMT

The question posed by William Collen is something like: why are the Genesis Creation Accounts written as mythological stories rather than simple records of events or propositional statements? A way of reframing it would be to ask: how does story enhance rather than cloud the deeper meaning of the accounts? A great question. In fact, a number of questions. Whilst there are no definitive answers, there are compelling intuitive ones. To that end, it might be helpful at first to explore the contrasting purposes of propositions and stories.

Thinking of propositions in this context, the Decalogue and Nicene Creed spring to mind. Their function is to summarise, state precisely and clearly, set parameters, act as guides, define rules etc. There’s a place for this. We all need clarity. A representative Creation Creed might begin:

God created the one and only universe out of nothing

God created it out of love, without need, compulsion or conflict

God created it good, ordered and with inherent purpose

And so on. In other words, single, simple, clear statements. But also statements that are fixed, objective, immovable.

What of story? Specifically, why creation stories? A simple answer might be: because that’s what the writers chose to do. Which is more like a bat to the boundary than an answer. If, (as I fervently believe), the Bible is the inspired Word of God, then technically, God had a hand in choosing story over creed. Reading the mind of God is above my pay grade but I know a thing or two about stories. Crucially, stories may contain propositions but that’s not really their purpose. A story is, in fact, a prism of life itself. Propositions don’t seek to express life in all its mystery. Rather, they cast clarifying light upon often murky stretches of the path. They illumine the what of existence that we might better consider the why. In contrast, stories are bound to the totality of existence. If you will, navigating the why.

As with life, every story is a journey. We come into this world and our story begins. We struggle, chapter by chapter, to discover our place in it. Hopefully, we overcome the obstacles on our path, find some enduring sense of purpose and fulfilment, and then, when our tale is at its end, the dust jacket is gently closed over us, (amid rumours of a spectacular sequel).

Genesis is the beginning of story as well as the entire journey of the universe. It can’t be a set of propositions in the same way life cannot be. The telling of the story finds completion in the last book of the Bible, (Revelation) which is the promise of things not yet fully come to pass. It’s always a dynamic, a pilgrimage, an adventure, a quest of discovery, rather than a fixed point.

So, propositions are a subset of story; or, (practising my own craft), the Kendal Mint Cake we carry for our mountain ascents. But the ascent is the thing.

There’s something else, though. Here is God’s question to Job:

Where were you when I laid the
foundation of the earth…
when the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy? [38:4,7]

As noted before, the reader of Genesis knows from the outset that only God can be true witness to the events of Creation. He’s the storyteller; the One who tells it as a story. He inspires rather than dictates, but the result is still His Word. This is way beyond the idea of prescientific writers simply making use of popular modes of communication. We learn from God Himself that story is the supreme way to portray a mystery. Something a set of stand-alone propositions is not equipped to achieve.

Thus, the enduring majesty of the stories consists not only in the beauty of language but in their correspondence with mystery. They are the means by which we’re privileged to see aspects of reality normally beyond seeing.

Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward
And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.1

Digging deeper, this means story is the frame for everything. As explored, God sets the whole of creation’s intelligibility within a story-frame. And, within it, we are marked out by His exceptional grace as the storytelling creature. Unique upon earth. True stories echo the divine voice; that wind-borne call of the Shepherd ever in search of His lost sheep. Arguably, story also underpins all aesthetics since it subsists in image and sound. In a way, story itself is deeper even than words on the page since it also gathers in the gaps in between; or more than words in the mouth, since it also resides in living silences.

Finally, building on the previous post, there’s a sense in which story is our only effective means for approaching reality. Fundamentally, we don’t know what reality is. What we label reality is something like observed repetition articulated into an aggregated tradition. Over the millennia, we’ve built a complex mesh of interconnecting narratives derived from experience and wisdom, trial and error, experimentation, risk and reward etc. In this sense, true stories are our best technology, our best psychotherapy, our best hope for survival. They present patterns of behaviour or, (to steal a title), maps of meaning for our consideration, contemplation and enrichment. At their absolute best, stories represent pure distillations of beauty and truth: something hyperreal and therefore ultimately transcendent.

Each single story is a fractal of the greater enveloping narrative, and always at its centre - creating cohesion, offering correction, radiating light, revealing fresh vistas - is the Bible. Not a book but the ever unfolding story of stories. Not words on a page but a permanently engaging Meet The Author.

