Authors warm the heart and soul

Australian Stories for the Heart and Soul
Strand Publishing

My wife doesn’t like short stories and I know she’s not alone. She says they are over too quickly. She prefers stories that develop, stories that one can sink into, with characters that one can become acquainted with and can follow on their journeys through numerous chapters. I, on the other hand, like the way short stories condense ideas, the way they create a snap-shot of life. I like to see writers taking up the challenge of grappling with ideas in a short essay or review, experimenting with style, or knocking you over with an unexpected ending.

John Dickson

Phillip Yancey

Dave Andrews

Colin Buchanan

Kel Richards

Gordon Moyes

Angela Eynaud

Fred Nile

Michael Frost

Tim Costello

Thought starters

The pieces collected in Australian Stories for the Heart and Soul, itself an omnibus of two previously released collections, are stories in a rather loose sense. Hardly any are stories in the sense that they are fictional. But they are meant to be inspirational. They are what might be called, in old-fashioned terms, ‘devotionals’, although they do not follow the time-honoured formula of taking a biblical verse and meditating upon it. Like the essays in Philip Yancey’s underrated I Was Just Wondering collection (also Strand Publishing), light is shone on aspects of life that normally sit in the shadows, or the description of peculiar, interesting or startling incidents reminds us of God’s ever-present hand. But those assembled here are mere vignettes, with even less meat on them than Yancey’s, generally only a couple of pages. Therefore they suit the quick night-time or breakfast-time read, but can be frustrating where further exploration would be desirable.

They tend to fall into either of two categories. The first will be familiar to church-goers everywhere, as the style is used in thousands of churches every weekend in homilies, sermons and addresses. Typically a humorous incident without obvious reference to God or spirituality is used as a jumping-off point for describing what God is like, or what our dealings with our neighbours should be like. Parables, in other words. John Dickson writes of meeting U2 by posing as a businessman staying at the band’s hotel, and compares his own star-struck desperation to that of the crowds who flocked to Jesus, eager to hear him or be healed by him.

Other stories simply describe Christians living out their faith, and these are often the more moving. In Dave Andrews’ story of an old woman with a psychiatric illness befriended by his 20-year old daughter, God is not mentioned, and yet Jesus shines through. It is an example of what Jesus was talking about when he said, “I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in”.

Well-known authors

Obviously there is a distinctive Australian flavour from the mainly Australian authors. American Philip Yancey gets a guernsey for writing about Phillip Island and the penguins. Many of the stories are concerned with ‘battlers’, betraying a typically Australian love-thy-neighbour practicality. There is scant material dealing with ideological questions of Christianity and the nation, as we could imagine an American collection might contain.

The writing tends towards the sparseness of newspaper journalism, giving just the facts in a tight format. The lack of florid prose perhaps reflects the desire of many of these writers to present a form of Christianity that dovetails with the Australian attitude of ‘tell it like it is’. But we know through the work of, say, Banjo Paterson, that beautiful writing and an Australian sensibility are not mutually exclusive. Singer Colin Buchanan attempts both, and his piece on the drive to Bourke is a stand-out stylistically, being both rapid-fire and evocative of the outback in its battered resilience. Broadcaster Kel Richards uses poetry to relocate Biblical stories into fair-dinkum Aussie settings.

Different views

The mix of authors makes for some interesting juxtapositions. While there is much material dealing with God’s answers to prayer, interpretations differ. Gordon Moyes’ story about a haulage contractor suggests that leaving it all up to God can be very profitable, but Angela Eynaud’s own life story warns us that discovering God’s purpose for our lives can be a long, frustrating journey. She says, “What God considers successful may not resemble our definition”. In a later story she argues that being ‘real’ means admitting that we don’t always understand God’s actions, in contrast to those authors who write of hearing clear instruction from the heavens.

Fred Nile, God’s foot soldier battling immorality, rubs shoulders with Michael Frost and Tim Costello, who find God in places of seeming immorality. Frost indicates here and in his other publications that Christianity doesn’t always look like what we imagine, and Costello, whose church in St Kilda was filled with the tax collectors and lepers of today, responded in typical fashion to a parishioner concerned about the presence of criminals with recent convictions: “I simply asked him if he was pleased that they were in church”.

Warm the heart and soul

Many of the stories here convey a sense of finding in unexpected and humble places “the same guy who designed the entire universe” (as Sue Duggan puts it), and so offer a picture of faith as a multi-faceted jewel, as well as a sturdy tool that is well adapted to the Australian lifestyle. The repetitious use of some authors suggests that there is not a huge pool of Australian Christian writers from which to choose, and the brevity of the individual stories means there is breadth over depth. Nevertheless, this collection of spiritual fire-lighters is excellent value and should warm the heart and soul.

Nick Mattiske