Above and Below is in one sense a book born out of crisis, and in another sense a book born out of abundance. It grew from the weekly pastoral letters David Beresford wrote to two Episcopal congregations in the Diocese of Delaware during the years spanning 2019 to 2021 — a period that began in the ordinary rhythms of congregational life and then lurched, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, into something nobody had anticipated. When the doors of St. Barnabas in Wilmington and St. Martha’s at Bethany Beach were shut to public worship for two separate periods in 2020 and 2021, Beresford faced the question that he identifies as foremost in his mind throughout that time: how are we still the church when we cannot assemble? The weekly letters he wrote in answer to that question — posted on Fridays for St. Barnabas, Saturdays for St. Martha’s, appearing on the church websites under the heading Grains of Sand, a phrase drawn from Psalm 139 — were intended, in his own words, to keep members thinking about their faith, to inform, entertain, and help them stay connected to the church. That they have now been gathered, revised, and published as a permanent collection is a cause for genuine rejoicing.

The collection’s range is one of its most immediately striking qualities. Beresford writes about Woodstock and its mythologies, about the Greek word euchrēstos — meaning useful — and its relationship to Christian vocation, about Hamlet’s castle at Elsinore and what standing in its shadow has to say about mortality and faith, about an unexpected encounter with a stranger in an elevator who becomes an occasion for reflection on grace, about a walk in an autumn park, about the reimagining of the crucifixion by a contemporary artist, about becoming an American citizen, about spaciousness as a spiritual quality, about hermits and what their choice of radical solitude has to teach the rest of us. There is an essay on the Church yesterday and today that juxtaposes a passage from the Acts of the Apostles with a second-century description of Christian worship by Justin Martyr, and the comparison is startling in its implications for the present: the early church’s practice of assembling every Sunday, reading scripture aloud, hearing a sermon, receiving bread and wine, and then distributing a portion of the collection to orphans, widows, the sick, prisoners, and visitors from abroad is essentially the same pattern of worship and care that the Episcopal Church follows today, and the continuity of this practice across twenty centuries is in itself a profound theological argument for the endurance and vitality of Christian communal life.

The essays on the natural world are among the most beautiful in the collection. A rainbow glimpsed in the woods during the darkest weeks of the pandemic becomes the occasion for a prayer that God will reveal his hidden mercy even in our failures and troubles. The essay on D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, drawing on the novelist’s experience of the American Southwest and his famous writings on the wild otherness of the natural world, becomes a meditation on the God who is untameable, whose presence cannot be domesticated or contained in institutional forms alone. The essay Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, written in the early spring of 2021 when the second pandemic year was grinding on and hope felt genuinely fragile, is illustrated by David Hockney’s luminous painting The Entrance — a canvas radiating the impossible yellow-green light of an English spring — and uses the fact of seasonal renewal, of blossom and leaf breaking through regardless of human suffering and disruption, as a theological argument for the reality of resurrection. The essay on Assateague Island, the wild barrier island off the coast of Maryland and Virginia where feral ponies roam the beach, captures with particular sensitivity Beresford’s gift for finding spiritual meaning in geographical encounter.

The essays on Christian practice and worship reward equally close attention. The meditation on the Eucharist, titled For the Remembrance of Him, draws on Cyril of Jerusalem’s astonishing fourth-century exhortation to his newly baptized congregation — “So let us partake with the fullest confidence that it is the body and blood of Christ. For his body has been bestowed on you under the figure of bread, and his blood under the figure of wine, so that by partaking of Christ’s body and blood you may become one body and blood with him” — and uses this ancient text as a lens through which to consider what is actually happening when a small congregation assembles in a parish church on a Sunday morning to receive the sacrament. The essay on The Power of Love gathers voices from e.e. cummings, from a P.G. Wodehouse character who describes love as pumping her full of vitamins and making everything feel right, and from a contemporary preacher’s reflection on Christ’s self-sacrifice, weaving them into a single meditation on love as the fundamental energy of Christian existence. The essay on Amazing Grace traces the extraordinary biography of John Newton, the slave trader converted to faith and eventually to abolitionism, whose hymn has become perhaps the most beloved in the English-speaking Christian world.

There is also a quality of genuine personal disclosure in several of the essays that gives the whole collection an unusual intimacy. The piece on sermon writing, apparently co-authored with a cat named Mani who once wandered into Beresford’s study at a critical moment of compositional blockage and prompted a breakthrough, is both charming and revealing about the creative struggles that underlie all pastoral communication. The essay In Praise of Hermits reflects not only on the tradition of eremitic Christianity but on the value of solitude and silence in Beresford’s own spiritual practice. The piece Learning to Forgive, which Beresford tells us was the only essay completely rewritten for publication, is the most searching and personally courageous in the collection, suggesting a writer willing to apply to his own interior life the same demanding standards of honesty he brings to scripture and tradition.

The collection is prefaced by a foreword from the Right Reverend Kevin Brown, Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Delaware, who describes Beresford as a lens that helps his readers see God’s abundant love more sharply and clearly. That description is exactly right. Above and Below is a book for daily reading, each meditation standing on its own as a compact and nourishing reflection that can be completed in fifteen minutes but which goes on resonating long after. Across thirty-three essays it builds, without ever explicitly arguing for it, a complete and coherent vision of Christian life as a constant attentiveness to the presence of God — in scripture, in the sacraments, in the seasons, in poetry and music and art, in human encounter, in the natural world, and even, if one is paying the right kind of attention, in the unexpected appearance of caviar after Evensong in a country church. It is one of the finest collections of spiritual writing to emerge from contemporary Anglican pastoral ministry, and it deserves a wide and lasting readership.

Readers interested in exploring the book further can grab their copy here: https://a.co/d/0eRj1Wwe. For more information about the author and future updates, visit the official website: https://davidberesford.net/.