Here I sit in nothingness, asleep while I close my eyes to darkness as it falls around me.
There is a line darkness does not cross. And still there are shadows:
flesh doesn’t wander over spirit or death. (The flesh is quickest to disagree with eternity; the bones are slowest to turn over in graves of dust and water.) Spirit can never die.
Spirit never dies while we are awake but sleeps at night like a universe of endless stars expanding into nothingness, to never reach over the edge of an infinite void, a dark hole of remembering everything and giving it more weight, more gravity to nothing escaping, as every thought is compressed into words
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P. M. Flynn holds a BS in English from East Carolina University. A devoted roaster of organic coffee and enthusiastic baker of cookies, he pairs his creative pursuits with a long record of publication in respected online and print magazines. His debut poetry collection, Shadows on Moss, was released by Resource Publications. For more than fifty years, he has explored the deep interplay between art and theology, a commitment that continues to shape his writing and imagination.
I thought I saw you at the market after you died, and again rounding a corner on Monte Sano, past Holy Trinity. Convinced, despite your ashes in an alabaster urn, I follow my mother until she turns to look at me with the wrong eyes, wrong smile, three inches too tall – this body was not yours resurrected. Yet, the absentache does not dissipate, but burrows deeper in the bone. Doctors say it’s quite common after amputation to feel pain where there is no longer a limb, experience it as fully as when it was part of your frame you could see and touch – the missing part remains present somehow despite its removal.
I wonder if Christ misses his body, now ascended, misses the smell of his own skin and sweat, timbre of his own voice, touch of his mother’s hand sweeping hair from his face, even well into manhood – does he miss his father’s hand on his shoulder, the grip of his fingers around a hammer, unravelling a scroll? Does he reach to touch his chest where the pain of humanity still throbs, but there is no ribcage, no pumping heart? Or does he try to conjure the scent of spices, taste of roasted lamb filling his stomach, the sensation of sleep? Does his side still flinch with the memory pain of a blade sunk deep, do his fingers long to trace the borders of his wound?
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Nadine Ellsworth-Moran is a minister serving in Georgia, USA. She has a passion for writing and the arts. She is fascinated by the obscure and the way grace shows up unannounced. She has been published in over 60 journals and hopes to continue to find ways to put the indescribable into words. She lives with her husband and five unrepentant cats.
The editors of Sacrum et Decorum, a peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the history and study of sacred art, invite submissions for a special focus on sacredChristian art in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. They welcome contributions that engage with the intersection of Christian (broadly interpreted) visual culture and the distinctive colonial, postcolonial, and multicultural contexts of the region.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Church architecture and interior decoration
First Nations and Māori visual traditions’ encounters with European missionary art
The reception and adaptation of European sacred art traditions in Australia and New Zealand
Religious street art
Individual artists, craftspeople, and workshops engaged in sacred art production
Stained glass, iconography, sculpture, metalwork, and devotional objects
Contemporary sacred art and evolving liturgical aesthetics
Sacrum et Decorum is published in both Polish and English and is indexed in DOAJ, ERIH PLUS, EBSCO, and other major academic databases. It is an open-access publication, and authors retain full copyright under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licence.
The journal welcomes original, previously unpublished scholarly articles making a substantive contribution to the field. In addition to full research articles, shorter contributions – including reviews, source materials, and artists’ reflections on their own practice – are also invited. Submissions in English are particularly encouraged.
Full author guidelines, technical requirements, and submission information are available at the journal’s website.
the Lord is my shepherd and I / do not want to / lie down in your pastures / of fake grass and chlorinated pools / where the sun beats down on / our languid bodies and we are told / this is good even / though the heat feels like noise and / our thoughts have slowed / like tar
and you have closed / the entrances to the valley of / the shadow of death and / you have told us the shadows / have been banished / nothing to see here but I / want to see what that looks like and / you say I’m dwelling on the wrong things / why not dwell here where / there is a banquet that we will take / pictures of and post them so / those who admire us and those / whose admiration feels like / spite and those whose spite makes us feel / admired or at least victorious / so that they can see and try / to forget about us or talk about us / and surely / goodness and mercy will follow us all / the days of our life just in case / we hold still / long enough to / feel how much / we miss it
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Martine van Bijlert is a poet, writer, and artist who grew up in Iran, now lives in the Netherlands, and in between worked as an aid worker, researcher, and diplomat, mostly in Afghanistan. She is the author of the poetry collection Peace, Peace They Say. This was first published in Hot Pink Magazine.