With heartfelt thanks to William Collen for the spark

Header photo: Klim Sergen, Unsplash

T S Eliot, Choruses From “The Rock’ X, 1934

Just As Real

Adrian P Conway — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 11:55:33 GMT

We are informed that God created both heavens and earth. In other words, invisible spiritual realities and visible physical realities. This isn’t precisely the distinction being made in Genesis but it is nonetheless implied. Hence, the opening of the Nicene Creed: I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

What a truly incredible first statement of the Bible! Two (hardly trivial) details are established effortlessly and economically: God exists; and, reality is comprised of the visible and the invisible. No effort is made to explain this. As though it’s obvious. If you’re a writer of faith writing for fellow believers then it may well be. But even then, it’s still worth asking the question: what’s obvious about it?

We’ve already noted a deliberate connection in John’s Gospel with the opening of Genesis. Another aspect of John’s theology is pertinent here. His whole account is built on the idea of signs. As is true in English, the word has a dual meaning. It can refer to a physical mark or token, something outwardly noticeable or eye-catching. It can also refer to something inferred, implied, far less explicit, (eg she took his lack of attention as a sign). John uses the word as a descriptor for the miracles of Jesus. It carries both meanings: who saw what; and, who grasped its significance?

For John, the Crucifixion is the super-sign. Do you see brokenness, defeat and death? Or, do you see death’s defeat, victory and the beginnings of New Life? The first sign at a wedding reception is also instructive. The servants knew it was water in the jars because they’d just poured it in, but then saw wine when Jesus told them to draw some out. There’s no unseeing what you’ve just seen, but what does it mean?

For the modern Christian storywriter, this is the question of questions…

All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality… if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself… He’s looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point visible in the concrete, and another is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees.1

As a fiction writer, it strikes me as obvious that material realities are more immediately obvious than those of the spirit. Would there be any such thing as faith if God’s existence was undeniable? Yet, it’s equally obvious to me that obviousness isn’t necessarily the measure of something’s importance or its truth. We have the phrase in English more than meets the eye. This isn’t just a question of perception blindness as much as conception blindness. The writers of Genesis seem to be suggesting that openness to spiritual reality is a precondition for the possibility of experiencing it as real. If you’ve already assumed there’s no such thing as spiritual reality, it’s likely you’re missing the subtle signs of its presence.

The only nuancing to the above statement by the great Flannery O’Connor is that spiritual reality, understood a certain way, is more real than the material, because, as we’ll soon discover in chapter three, our present material reality is tarnished and diminished. In making an authentic connection between a given material reality and associated spiritual mystery, the Christian writer is opening a window to heaven itself. A deeper reality rushes in. Words pulse with transforming power. And the reader feels the tug of eternity.

Header photo: Andrik Langfield, Unsplash

Flannery O’Connor, Mystery & Manners, Faber & Faber, London, 1972, pp 40-1 & 42

Framing Marvellous

Adrian P Conway — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 14:48:23 GMT

Creation is our backdrop, then, and mighty pretty it is too. Put another way, it’s our story frame, which nicely leads us to Chesterton’s celebrated comment in Orthodoxy:

Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame… the artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing.1

Wikimedia Commons

At first, it might seem counter-intuitive that the essence of, say, Caravaggio’s wild and mesmerising horsy jumble that is the The Conversion of St Paul is the frame, but, of course, Big G’s referring to the literal context of all art, or, if you will, its conditions of possibility. Put simply: no frame, no content. This is the curious liberation of constraint. After all, even a chaotically complex Pollock relies upon four simple sides.

Following GK’s freight of thought: in creating, God somehow wilfully self-limited. It’s quite hard to know what is or isn’t impossible for an infinite being but it’s a little easier for us to recognise a paradox when it presents. And this enormous mystery is right there before us from the outset of Genesis, caught between our two simple words: God created.

One of the thematic preoccupations of Genesis One is creation by separation or division. Here, then, is the first and most fundamental separation, or we might say distinction: between God and his creation. God is infinite, uncreated, unlimited; creation is finite, contingent, limited. They don’t mix. Creation comes out of God but isn’t God. You don’t reduce an artist to their art. No graven images of the Most High, please, they’ll never do Him justice; they’ll always be created out of something created, never uncreated.

But, God still created.

He clearly didn’t create out of any need or lack in Himself. And, there’s obviously no limiting infinity. Except Chesterton, the Prince of Paradox, is surely still right. About humans and about God. God created a frame and because He’s everywhere He’s now also inside the frame He’s created. He’s not technically bound by that frame, the canvas, or for our purposes, the narrative arc but, nonetheless, it’s His story, He’s the author, and if He truly loves it, then, (as Maritain implies), He has to enter into it, care about it deeply and all its characters, even suffer for it and be faithful to His vision of that story from the very first word unto the last… even if it kills Him.

