Most of the theology I actually trust didn't come from a classroom. It came from sitting in the in-between spaces — the hallway outside an ICU room, the drive back from a funeral, the weeks after a house sells and before the grief settles into something you can name.
Jungle of Faith spends a lot of time in those in-between spaces on purpose. Faith, in my experience, rarely announces itself with certainty. More often it shows up as a kind of stubborn refusal to stop showing up — to the hospital, to the coffee after the board meeting, to the blank page.
I don't think that uncertainty is a failure of faith. I think it might be closer to its true shape: a willingness to keep walking a road you can't fully see the end of, and to keep calling that walking love, even on the days it feels more like fate.
If this collection has a single thesis, it's the question asked in its epigraph — whether we can remain, despite the maelstrom, a champion of love if not of fate. I don't have a tidy answer. I have thirty years of poems trying to live inside the question honestly.
From the Collection