No painting can be adjudged, can reveal its true meanings, can expose the deeper insights and sensitivities of the artist, unless one physically confronts and breathes in the paint. The message is in the medium. All that I am able to do is run my eye attentively over computer images of the successive panels of Kyrie Eleison, draw attention to one or two more obvious themes, and supplement my a priori reading of the paintings by inferences drawn from my many years of friendship with Michael Galovic.
Inspired by the unforgettable photographic images of the Twin Towers, Michael was moved to give iconographic expression to his meditations around the catastrophic event in the form of a series of eight interconnected, moving, and challenging panels. Drawing on living water from the well of Eastern Orthodox iconography, each successive panel links images of the devastated World Trade Centre to the Gospel narrative of Christ’s passion and resurrection, episode by episode. Michael’s conviction clearly was that it is only through the salvific Paschal Mystery that spiritual meaning can be ascribed to the otherwise totally meaningless incident.
But, as with Holy Scripture, one needs to delve deeper into the narrative to expose the sensus plenior, the fuller sense, that lies beneath the surface of the imagery. Unless I am much mistaken, what lies beneath the surface is a vision of “things-to-come” that Michael shares with countless Christians around the globe. To reduce this vision to its barest bones, it is that of an impending (in fact, it has actually started) worldwide catastrophic collapse of cultures and institutions, ecclesiastical as well as secular, accompanied by massive extinction of biological species, and the ravaging, or even the extreme elimination, of entire human populations. But this widely shared vision is not one of despair but of hope; not hope in the “but there is still time” with which climate scientists seem to feel it their duty, even if contrary to their convictions, to conclude their dire warnings, but hope, of faith, that a new universal order will emerge amongst a remnant humanity.
Michael Galovic, Kyrie Eleison, 2025. 170 x 80 cm.
In its Christian form, it is the conviction that the New Jerusalem will be centred on the Cosmic Christ, through whom, in the power of the Divine Breath, the Holy Spirit has drawn people to himself from the beginning of the Homo sapiens story. The eternal Logos, the Word,and the Incarnate Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, are one and the same, but the Word has come to the hearts of countless millions of seekers before the Incarnation and amongst those who have heard nothing of the gospel, even today. The cosmic Christ is the universal Christ, the saviour for all. The age of the cosmic Christ, to those who share this vision, will not be long coming.
Galovic’s Kyrie Eleison series is defined by the first and last panels, from the fall of the towers to the icon of the cosmic Christ. Each of the intervening six panels is centred on a cluster of symbols that invite the viewer to meditate on Galovic’s apocalyptic vision, first from one angle, then from another. Obviously, the symbols were selected and grouped because, for Galovic, each symbol has a particular meaning. But symbols are polysemous, and indeed frequently carry opposite connotations. This means that each panel, in its unique way, can simultaneously convey or connect with the meanings of both horror and doom, and with the promise of a new order arising from a devastated world.
But why, one might ask, does Galovic ground the whole series in the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 9/11? Galovic’s Kyrie, though he constantly refers back to 9/11, is not about 9/11 per se. He simply uses 9/11 as a type (in the biblical sense) of catastrophic events with worldwide consequences in general. He could, to take a couple of examples, equally have chosen the nuclear holocaust of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, or the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, to anchor the series. The obvious answer to the question is that it was the impact, and by no means does that exclude aesthetic impact, of those unforgettable photos of the destroyed Twin Towers that gripped his attention. It was indeed those naked, silvery pinnacles of steel rising from the sea of wreckage that were to haunt Galovic and led to a series of 9/11 paintings that predate Kyrie.
Even the view from in front of a computer screen is more than sufficient to tell one that Galovic’s Kyrie Eleison is a work with a desperately urgent message for our times. In my opinion, it is both a triumph for Galovic as an iconographer and for the flexibility of the Serbian iconographic tradition, which has been his mentor since childhood, that has enabled him to interpret the apocalyptic signs of our times in a brilliant sequence of iconographic images of the unfolding heart-rendering stages of the paschal mystery.
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Guy Freeland, a lecturer at St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College, Sydney, lives and works on the lands of the Dharug people.
I have often asked myself a seemingly unanswerable question. Over and again, I have wondered, What will happen to G?d in the not-so-distant future when all of us earthlings will have perished, when, as a result of our plundering of this precious Earth we will have gone the way of the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon? What will happen to G!d?
I have wondered out loud, and I have pondered in the quiet of my heart.
With the Torah or Talmud open before me, their ancient black letters speaking to me from the past, I have wondered.