Long before postmodernism was ever a twinkle in the Modernist eye, God, in Jesus, bypassed the frame and literally entered His own story in order to save all the characters therein. In so doing, He transformed story forever.

Header image: Angèle Kamp, Unsplash

Collected Works, Vol I, Ignatius Press, 1986, San Fran, p 243

The Blessed Curse

Adrian P Conway — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 08:04:49 GMT

It’s time to move on from the first three words of the Bible because, just scanning ahead, it looks like there’s over 750,000 more to go. No rush, but, then again, it’d be nice to reach Exodus before Judgement Day.

God created – two words of inspirational terror for any storywriter, artist or creative labouring under a deadline (see Judgement Day above). God makes it look so easy! Only the whole Universe. Nothing to write home about.

When it comes to this topic, Jacques Maritain is always worth an ear:

Hence the feeling in the artist of his special dignity. He is as it were an associate of God in the making of works of beauty; by developing the faculties with which the Creator has endowed him.1

Wow, God’s associate. A tad onerous. But, also, an incredible privilege. He furthers: ‘Artistic creation does not copy God’s creation, but continues it.’ Co-creators, then, not imitators. All our creativity is a sharing in the unfolding of Creation. We play our part in that single creative act extending through time.

In one sense, this takes the pressure right off. There’s no reinventing that (ginormous) wheel, and no call to. As Qoheleth puts it, there is nothing new under the sun, (Eccles 1:9). Phew, we can all stop trying desperately to be so original. Then again, how many new unfoldings, how many permutations and how many incredible re-beginnings can there be? That’s quite daunting. You might never get started!

But Maritain in his wisdom seems to be suggesting that once an artist is freed from the shackles of mimesis and sinks into their singular connection to The Creating One, then, within the bounds of that connection, literally anything is possible – to relax and follow that sense of vocation. Yes, but he’s also aware the practical working-out of this is the very opposite of straightforward:

The Artist is subject in the sphere of his art to a kind of asceticism, which may require heroic sacrifices. He must be fundamentally in the direct line as regards the end of his art, forever on his guard not only against the vulgar attractions of easy execution and success, but against a host of less subtle temptations, and against the slightest relaxation of his interior effort, for habits diminish, if unexercised, and ever so much more by any careless exercise not proportionate to their intensity. The Artist must suffer sleepless nights, purify himself without ceasing, voluntarily abandon fertile places for barren places, full of insecurity.2

Right, well, umm, better get back to it then!

Header photo: Amauri Mejía, Unsplash

Art & Scholasticism, (trans J F Scanlan), 1930, Sheed & Ward, London, p 63

Ibid, p 83

Creation Story One

Adrian P Conway — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 10:57:25 GMT

Image: Ariely, own work, Wikimedia Commons: imaginative reconstruction of Second Temple of Jerusalem

Creation Story One

Grand theme: Creation as the courtly dwelling place of the Most High King, of His blessed and honoured subjects, and all things bright and beautiful

Key insights: God’s bone-quaking transcendence; the birth of true storytelling; the importance of order and correct distinctions; human centrality and responsibility within the world

On the vital necessity of always beginning at the beginning

When the beginning turns out to be not quite the beginning conceived

When Word is the only word that will do

The agony and ecstasy of writing

When putting things in boxes is much more than ok

Spiritual reality. You better believe it!

The best way to tell story’s own story is with a…

Formless Voids

On the benefits of blanks

No, Grease Isn't The Word!

Adrian P Conway — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 11:44:04 GMT

Showing my age now! Anyway, sticking with John, (not Travolta), we are informed the key word is Word, which does make for a fascinating descriptor and intriguingly powerful character name. John reveals that Jesus is this Word, (1:17). I can’t imagine it was ever used of Him during His earthly life. Nonetheless, it surely beats, dare I say it, The Dude.

John can’t state that ‘Jesus’ was there at the beginning because that’s His given incarnate name. John needs another word for the Person or personality of Jesus that pre-existed His becoming human and was thus present at and involved in the beginning of the universe. With Word (or Logos in the original Greek), things get very interesting for Story.

Logos means something like the-speaking-that-makes-happen. More like an event than merely stating something. Just as the universe begins when spoken into being, so too does Story. In this sense, Story is embedded in the very life of this originating Word, the one who is Jesus. This isn’t pietistic - it absolutely doesn’t mean every story has to be exactly like the story of Jesus. Rather, it means the blueprint for Story is found in the One who is Word.

