The Bible is a living Person who speaks and listens.
Sacred stories live in the marrow of human experience, not as distant texts but as preverbal memories that echo through time. Each biblical narrative carries the weight of bodies that lived, breathed, and encountered sacred presence in the raw moments of their days.
To allow that presence to make her home in human form — in our form — we need to learn reading through, with, and in our senses. Dust to Grace is my art of retelling biblical stories over seven weeks, using a body-centred approach. Together, we craft the art of listening through our senses, so that sacred stories can pulse beneath our skin, slowly inhabiting the spaces between heartbeats. Staying with the story — not just reading past it — we find our way back to Grace.
After all, the Word became flesh once, and it wants to become flesh again, in your life, today.
The Word Became Flesh — And It Wants to Become Flesh Again
Yet how often do we hold our breath against grace? We clench our jaws through prayer, push past the ache in our knees as if holiness lives only above the neck. We read sacred words with racing eyes, swallowing stories whole without tasting them — as if Scripture were a problem to solve rather than a bread to break. We punish ourselves for the flush that rises unbidden, for the trembling that prayer sometimes wakes in us, as though the body’s knowing were something to overcome rather than something to follow.
Christianity — the only religion believing in divine incarnation — still teaches us to flee the very flesh God chose to enter.
But if we truly want our souls to discover the hidden God, we must turn our bodies into temples. We need to encounter God in the sweat of our endeavour, unhide the divine presence in the shameful rushing of our hormones, in the whitening of our knuckles and the reddening of our cheeks.
When Text Transforms into Touch: Biblical Characters in the Body
Journeying with biblical characters through their stories, their hopes and challenges, we cross ancient landscapes that open into our own. Feeling how they move through dusty streets and modern hearts, we suddenly experience salvation happening today. Through the weight of age-old water jars pressing against shoulders, we discover forgotten wells where destinies turn — their midnight silence thick with questions that still find us in our restless hours.
These are the moments where text transforms into touch — Peter’s palms burning against rough wood as waves mount around him, Ruth’s fingers sifting foreign grain as belonging blooms in her chest, Moses’ bare feet curling against holy ground as sacred fire rewrites his world.
Here, Scripture breathes with human experience. Each narrative opens into encounter — your hands remembering Peter’s reaching, that electric moment between sinking and salvation. In your bones lives Joseph’s dream-light, pulsing against prison stone where grace transforms chains into coming glory. Your body knows Hannah’s midnight vigil, where longing becomes prayer becomes promise.
Discover Your Place in Love’s Unfolding Story
These stories invite more than reading — they call us into moments of meeting, where the God-self writes divine into human experience. Each scene pulses with presence, each word carries the weight of incarnation.
Here, Scripture becomes the place where your story and the Sacred intertwine, where grace finds its way to transform dust through the landscape of your own flesh.
For in these ancient words breathes an eternal truth: no soul dwells beyond Love’s reach, no darkness stands deeper than this Light. From prison walls where Joseph’s dreams refused to die, to sick beds where healing touches like morning light, to valleys where shadows gather thick as night — Sacred Presence waits, constant as heartbeat, sure as sunrise.
Call, and the ancient promise lives again in your own breath: Love comes. Always. Like dawn breaking through iron bars, like mercy threading through impossible spaces, like tenderness that knows your name even when you’ve forgotten how to speak it — always, Love comes.
We begin this Lent, walking among the tombs with Asher of Gerasa: a man who tried everything – except letting go.