In the woods alone, among the trees and beside the water, watching the sunset, listening to the geese, I have wondered, What will happen to G?d when we earthlings are gone?
In the evening, when the sun has set but the darkness we earthlings have banished hasn’t come, I have wondered. In the quiet of the night, when many sleep and few are listening as a distant owl hoots, I have wondered, What will happen to G!d?
In the cacophony of the city, with cars honking and trolleys squeaking, with voices of many languages blending together and people of every hue weaving past each other, I have wondered, What will happen to G?d when we earthlings are gone, our demise the result of our disregard for this precious Earth and each other?
As candles flicker before me, welcoming a day of rest and celebration, when my heart quiets and peace settles over my home, I have wondered, What will happen to G!d?
And every time, in every place, the same answer has welled up within me. Every time, in every place, I have heard, I have felt, I have experienced the same answer.
G!d will endure. G?d will survive. G!d will always be.
Brokenhearted, consumed by grief, but ever-resilient, the Mystery, the Spirit, the Wonder will abide, never forgetting, always remembering,
when we earthlings are gone.
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Katy Z. Allen is a poet and a devoted lover of the more‑than‑human world. A retired rabbi of an outdoor congregation, she has also served as a healthcare chaplain, co‑founded a Jewish climate organisation, and works as an eco‑chaplain. She is a member of the LGBTQ community and has been writing in one form or another throughout her life. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, The Bluebird Word, and Art on the Trails: Number 9, among other venues. Her book, A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text, was published by Strong Voices.
Patricia Piccinini, Doubting Thomas, 2008. Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, chair, 100 x 53 x 90 cm. McClelland, Langwarrin, Australia. Photo by Mark Ashkanasy.
‘Reach out your hand and put it in my side’ moved at hearing of Thomas’s act – that extraordinary moment its intimacy, the invitation to trust and touch, imagination travels to the theatre with gowned and masked figures bent in concentration over human souls prone, delivered to the knife the testing, probing fingers both intimate and distant in their sides.
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Chris Ringrose is a poet and fiction writer living in Melbourne, Australia. His latest poetry collection is Palmistry (ICoE Press, 2019). Creative Lives, a collection of interviews with South Asian Writers, was published by Columbia UP in 2021.
Do you ever gaze upon the ocean and fall quiet, struck by its vastness, by the way it stretches beyond sight, yet answers to a shoreline?
A body so immense, it feels eternal, yet born of a Presence that called it into being.
It remembers beginnings. It foreshadows endings.
It has claimed ships and carried them home. It has held both storm and stillness in the same breath.
And I wonder, what kind of God writes himself into water and wind, into tide and undertow, into depths no eye can measure?
Somehow, I find myself in its rhythm, my thoughts rising and retreating like waves surrendering to an unseen hand.
In its ceaseless motion, I learn submission. In its return to shore, I glimpse grace.
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Buki is an emerging poet exploring love, grief, identity, and the quiet thresholds of becoming, shaped by her life across Nigeria, the UK, and the USA. Having only recently begun writing, she uses restrained language and intimate imagery to trace the spaces between fear and tenderness. Her work has been published in Wingless Dreamer and is shared on Instagram and Substack.
Mary Twomey, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man. Silk aquatint, monotype, collagraph, drawing, 25.4 x 53.34 cm. Private collection.
If you’re a poet who has ever found yourself drawn to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth – whether in faith, doubt, curiosity, or outright resistance – Wayfare magazine has a contest with your name on it.
The inaugural ‘Behold the Man!’ poetry contest is open now, with submissions accepted until 29March 2026 (Palm Sunday, fittingly). The prize pool is generous, with honorable mentions also published in Wayfare.
What makes this contest particularly interesting is the scope of the invitation itself. Wayfare is explicitly seeking poems from any faith tradition – or none. The subject is Jesus of Nazareth, but the angle of approach is entirely yours. Skeptic, believer, agnostic, curious outsider – all are welcome, provided the poem engages its subject with freshness and genuine thought rather than settling for easy praise or easy dismissal.
The reference poems cited in the contest announcement give a sense of the range they’re after: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s rapturous devotion, Mary Oliver’s tender human sympathy, James Wright’s moral ambiguity, Anne Sexton’s anguished wrestling. These are poems that take a stance, feel something, and refuse to look away. That’s the company this contest wants to keep.
A few practical notes: you may submit up to two poems, each no longer than 50 lines (or 300 words for prose poems). Judging is blind. Simultaneous submissions are fine. Poems must be unpublished and entirely human-written.
Full guidelines and the submission form are available here.
Art/s and Theology Australia 