Given the number and variety of stories written, this is patently a very grand claim. What, then, is this supreme pattern? It is Jesus’s journey into and out of this world, perfectly summarised in the celebrated Philippians hymn:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

His state was divine,
yet he did not cling
to his equality with God
but emptied himself
to assume the condition of a slave, 
and became as humans are;
and being as all humans are,
he was humbler yet,
even to accepting death,
death on a cross.
But God raised him high
and gave him the name
which is above all other names
so that all beings 
in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld,
should bend the knee at the name of Jesus
and every tongue acclaim 
Jesus Christ as Lord, 
to the glory of God the Father. (2:6-11)

In other words, this is the supreme expression of the Hero’s Journey of epic literature. Now, obviously, such stories predate Christianity, (eg Abraham, Gilgamesh, Horus, Odysseus, Orpheus) but the journey of the Word Incarnate represents their perfection because God himself enters the fray as the perfect human to save the entire universe. At a cosmic level, then, the victory is complete. Jesus is Lord of All Realms (above, here, below). There’s no topping an infinite solution to the problem of evil. Hence, all else becomes prefigurement.

However, it’s unlikely to have escaped your notice that things aren’t exactly measuring up down here. That’s why the Hero Tale retains its power. We all know what struggling against personal demons feels like and there’s nothing like the horrors of the Twentieth Century as a salutary reminder of why we must never tire contending with the darkness. But the Word version now reigns supreme not through any religious or doctrinal imposition but because it places the most important of all realities at its centre, leaving all other motivations pale in comparison, eg self-destruction, strife, hubris, tribal justice, revenge, personal glory, patriotism etc.

In the First Letter of St John (1 Jn 4:8) we find the words: God is love. The Ancient Greek word for love here translates as self-sacrificing love. In other words, the very nature of the Word is self-sacrificing love or, put another way, the love that through death overcomes death. All story (and so life) is now measured against this gold standard. No one has greater love than this: laying down their life for friends, (Jn 15:13) and, if that weren’t enough, whilst also praying for their malign executioners (Lk 23:34). The good hearted and innocent self-sacrificing hero/ine becomes, at the very least, the model par excellence of tragic literature. Reflected in Michelangelo’s Pietà; a broken Lear holding the gentle, loyal and lifeless Cordelia; Jack having done everything to save Rose; the most powerful Star Wars movie - Rogue One.

Notably, though, with the Resurrection, the Word blueprint also scales to Romance literature (ie happy endings). Self sacrificing love might manifest simply in tireless community service, in workaday acts of selflessness, in helping the vulnerable at uncounted cost. Think It’s A Wonderful Life. Or in remaining faithful when sorely tested eg Job. It might mean the overcoming of fatal flaws, a heroic and very public battle with our vices, the humility to accept help, to admit when we’re wrong and make reparation, eg Leontes of The Winter’s Tale. It might even mean a simplicity of lifestyle so tender as to be barely recognisable as heroic. Heroes don’t have to die to be heroic. It isn’t always about taking a bullet or finally succumbing to one’s wounds beside the steaming corpse of a freshly slaughtered dragon. Bullets and dragons come reticulated. After all, the ultimate story arc is life. LIFE! And to the full. A narrative that, thanks to the Incarnate Word, punches right through physical death.

The gauntlet is, thus, laid down to any aspiring Christian writer. Find Word! Show salvation: the dying to selfishness that leads to a truly fulfilled life. Pass beyond the obvious truth that every story is contingent; a particular journey in space and time. Explore the very far from obvious truth that Story is an attempt to channel the flood tides of eternity. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, show the mystery within the manners. In other words, allow the eternal day to break out of the everyday. Even in things as simple as mustard seeds. Or, especially.

This truth extends to how a story is created; written into existence. The struggle to find any good words let alone royal ones itself becomes a journey in self-sacrificing love. It isn’t in itself about getting published, hubris, agon, or becoming faymuss, but rather more the daily deepening of love for Word. Every immeasurable moment turns out to be the beginning, every fresh pen-stroke is Word still creating in the beginning; still fleshing-out in the beginning. We’re always beginning.

