Chapter Seventeen

Four blog posts exploring questions of significance: what we cling to, who decides what counts, and how we recognise the signs in front of us.

The first three were written at different times.

The fourth, written especially for this issue, reflects on the connections between them.

This is the complete spoken edition of Thinking Aloud, Issue 001.

Welcome back to Chapter Seventeen.

This time, a reading from the blog.

Elihu and the Chainsawed Hoover.

We start in the Book of Job (chapter 32, since you ask), wander off with Bear Grylls, Robinson Crusoe and a few increasingly improbable camera angles, and find ourselves wondering what it really means to be friends with God.

Especially when you're fed up.

VERY fed up.

There's suffering, Jesus, C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, a parasite that becomes a stallion, and a Hoover that doesn't survive the experience entirely intact.

Somewhere in all this, we're exploring redemption, Christian imagination, and whether the story of our lives might look rather different from another perspective.

Still thinking aloud.

Still, it might be true…

Welcome to Chapter Seventeen.

Still thinking aloud from the Author's Quarters, somewhere in the forest.

Splash! Dive bomb. Performative dive. One toe in the water

— yes, I know.

My blog posts read like an afternoon in a noisy swimming pool inhaling chlorine and water as the daylight passes outside.

That seems the nature of things when you're writing in different dimensions.

And perhaps that's why one metaphor we might use for Chapter Seventeen as a whole is that of a swimming pool. That is, one especially built for people talking about theology and imagination.

Here you can experience a wide variety — armbands, free diving, the chocolate machine in reception — and have everyone else take you seriously.

The Keyholder is still sweeping.

Come on in. Despite everything. You're probably exactly the person we've been waiting for.

Welcome to Chapter Seventeen.

A voice from the Author's Quarters, somewhere in the forest.

What is Chapter Seventeen?

Exactly.

In this first wandering conversation, Sarah thinks aloud about why she needed more elbow room, what scaffolding might make possible, and why a different angle can sometimes only appear when you step outside the space you already know.

The Keyholder is still sweeping.

Come in. Listen. See where we get to.