The Book of Wild Saints

... is in search of a publisher

Yesterday was the feast day of St Kevin of Glendalough. Kevin, or Coemgen, whose story I told here in April, was one of the Christian wilderness ascetics who I’ve taken to calling ‘wild saints.’ I am fascinated with these people. Why? Well, partly because I think they bring the Christian Way to its purest expression. Partly because their stories are so intriguing and eccentric and sometimes even inexplicable. There’s a deep mystery to them. And finally because I have a strong intuition that they have something important to tell us today.

What could that be? I tried to get at the answer in an essay I wrote last year for First Things magazine, entitled A Wild Christianity. In that essay, I wrote that we are living in what we might call a ‘desert time’: a time of collapse and change and radical reinvention. If that is true, then these old Fathers and Mothers of the desert might have something to tell us about how to live in it:

I feel like I am being firmly pointed, day after day, back toward the green desert that forms my Christian inheritance … Back to the song that is sung quietly through the land by its maker, the song that is in the stream running, in the mist wreathing the crags, the growling of the rooks, the thunder over the mountains. Back to the caves, to the skelligs, to the deserts green and brown … I feel that in another time of crisis and confusion we need to go back to our roots, both literal and spiritual. To flee from the gaze of a civilised centre that denies God and launches salvo after salvo daily against the human soul. To seek out a wild Christianity, which will see us praying for hours in the sea as the otters play around us. To understand—to remember—that the Earth and the world are not the same thing.

The next of these stories, fantastically illustrated as ever by artist Ewan Craig, will appear here next week. But Ewan and I have been talking. Scheming, even. We have developed ambitions. We want these stories to go out further than this Substack, and we want them to appear, too, on real paper in the real world. We want them to last.

We want, in other words, to turn them into a book.

So this, God willing, is what we are going to do.

The Book of Wild Saints will feature twenty stories, all illustrated by Ewan, and with an introduction by me. You can read my existing introduction to the project, and the five stories I have written so far, here.

We want the finished product to be a thing of beauty and an object of inspiration:

Ewan and I have put together a proposal for The Book of Wild Saints and it’s currently in the process of winging its way to potential publishers. I know that we have a few publishers reading these stories already, and so I’m also putting the word out here. Any publisher who would be interested in finding out more, and reading the proposal, should contact my agent, Jessica Woollard, whose details can be found here.

I think that these saints have something to teach the people of this desert time. Let’s see if their stories can walk more widely into the world, as they once did themselves.