In the Book of Revelation, Jesus is described as the Alpha and the Omega (Rev 21:6), notably, letters: the first and last of the Ancient Greek alphabet. Last lives inside First and vice versa. The beginning is nested inside eternity and thus is already mysteriously complete. The finest prolonged meditation on this I’ve encountered is T S Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, [Little Gidding V]1

So moves this eternal Word through the rounding seasons of the soul:

Yes, as the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do not return without watering the earth, making it yield and giving growth to provide seed for the sower and bread for the eating, so the word that goes forth from my mouth does not return to me empty, without carrying out my will and succeeding in what it was sent to do. (Is 55:10-11)

It may not always feel like it, but everyday is in fact an adventure of Word: originating, re-expressing, revitalising and returning. And when you’ve exhaustedly penned or edited the last one in the story resting before you, new ones already cluster upon a horizon filled with light, eager for incarnation.

Header photo: Patrick Tomasso, Unsplash

T S Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays, Faber & Faber Edition, London, 1969, p 197.

Where To Begin, Again?

Adrian P Conway — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 07:51:53 GMT

It turns out the opening words of Genesis - In the beginning - make for such a deceptively good beginning that they’re used for another beginning. Well, if it ain’t broke! The Gospel of St John begins with the same phrase. At first sight, this might be mistaken for plagiarism or lazy writing or even simply a Biblical big-up. One only has to read on to realise something much more profound is at work. Whoever wrote this - In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. (Jn 1:1) - is as original a writer as, well, the original writer of - In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen 1:1) He’s even managed to use our key phrase twice without the feeling of repetition or redundancy.

This doesn’t land like mere homage but more like redux or even a radical deepening of the original statement. How do you take on the biggest story of all time; the story about the beginning of all time? Normally, you don’t. There’s no beating Shakespeare or Joyce on their home ground. Except hubris isn’t driving the Evangelist here. He’s not deconstructing but, rather, has something amazing to add.

Here’s the claim: that the mind-blowing beginning of Genesis is not the most important thing about the beginning. Qué? In other words, the most important element is what’s missing from the original account - The Word. A Person. St John is suggesting that the beginning really begins with this Person, this Word. Could there be a more profound statement for storytellers, writers and creatives? We’ll explore this more deeply in the next post. Suffice to say, an implication of John’s account is that (properly understood) the true story starts here, not Genesis 1:1.

That also makes for solid story device: a massive reveal about the protagonist someways through the narrative - Harry’s a hor what? It’s also a stroke of genius to reframe the whole story thereby - you’re not my faaaaatherrrrrrrrrrrr! John’s astonishing insight is that the very meaning of history and so also of story, is not so much a linear narrative from first to final word but is instead to be found summed up in Person, Character, Actor.

I think it was Henry James who once stated of story-writing: what is action but the development of character? What is character but the development of action?

Opening words are crucial but their full significance subsists in the total sum of Word in a story, (the spoken and unspoken). Story is not so much about chapters of passing time or the turn of the page, as unfolding relationships - you to the inhabiting characters, and the narrative itself to the broader mystery of existence. In our best stories, truly Word becomes flesh and dwells amongst us.

Header photo: Vincentiu Solomon, Unsplash

Where To Begin?

Adrian P Conway — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 10:17:06 GMT

There’s an old adage: the best place to start is at the beginning. Right, but if you’re telling a story, you might feel that spelling that out doesn’t exactly make for the best of openers. Given the absence of any preceding words, it’s a fair assumption the reader knows they’re at the start. With a remit to find three golden opening words, one might regret wasting the opportunity with In the beginning. Arguably, Melville’s Call me Ishmael makes a finer fist of it.

However, if, like me, you believe the Bible’s an encounter with Ultimate Truth through the power of story then there can be no wasted words. A deeper reality is always waiting to be discovered.

The Once upon a time that often opens fables has, interestingly, a certain timeless quality to it and there’s something similar at work here. A fable doesn’t have to be literally true to be fundamentally true. The classroom question, ‘What’s the moral of the story?’ hardly requires explanation. Is it crucial that there was ever an actual boy who cried wolf? What about not messing around the people your life might depend on one day?

So, in one sense, we’re already in the realm of the fabulous because, well, who’s honestly around to tell this tale from the start? But, ironically, that’s the telling point which wreathes the apparently pedestrian opener with golden primordial light. Quite literally, from the off, we’re taking God’s word for what follows. It’s told in the third person but, of course, only He can be the true narrator. So, this isn’t merely the opening of any story but of every story. It’s the beginning of story itself.

