Blessed by God is, by any measure, the most ambitious and fully realized of David Beresford’s collections to date. Published by Brookscraft Publishing in 2026, it gathers twenty-six essays and meditations that together constitute something approaching a comprehensive theology of the ordinary Christian life — a sustained argument, made through narrative and reflection rather than systematic exposition, for the claim that God’s blessings are not exceptional events but the continuous texture of existence for those who have learned to recognize and receive them. Beresford states this conviction simply in his preface: God’s blessings are freely bestowed on believers and non-believers alike, and the art of the Christian life is to recognize those blessings and live into them, giving thanks to God for his providence and love. The twenty-six essays that follow are his attempt to show what that recognition looks like in practice, across an extraordinary range of subjects and registers.
The opening essay on Jesus as teacher is a masterpiece of its kind. Beresford begins, characteristically, in the personal — with memories of the teachers who shaped his own life: Miss Sewell, who fired a lifelong passion for drama and poetry; Mr. Baird, who opened a window onto French culture; Mr. Simms, who encouraged the young Beresford to found and edit a school magazine; and the mathematics teacher who threw chalk at inattentive pupils, and the primary school teacher whose habit of using the cane convinced Beresford even as a child that the man was a sociopath, and who yet, in the mysterious way God works, was the one who taught his class Psalm 23. From these vivid recollections the essay moves into a sustained meditation on what it means to call Jesus Rabbi, to sit at his feet not once but across a lifetime, to understand Christian maturity not as the achievement of a fixed destination but as the continuous willingness to go on learning from a teacher who never stops teaching. Beresford makes the striking argument that when Jesus calls his followers to be perfect he is not demanding an impossible flawlessness but inviting them into an endless growth, since perfection in the deepest sense is not a state but a journey. The essay ends with a passage of unusual personal intensity, in which Beresford reflects on Jesus as his rock in times of collapse, the companion who punctures his pride, teaches him resilience, and keeps restoring his capacity for love.
The essay on God’s existence is one of the most intellectually wide-ranging in any of Beresford’s collections. It opens with a pleasantly absurd newspaper report of two wind turbines collapsing in a storm in Devon, which a journalist took as proof of divine displeasure at windfarms, and uses this comedy as a launching point for a serious examination of what it would actually mean to prove God’s existence. Beresford assembles a remarkable range of witnesses: Woody Allen asking for a clear sign, ideally a bank deposit; a pastor who drove his Ferrari onto the stage of a megachurch as evidence of what faith could win you; Rowan Williams in debate with Richard Dawkins arguing that religion is fundamentally about community, compassion, and the forging of fellowship rather than about private metaphysical belief; George Guiver’s image of faith as a boat held on course by the wind of the Holy Spirit, with each individual believer carried when their own faith fails; and C.S. Lewis’s patient account of the things in Christianity that cannot be understood from outside and must be approached by a kind of practiced proximity, waiting for insight to arrive. Beresford’s own argument builds gradually through these voices toward a conclusion that is less a logical proof than a communal testimony: God exists not because the wind knocked down a turbine, but because of the accumulated witness of lives that have been touched, healed, and drawn together in love — lives like that of Ananias, who took in the newly blinded Saul of Damascus at the Lord’s instruction, knowing that Saul had come to Damascus to persecute Christians, and who showed him hospitality anyway, with a generosity that became itself the evidence of the God in whom Ananias believed.
The essay on the cross begins with a moment of disarming domesticity. Beresford’s three-year-old granddaughter notices the cross his wife Ruth is wearing and asks, with the directness that only a child can muster: “What does it do?” Beresford confesses that he had never heard this question before, not even at seminary, and the essay is organized as an extended response. The cross, as it was used in first-century Palestine, was a means of execution understood by everyone who saw it. After the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, it became something else entirely — a sign of God’s victory over death, won through suffering and self-sacrifice, a transformation of the most feared symbol of Roman authority into the sign of divine love and reconciliation. The essay ends by returning the question to the reader: what does the cross mean to you? It is the kind of question that, once asked, does not easily let go.
The essay on Julian of Norwich is written with evident love and deep knowledge of the medieval mystical tradition. Beresford situates Julian in the fourteenth-century city of Norwich — a time of extraordinary violence and disruption, when half the English population was wiped out by the bubonic plague and the Peasants’ Revolt shook the established order — and describes her life as an anchoress in her cell attached to St. Julian’s church, with its sacrament squint through which she could follow the daily liturgy at the high altar. He recounts with great care Julian’s famous vision of the hazelnut — the tiny object lying in the palm of her hand, round as a ball, which God revealed to her as a symbol of all created things, sustained in existence entirely by divine love — and he reflects on his own pilgrimage to the rebuilt church in 2022, where the rector passed round a basket of hazelnuts and the group prayed together in silence, finding in this small act of participation an unexpected and genuinely effective aid to contemplation. The essay on Evensong and Caviar — about an encounter at a tiny village church in West Sussex where a congregant who had just returned from Russia produced a pot of caviar after the service — is one of the collection’s most delightfully unexpected pieces, and Beresford uses it to make a serious theological point about the extravagance of God’s generosity: the caviar, he argues, was like the nard with which Mary Bethany anointed Jesus’ feet, an act of lavish and apparently unnecessary love that turns out to be entirely appropriate, an offering of the best rather than the adequate.
The essay on Home is perhaps the most personally revealing in the book. Beresford traces his lifelong displacement — more than fifty homes since birth, a childhood divided across five houses in four cities in two countries as his airline executive father rose through the ranks — and reflects on what it has meant to live without a fixed sense of rootedness. He draws on Maya Angelou’s description of home as the safe place where we can go as we are without being questioned, on the guitarist Duane Allman’s comment that gypsies have no home and he is always at home when he is with his people, on T.S. Eliot’s lines from Little Gidding about arriving at the end of all exploring in the place where one started and knowing it for the first time. All of these voices circle around the theological claim that the Christian’s ultimate home is neither a geographical location nor a psychological state but a relationship — the relationship Jesus promises in John 14, when he tells his disciples that in his Father’s house there are many dwelling places and that he is going ahead to prepare a place for them.
The meditation on Colin is the collection’s emotional centerpiece. Colin was, in external terms, an unremarkable man — a fellow worker Beresford encountered at a critical and unhappy period of his own professional life who offered companionship, perspective, and a kind of wordless solidarity that proved transformative. Beresford describes him as a saint of the down-to-earth kind rather than a picture-postcard one, and the portrait is built from small precise details that together convey the mysterious way in which grace can work through the most unassuming of human beings. The extended essay on the Church and Communism — which Beresford acknowledges is like an oak tree in an apple orchard in its scale and register relative to the surrounding pieces — is a piece of serious historical and theological argument, examining the confrontation between Christianity and Marxism-Leninism across the twentieth century with a rigor and range of reference that would do credit to an academic publication.
John Zagarella of Daylesford Abbey writes in his foreword that David Beresford shows his readers how to look no further than their own backyard to be blessed by God, and that description captures the spirit of a collection that is consistently, almost stubbornly, oriented toward the near rather than the distant, the ordinary rather than the exceptional, the available rather than the theoretical. Blessed by God is a book that rewards slow, attentive reading, and which, in its accumulated weight of testimony, learning, personal honesty, and theological generosity, makes a compelling case that the life of faith is not a withdrawal from the world but a deepened engagement with it — an engagement made possible by the recognition that everywhere one looks, if one looks with the right eyes, there is evidence of God’s inexhaustible love. Readers interested in exploring the book further can grab their copy here: https://a.co/d/09gJ0grK For more information about the author and future updates, visit the official website: https://davidberesford.net/.