Two voices. One remembers the smoke. One names the fire. Together, they refuse to forget.

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ASH IN THE SHAPE OF FAITH

I. The Smell of Smoke

I was ten

when a Sunday school teacher told me

the dinosaurs were God’s mistake:

too big, too strange,

not mentioned in Genesis.

We laughed, but quietly.

Even as a child, I knew

not everything that breathes

makes it into scripture.

.

Later that day,

I watched a bonfire burn

behind old Mr. Williams’ barn.

The smoke reached into his hunch-back

and into my clothes, my lungs, my hair.

The kind of smell that stays

even after the fire is gone.

I asked Mr. Williams if fire could be holy.

He said,

“Only when it knows when to stop.”

II. A Flag in the Pulpit

Years ago, I sat in a church

where the cross had been replaced

by a flag –

red, white, and looking for a fight.

The preacher wore his certainty

like armour polished every Sunday.

He said,

“We are God’s chosen people.”

I looked around.

Nobody flinched.

Outside, it was spring,

a tree near the entrance

was flowering with a quiet defiance that

nobody ever preached about.

Bees did their messy work busily,

without asking for a blessing.

III. A Question Too Small

A man* on the radio

asked a woman to define herself

in one sentence.

“What is a woman?”

as if a soul could be

filed alphabetically.

She paused too long.

He called it a victory.

But I once watched an old lady

at the kitchen sink,

one hand in soap, the other

holding a book of poetry

while waiting for dinner to cook.

She didn’t answer questions like that,

she lived them,

unfolding slowly,

like steam on glass.

IV. The Religion of Doubt

I have prayed with my eyes open,

spoken to ceilings

more honestly than to any God.

I’ve doubted in the same pew

where others raised their hands

and shouted praise.

Once, I told a Godly uncle,

I didn’t know what I believed anymore.

He looked relieved.

“Then you’re finally starting to,”

he said,

“Faith without doubt is just theatre.”

V. The Shape of Memory

We are always being invited

back into the cathedral

of control,

where power wears robes,

and silence is mistaken for peace.

But I remember the smoke.

I remember the bonfire,

Mr. Williams’s voice,

the way certainty scorched

everything it touched.

So when someone says

we should build a Christian nation,

I hear the crackle of kindling.

And I step away

from the match.

.

Remember the Fire

I. The Shadow of the Throne

Beware the silver-tongued who cry,

“Make this land a Christian nation!”

We have walked that road before;

a thousand years of consecrated flame,

of swords raised in God’s bright name,

when reason was a heretic

and science, a whispered crime.

The Church once crowned itself the State.

And what did that dominion bring?

Crusades drenched red across the sand,

inquisitors with questions honed to blades,

and thought itself, unbaptised, cast out.

We have lived beneath that shadow.

No thanks. We remember.

II. Of Nouns and Narrow Minds

“What is a woman?” asked the zealot *Kirk,

as though the cosmos could be caged

in the shape of a noun.

But language, too, can chain the sky. 

It’s dualities not destiny,

its binaries not biology.

They struggled to answer, not for lack of truth,

but because his question

was too small for the universe.

A mind that would divide the stars

into subject and predicate

has not yet learned to see.

If faith is to walk beside the modern age,

it must shed its crude disguise as “belief”

and name itself for what it truly is. 

It is a trust deeper than certainty,

a hope fierce enough

to hold both belief and doubt.

III. The Gospel of Doubt

Descartes, weary of Aristotle’s cage,

scraped back dogma to bedrock thought:

“I doubt, so I think – therefore I am.”

This is the breath of the modern mind:

to doubt, not as betrayal,

but as birth.

For those who build their world

only from what they already believe

drift ever further from what is,

into illusions of their own design.

To question is not to blaspheme,

it is to seek.

And without that seeking,

faith is but a fossil in a shrine.

IV. The Double-Minded Snare

“Doubt,” warns James, “and your prayers go unanswered.”

But the English language, blunt and ill-equipped,

hides the heart of what he meant.

His “doubt” was not the honest tremor

of a mind reaching beyond itself

it was the fracture that splits hairs

till all that’s real is lost.

True faith is not a brittle creed;

it is the trust beneath both belief and doubt,

the courage to admit

we do not yet know – but might.

V. Final Benediction

So when preachers preach a nation’s crown,

when politicians robe their power in Christ,

when they offer once again

the bitter bread of theocracy;

answer them with memory.

I have knelt in that cathedral of control.

Burned and bled beneath its steeples.

And have risen from it

thinking, doubting, seeking still.

No thanks.

I remember the fire.

And I will not go back.