Now the beginning isn’t obvious at all and calling it the beginning is the opposite of self-explanatory. It feels more like a cipher to a murder mystery designed to hook the reader to the end of the tale. With these three simple words we find ourselves instantly drawn into an unsettling intimacy. The very opposite of a bad story start! We’re getting to witness the stuff of CERN fantasy first-hand: nothing short of the origins of the universe. But it’s truly too mind-blowing to comprehend which is why it’s told as a story. After all, when does the beginning actually begin? How does one measure the transit from timelessness to time? So, we’re getting to see what cannot rightly be seen with the human eye – like suddenly beholding the total shape of love.

It’s an astonishing privilege of imagination to stand at the demarcation between non-existence and existence, nothing and everything, darkness and light, chaos and order, emptiness and fullness, between silent hidden impulse and astounding vocal power. Brilliantly captured in those first three words, we hear the human voice interwoven with Divine Word. Whoever penned them well knew they’re fundamentally unlike Once upon a time. It absolutely matters that this is more than a fable or a simple morality tale. From the outset, the figurative is at service to the revelation of reality, and God here is most certainly real.

Now, whether or not you’re convinced by its vision is a rather different question. But, given its subject matter, I think it’s an easy case to make that it’s one of the most deceptively brilliant starts to a story ever written. And to anyone interested in story as a journey of discovery into a deeper sense of reality, this, at the very least, ought to be enough reason to read on.

Header photo: Aldebaran S, Unsplash

Genesis Genius

Adrian P Conway — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:07:21 GMT

What’s In A Name?

As the Bible’s first book, Genesis does exactly what it says on the scroll. The title’s an Ancient Greek word meaning beginning or origin, and the stories within reflect this theme. The book’s original Hebrew name (Beresheet) is literally the opening word which translates as In the beginning. Of course, every story has to have a beginning, even The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. However, not many stories start with THE beginning. The reason for this is perhaps obvious. If the subject matter’s too grand, it’s all too easy to slip into abstraction. Keeping a story grounded enables universals to shine through naturally.

It should be the case that the writers of Genesis bit off more than they could chew. Somehow, though, story after compelling story casts an ever-revealing light upon a broad range of archetypal realities – the nature of God; the origins of the universe; the meaning of life, family, kinship and human relationships; deception, temptation, sin and betrayal, suffering, death, disaster and disorder; identity, tribalism and national consciousness; communication, language, society, hospitality and common courtesy; prayer, sacrifice and covenant; journey, trust, reconciliation and salvation, (to name but a few).

Going this big in any story and so soon is, then, normally a recipe for narrative disaster. It’s a sign to the reader that there’s no small genius at work in the weaving of these accounts, especially given that they appear to be gathered from a diverse range of sources over a vast sweep of human history.

The Golden Thread

It’s possible to make a distinction between the character of chapters one to eleven, and twelve to fifty. These first chapters have the more mythic qualities of primordial history where figurative stories serve to express powerful universal truths. The second part begins with Abram and ends with Joseph, his great grandson, and so feels more fleshed-out as it follows the lives of a tribal family with all their daily dramas. Still, both parts are about origins: the first, the origins of everything; the second, the origins of God’s chosen people. There’s a word in the original Hebrew that carries this connective feel – toledoth, meaning generations. In other words, God generates everything: He begins the story and then is present in and through the generations of His faithful and even unfaithful people.

Absolutely Fabulous?

So, God is real from the get-go; for these writers He’s bread and butter, (or wine). It’s often disquieting that the characters in Genesis are so intimate with Him as to have ongoing conversations. Even for a believer this can be astonishing. The modern reader might assume God’s role within the narrative is deliberately fabulous – a cipher or story device. Yet, to an extent that seems hard to concoct, He’s somehow both very real and beyond reality, familiar and mysterious. The text provokes the thought: how is such intimacy with God even possible? It takes the rest of the Bible to answer that fully, but it’s a great question to raise and leave hanging.

A Revealing Style

A little research on the early chapters of Genesis shows the authors making use of literature from surrounding civilisations and cultures. Had they simply offered a modified re-telling of these tales, their accounts might have survived as comparative curiosities. However, they select only those story elements deemed fit for purpose and often, through subtle allusion, use them in ways that corrects perceived falsehoods.

Genesis is not, in fact, presented as a collection of alternative stories, cosmic confections or astral projections of the best of our imaginings. Everywhere the writers communicate a clear and unique sense of the Divine origins of their accounts – as unvarnished gobsmacking revelations – and the reader senses this challenge from the very first word.

The unsettling genius of Genesis, as the Bible’s opening vision, consists in having the sheer temerity to begin telling God’s own story.