Missing Messiah

A Journey into the Abyss

We live in a cynical age. Cancer Man from the X-files puts it best. "Man does not believe in God because He does not supply him with miracles to justify his faith." I see people all over the world making daily decisions based on this cynicism. Nobody really knows what we are doing here. All of us seem to be caught up in the daily minutia of life - lost in our thoughts, our jobs, our preconceptions - and now, the wars. If you asked someone, I don't think anybody could say they knew what the point of life is or even that life had a point at all.

Well, my life hasn't been like that.

I'm reminded of what Rutger Hauer, BladeRunner's Nexus 6 replicant, said just before he died in front of Harrison Ford. "If only you could see the things these eyes have seen - all those moments lost now, like tears in the rain". I don't think I am any different than anyone else, really. The only thing I can think of is that I can take things at face value. Being an artist, I have an inordinate ability to see what is in front of my face. I have also learned to step out of my own way.

Read the First Chapters Notify Me on Publication

What This Book Is

An Honest Investigation

This book began as a private question — one I had been carrying for years without quite naming it. Not a question about history, exactly, though history is everywhere in it. Not a question about faith, though faith and its absence run through every chapter. It was a question about absence itself: what it means when something that should be present is not, and what we do — what we cannot help doing — in the space that remains.

I am not a theologian. I am a painter. What I bring to this inquiry is not expertise in the ancient texts but a particular kind of attention: the attention of someone trained to look at what is actually there, rather than what is expected to be there.

The book is structured as a journey — inward as much as outward. Each chapter follows a thread of inquiry that begins in the historical record and moves, sometimes without warning, into questions that are harder to put down: about consciousness, about the nature of spiritual experience, about what it might mean for a divine presence to seemingly withdraw from the world it created.

I wrote the book because I wanted to understand what it means for a divine presence to be absent from the world. I wanted to understand why it would hide itself. What is the purpose of this absence? And what does it mean for us, as human beings, to live in a world where the divine is not immediately apparent?

I wrote it the way I paint: without knowing the destination in advance, following what arrived. It does not resolve the questions it raises, but it does pose possible answers. It does not insist on them but instead just keeps pulling at the threads of inquiry, following them wherever they lead, and letting the questions themselves be the guide.

The paintings and the book are not separate projects. They are two languages for the same investigation.

Paint & Word

The Paintings and the Book

The paintings came first — or rather, they came from a place that preceded both the paintings and the book, a source I had learned to trust without fully understanding. For years I painted what arrived and did not ask where it came from. The book is the asking.

Many of the paintings on this site carry traces of the same questions the book pursues: the quality of light in a landscape that feels inhabited rather than empty; the way a figure can be present and absent simultaneously; the moment before a mark is made, when everything is still possible. These are not decorative concerns. They are metaphysical ones.

See the Paintings

"Every painting I have made is an attempt to render visible something that does not, strictly speaking, have a visible form. The book is the same attempt in a different medium — slower, more humorous, less forgiving of vagueness in some ways, but more accepting of creative reasoning. The paintings and the book are not separate projects. They are two languages for the same investigation. "

— from the Preface

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The First Chapters

Two chapters are available to read in full. More will be added as publication approaches.

Chapter One

The Metaphor

On what it means to search for something that may not wish to be found — and on the particular quality of attention that such a search demands. The chapter that sets the conditions for everything that follows.

Read Chapter One

Chapter Two

The Bridge

The Bridge is a city in Alberta where a fool's journey was taken to explore the Abyss and meet one's maker. Some events sound like science fiction but The Bridge is a real place, and the journey is a real one. The chapter explores the nature of reality and the human experience.

Read Chapter Two

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