From the Vicarage
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I write about suffering and beauty, theodicy and theology, imagination and the luminous grace of real, disciplined wonder. I love good books and spacious days. I bear a mental illness that dogs me every day and forces me to wrestle hard for my faith. Writing is my journey and craft, my prayer, and my exultation.
I’ve written a number of books (This Beautiful Truth, Reclaiming Quiet), I’ve studied theology (B.Th and MSt from Oxford), I’m a hungry reader, mother to four lively souls, and wife to a handsome Dutchman who also happens to be a priest in the Church of England.
After many years of wandering both in body and soul, I’ve found myself startled and grateful to be settled in a drafty queen of an English Victorian vicarage, with paned glass windows and a willow tree in the wild garden. The church towers benevolently over our home and the bells chime our days into a certain cadence. I am wondrously ‘placed’ in this season, my world ordered by liturgy, bordered by garden fences and old windows, my work a daily immersion in words and cherry trees and the making of young souls. (I also love that Oxford is my slightly larger oyster, with it’s many libraries and excellent flat whites.) This is, as Wendell Berry would say, my ‘place on earth’, and my writing emerges from the countless novels and tomes of theology I read and the liturgies I pray and the quiet (as often as I can make it) life I lead here in the vicarage with my family. Source
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesThe Gaze That Heals
The Woman Who Touched Jesus’ Garment by Cordell Cordaro One of my favourite stories in the Gospels is the one about the healing of the woman who touched just the hem of Jesus’ robe. Afflicted for twelve years by a ‘discharge of blood’, her resources spent on doctors who could not help her, this woman allowed her bleeding, sore body to be jostled by the crowd, shoved this way and that, until the current of curiosity and need shoved her right up against the Person she sought.
The Mirthful Mr. Buechner
This piece is crossposted at the Buechner Review, and was commissioned by the Review in honour of Buechner’s 100th Birthday celebration. The Buechner Review is a lovely resource, take a look! There is no cry from the human heart that he does not hear…[1] In honour of Frederick Buechner’s hundredth birthday, I was going to write an elegant, researched essay on suffering and narration and the way that Buechner’s life and work combined the two.
Books · Beauty · Theology #10
We’ve entered the outdoor season, when the whole of nature is like an extra room in our house, endlessly expansive. We’ve come to the season of days made spacious by sky. Empty outdoor hours, framed by rest, by snacks, perhaps a few good books, are as much of a plan as we need. We foray out. To field, to forest. Yesterday, the children and I went for very long wander through the ancient grazing grounds of Port Meadow here in Oxford.
What I Hope For My Body When I'm Old
The Man is at Sea by Vincent van Gogh Here is my body, baby, Broken for you. I do not know if it will ever mend. For you have drawn so much Of me; into your skin Your fragile bones, and blood, Your breath; this, I think, Is what God means by love. But I’m not very good at it yet. In the dim, autumn haze of my days in bed just after Jack’s birth, I wrote the poem above. I scratched it out, really. Balancing him against my pummelled body.
A Happy Hobbit-Style Birthday... to me!
It's time for my yearly giveaway... I have always thought the hobbits a wise and festive folk in their tradition of giving gifts away on their birthday. What joy to scatter joy abroad in honour of one’s birth! In keeping with their fine ways, I like to give something away each year on my birthday. So friends, join me for this year’s giveaway in honour of my birthday.
Recognising God
my youngest girl, Elanor, exclaims ‘look Mama, it’s me and you’. It doesn’t matter how varied the figures: they can be eastern icons, German carvings, or renaissance paintings. In the form of the Christ child tenderly held, she sees herself. To her, every loving mother looks like me, every beloved child looks like her, and I am always a little astonished and unravelled to discover this again.
A Summer of Quiet
Familiar Landscape by Kaoru Yamada A few years ago when I was finishing the work on my book Reclaiming Quiet, while also trying to construct a life that truly was quiet, I stumbled one day upon the word that I wanted to define our ordinary: Spacious. Quiet, for me, seemed an impossible quality to cultivate without a sense of time as ample.
Books · Beauty · Theology #9
Frühling auf dem hohen Schwarzwald (Spring in the Black Forest) by Ernst Arnold Lyongrün We have returned to England from a holiday in Germany just in time for the outdoor days to begin. The light is honeyed gold and the air is still cool. Most of the leaves are out on the lithe-armed trees, except those of the great ash that overlooks our garden… he always takes his time.
Read Aloud: My Favourite Easter Poem
The ebb and flow of Easter energy, the cost of Holy Week, the joy of it, all combined to keep me from all the Lenten poems I hoped to read aloud to you here. But in honour of Easter, let us revel at least in this poem to close the season. Joy to you friends, and as Levertov says, may our ‘mortal flesh be lit from within’… (The poem is Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell by Denise Levertov.)
Eastertide
And we rise, small children and adults, bleary-eyed from the night vigil, the small fry jittery with the aftershocks of sleeplessness and sugar, the adults still running on adrenaline and awe and champagne. He is risen, and death cannot get his clutching fingers into us any longer, and I look at my lined and aging face in the mirror and wrestle to espouse that truth.