Loren Wilkinson is, among many endeavours, a philosopher, literary scholar and student of science but these cannot be abstracted from the decades of living with his wife, Mary Ruth, on Galiano Island on the Pacific Coast of Canada. While baking bread in an oven, tending a substantial garden and orchard on their farm, being active in the church and community life of the island, and hosting hundreds of former Regent College students who continue to return like migrant birds, Circles and the Cross slowly took form out of this lived experience and reflection as the author looked out on the waters of the Trincomali Channel.

Peter Harris in the Introduction writes that the book “is a Babette’s Feast of a work.” Beginning with a recognition of the wonder of the mystery of human consciousness we are asked to ponder: Why in a vast universe that is beyond human comprehension, should we humans be the only creatures that we know of with the intelligence to be aware of this vastness? Wilkinson then draws us to the wonder and beauty of the cosmos and the continual search to find ourselves within it. At the midpoint of the book, we are introduced to a science that “is the foundational myth of our age” in contrast to a traditional view of science that saw a creator God as the origins of all that exists and the story that holds our culture together. Romanticism and new religious quests emerged from that human longing in the face of the harsh Scientific Enlightenment.

Throughout Circles and the Cross are planted reminders of the wonders of Creation and warnings of its fragility in the face of the activities of us humans. What sets this book apart from, say, the writings of a brilliant thinker such as Iain McGilchrist, is the Cross and Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Particularly in the Gospel of John we are intimately introduced to the significance of the Incarnation within Creation. The Celtic Cross symbolizes the self-giving love of God at the centre who connects and gives meaning to the cycles of earth and cosmos. Following the crucifixion, it is the resurrection of Jesus that enables us to see the power of the God who first formed the cosmos. Concluding an almost meditative discussion of the Incarnation is that old carol by the fourth-century Christian poet, Aurelius Prudential:

Of the Father’s love begotten,

Ere the worlds began to be,

He is Alpha and Omega,

He the source, the ending He

Of the things that are, that have been, 

And the future years shall see,

Evermore and evermore.

This reader has only begun to partake in the richness of the feast but I intend to return to this table many times in the years to come.