David Beresford’s Call to Love is a work of pastoral theology that earns its place among the most humane and carefully crafted contributions to the genre in recent years. First published in 2023 and now reissued by Brookscraft Publishing, the book is built around a single animating conviction — that the call of God is not a summons reserved for the extraordinary few but an invitation extended to every willing person, in every age and station of life. Beresford pursues this conviction across three interrelated sections with the patience of a scholar, the warmth of a pastor, and the narrative instinct of a writer who understands that truth comes alive most fully in the telling of particular lives.
The book opens with a rich theological foundation that covers faith, prayer, discernment, calling, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the art of reading the Bible. These introductory chapters are genuinely excellent and deserve to be read as independent essays in their own right. The chapter on faith is a model of clarity and range, moving from the familiar — faith as the trust a trapeze artist places in her partner, or a patient places in her surgeon — to the philosophically demanding, engaging with the cultural consequences of the Enlightenment, the problem of self-sufficiency in advanced societies, and the nature of intellectual belief in a scientific age. Beresford quotes the old slogan that Jesus came to take away sins, not minds, and his argument throughout is for what he calls an informed faith rather than a blind one, a faith sharpened rather than extinguished by honest questioning. His chapter on prayer is anchored to a vivid moment from pastoral practice: responses gathered from parishioners during a study course, ranging from “being with God in silence” to “struggle and silent contemplative listening” to “talking with God — not necessarily telling him what I want.” From these human voices Beresford builds a theology of prayer that feels entirely lived-in and credible rather than merely theoretical. Prayer changes us, he argues, by drawing us into an ever deeper relationship with God, and it is from within that relationship that callings emerge and grow.
The chapter on discernment is where Beresford is perhaps most honest and most useful. He speaks with disarming candor about his own experience — the years he resisted what he increasingly recognized as a call to ordained ministry, the episode at a banking conference where stage fright reduced him to complete silence before a room of colleagues, a humiliation that seemed to make the whole idea of preaching a vocation preposterous. And yet the call persisted. A college principal who listened patiently to his early sermons and made constructive suggestions, a practice of Christian meditation that deepened his faith, the encouragement of a priest who recognized something that Beresford himself could not yet see in himself — these were the instruments through which God, in the author’s words, equipped the called rather than calling the equipped. The chapter on the gifts of the Spirit is enriched by an equally telling illustration: the concert pianist who felt the call to the monastic life more powerfully than the call to music, and entered a convent not as an escape from life but as an act of wholehearted love, offering her gift as a sacrifice rather than an achievement.
The book’s second section turns to six biblical figures, and it is here that Beresford’s particular gifts as both a scholar and a writer are most fully on display. His chapter on Jacob is a genuine feat of biblical interpretation, drawing on Robert Alter, Walter Brueggemann, Ellen van Wolde, and Mary Phil Korsak to construct a psychological reading of Jacob’s life that is at once academically grounded and narratively compelling. Beresford traces Jacob’s complex inner life from his birth clutching Esau’s heel, through the deceptions of Laban’s household, through the extraordinary prayer by the Jabbok River — the only extended prayer in the whole of Genesis — to the night wrestling match with the mysterious ish who may be God, or an angel, or Esau, or Jacob himself, or all of these at once. Beresford reads the wrestling match as a confrontation between the divided natures within Jacob — the feminine and the masculine, the cunning and the courageous, the self-made patriarch and the frightened boy who craved his father’s love — and argues that the blessing Jacob receives and the new name Israel he is given represent not merely a divine favor but a psychological integration without which Jacob could never have been a worthy founder of a nation. When Jacob finally meets Esau and sees him running across the plain with arms open, weeping with fraternal love, the reader understands with Beresford that what was being healed that morning was not merely a family quarrel but something much older and deeper in Jacob’s soul.
The Moses chapter takes an entirely different approach. Beginning from the scene at the burning bush and working with David Whyte’s remarkable poem Fire in the Earth — a poem that imagines the visceral and spiritual transformation Moses undergoes when God commands him to remove his sandals — Beresford crafts a meditation on what it feels like to stand on holy ground. The poem’s lines about Moses growing pale, being freed from his complicated way of loving, feeling fire rise from the earth into his body like a flame of love — all of this becomes for Beresford an occasion to explore the sensory and emotional dimensions of a religious encounter that scripture itself, with characteristic reserve, leaves largely undescribed. The God who tells Moses “I will be with you” and who promises that the “I AM” of God will join itself to the “I am” of Moses is depicted here not as a remote authority issuing commands but as a transforming presence, forging a reluctant shepherd into a leader through the heat of love itself.
The chapter on Samuel brings a different but equally valuable quality of attention. Beresford traces Samuel’s story from his miraculous birth to Hannah, who was barren and prayed with such desperate intensity in the temple that the priest Eli at first thought she was drunk, through the extraordinary night calling in the temple when the boy runs three times to Eli before understanding that it is God who is speaking, through his decades of leadership as judge, prophet, and the anointer of Israel’s first two kings. Beresford is honest about what is less comfortable in Samuel’s story — his failure as a parent, the sons who perverted justice and took bribes, the irony that the same fault that destroyed Eli’s house was repeated in Samuel’s own family. Yet what emerges is a portrait of a man whose trustworthiness, obedience, and steady faithfulness were exactly what Israel needed at its most vulnerable moment, a man whose greatness was precisely that he was willing to step back and relinquish authority when God asked him to, anointing Saul and then David and writing down the rights and duties of kingship in a book before disappearing quietly from the narrative. The simple sentence that records Samuel’s death — “Now Samuel died; and all Israel assembled and mourned for him” — carries more weight, Beresford observes, than its brevity might suggest.
The third section of the book turns to four contemporary figures who have responded to God’s call in their own time and circumstances, and it is here that the book reaches its most emotionally intimate. The portrait of Elsa, the leader of the pastoral care team at St. Martha’s, Bethany Beach, is the centerpiece of the collection and one of the most quietly moving passages in recent devotional writing. Elsa organized phone calls, visits, grocery deliveries, and car rides for the housebound members of her congregation with a cheerful and entirely unselfconscious generosity that Beresford describes as a calling she never thought to name. She died before this book was written, and at her funeral Beresford quoted St. Teresa of Avila’s famous words — Christ has no body but ours, no hands, no feet on earth but ours — and the conjunction of saint and parishioner, of sixth-century mystic and Delaware volunteer, makes for an unusually powerful theological argument: that calling is nothing more, and nothing less, than offering what one has in love. The concluding chapters of the book argue that everyone is called by God, that there is a calling with a small c as well as a calling with a large one, and that volunteering to do the coffee hour at church is as genuine a response to God’s invitation as entering a monastery, provided it is done with love.
The Reverend Russell Levenson’s foreword rightly identifies the book as a superb handbook for love, and that description captures both what the book is and what it aspires to do. Written with scholarly depth, pastoral warmth, and a personal honesty that is rare in theological writing, Call to Love is a book that will enrich any reader who takes it seriously — those who are already engaged in Christian life and ministry, those who are wondering whether they might have a calling they have not yet dared to name, and those who simply seek, in Beresford’s own phrase, to respond in faith and love to whatever God asks of them.
Readers interested in exploring the book further can grab their copy here: https://a.co/d/05dPR8CE. For more information about the author and future updates, visit the official website: https://davidberesford.net/.