If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?
About ten years ago we did a dramatised reading of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. I invited a university lecturer who had written his PhD on Milton’s Paradise Lost to come as a literary expert, and a friend who was a pastor, writer and stand-up comedian with a PhD in Old Testament to do the dramatic readings. It worked beautifully. The evening had depth, warmth and life. The words were not just discussed. They were inhabited.
I still think about that night because it brought together several things I love: literature, theology, voice, interpretation, friendship, and the shared experience of listening well. It reminded me that words can do more than communicate ideas. They can gather people into attention. They can make truth felt, not just understood.
I think part of what stayed with me is that I would love to have the skills to do that myself. Not only to recognise a text’s power, but to carry it aloud with intelligence, timing and presence. There is something deeply attractive about that kind of gift. It gives a text room to breathe and gives other people a way in.
Perhaps that is one reason John Ames appeals to me. He inhabits words carefully. He does not use them to impress, but to bless, to clarify, to witness. There is a kind of moral and spiritual poise in that which I find deeply compelling.
Still, when I look back now, I suspect the longing is not only about performance. I have spent much of my life gathering people, shaping settings, and helping words find their mark. Others that night brought literary insight and dramatic skill. I brought the instinct to imagine the evening as a whole. That too is a gift.
It is not simply that I wish I had their skills. It is that I recognise in them something I have always loved: the ability to bring thought, language and presence together so that other people hear afresh. In one form or another, I think I have been trying to do that work all along.
The Afterword 
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