This book could have been entitled “Meditations.” In some ways, it is similar to the meditations of Marcus Aurelius: the homage to his father, the way that the physical world picture impacts on the spiritual life, and the keeping of violent world events away in the background. There are flashes of mystical experience, and the sense that his spiritual life could develop further. What is unique is the vivid description of Wiradjuri religion, how it is anchored in country, and the occasional visits of the visionary poet, Mowaljarlai.

Grant wrote this book as a poem seeking silence and shelter from the world of modernity. For forty years he had been a television journalist, and he brought the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Pakistan home with him. Understandably, he needed a break. As well, he had a sense of mission, to write about God.

He was drawn to the mystics. He wrote that he got that from his mother who “dwells in the supernatural”, as, from time to time, did Grant: “I have experienced the divine – the touch of God. I will not let miserable modernity – a world without magic – steal that from me.” [p. 19]

Grant is forthright about his position:

“In Church I enter into what Christians call the contemplative, a poetic state of being at one with angels and miracles. I am embraced within the corpus mysticism – Ecclesiae de mysterio. Nothing gets closer to God or to who I am as a Wiradjuri person than that.” [p.21] And God gets close to us in dreams, close enough to speak to us.

His spiritual life was supported by the visionary poet Mowaljarlai, to whom the heavens were open, and who saw the angels coming up and down, just as the visionary poet William Blake had before him.

Grant argues that the Reformation and the Enlightenment banished God to the heavens, but his people [the Wiradjuri] knew that God had never left them, though they had fallen on hard times. Grant writes movingly of the lament that he heard in the sweet, sad sounds of his aunties singing in their old wooden church.

Australia, writes Grant, is born from modernity`s original sin, the triumph of reason. It isn`t that reason is without virtue, but its calculation and innovation are without feeling. The forces that unleashed liberty also unleashed terror. Some scientists, he remarks, mock God`s corpse and deride the faithful as deluded.

It is not that Grant is ignorant about science; far from it. He has a strong interest in the history of physics and has actually visited the rooms in Denmark where one of the creators of contemporary physics, Niels Bohr, worked. It was he who made the celebrated riposte to Einstein`s “I do not believe that God would play dice with the universe:” Bohr in reply: “ You should stop telling God what to do. ”Grant quotes a statement, congenial to theists, from one of the most famous of last century physicists, Werner Heisenberg, “the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

There is an assumption, often made by apologists for science, that only science can reveal the invisible world. Mystical experience shows that not to be true, though mysticism and science reveal different things. Grant is very good at showing how the modern world has stripped our souls of wonder and awe.

Grant’s description of Wiradjuri religion is something of a triumph. Baiyaame is his people’s name for God : a creator spirit that commands the heavens, who gave the Wiradjuri their place and their law. He fled to the stars when the strangers came with their ideas about God and their words. Grant reminds us that the Wiradjuri tradition is older than Christianity.

The book is full of memorable one liners: “I just say that there are some things beyond words. There are some things to be felt. Like God. ”[p33] The book may become a spiritual classic.