Dayspring, Strange Light, April 2, 2024, 432 pages
If you ever wanted to find a distillation of Catholic sexual ethics, you could look to a quotation attributed to St. Paul: “For the flesh has desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; these are opposed to each other.” A few hundred years later, Augustine of Hippo came to similar conclusions, separating body and soul, with the body a source of sin. The legacy of this dualism, which has echoes from Aristotle to Descartes, has shaped Catholic teaching for almost two-thousand years. For those of us who attended Catholic school in the 1990s and 2000s, these ideas produced confusion and shame around not just sexuality, but embodiment. Add queerness to the equation, and to have a body becomes an abhorrent thing.
In Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira rejects the Augustinian dichotomy, presenting holiness as queer and fully embodied. The soul and the body are not opposed but united, inextricable from each other. Written in verse, Dayspring tells the story of John the Beloved, “the apostle whom Jesus loved,” and his relationship with Jesus. Oliveira bucks the restraints of time and chronology; we see the two fall in love and fuck in fishing boats in first-century Galilee, and in basements and locker rooms and bunk beds today.
At the heart of this book is incarnation, fiercely reclaimed: the word became flesh, and that flesh is not incidental but critical. The Jesus of Dayspring, narrated through John’s eyes, gets hungry, irritable, sleepy, soft. He’s hairy, smelly, horny. And he’s not alone. We see Mary’s aging body, reliant on a walker. Mary Magdalene treats her trans body with care, taking long perfumed baths with John and adorning herself with nail polish and false lashes when she chooses. John, as narrator, feels everything — his love of Jesus, his resentment of certain apostles, his fear of eternity and apocalypse — with his entire body.
Much of the beauty of Dayspring comes in its very human depiction of sexuality. John and Jesus fuck often, sometimes gentle and sometimes rough; they hold each other, sticky and spent; their perfect knowledge of each other’s bodies is earned through years of intimacy. Their queer desire for each other is about body and soul both, and sex is a sacred act of divine creation: “you spill a white-hot newborn galaxy across my face and then…bending to kiss me, still full of your liquid communion.” Jesus raises John from the dead (Oliveria renders “Lazarus” a description, not a name), but he also shotguns smoke into his mouth, “like vapour incense communion like the cataract of some ancient quickening waterfall till I was bursting with you.” The moments where Jesus’s divinity is loudest become quiet moments of tenderness between the two: just before his ascension Jesus’s words narrow and focus on his beloved: “i am with you always/ till the age’s end/ it’s you and me handsome/ only love/ as I have loved you.” This is a grand love story, spanning millennia, but it’s also about the minutiae of care.
Oliveira knows that an embodied account of Jesus’s life is not new, and he has the sources to show it. Interspersed throughout the text are excerpts from Christian mystics who experienced the love of God as sensual and often explicitly sexual. Teresa of Avila, Juan de la Cruz, Simone Weil: Oliveira draws on a tradition of embodied mysticism to illuminate Jesus and John’s embodied love. He also uses Old Testament pairs, including both the ones you might expect, like Jonathan & David and Ruth & Naomi, and the lesser-known Tobit & Raphael. Other references are more fleeting, like the allusion to The Last Unicorn or the many, many nods to Hamlet (another story of a son killed on a mission from his father). In terms of intertext, Dayspring is both universal and particular. John the Beloved tells this story as only he can, but his experience echoes across centuries.
Dayspring’s power lies in its ability to make words and stories familiar to those raised Christian feel not just new but urgent, a more vibrant reinterpretation than any homily I’ve heard. The book’s red text, Jesus’s words as paraphrased by Oliveira, becomes simple and beautiful exhortations: “There is enough/ too much/ for you and for all/ and you will be ok.” Miracles become collective, as in the feeding of the five-thousand: everyone gives what they can and takes what they need, and there is enough. It’s a reminder that without two-thousand years of legend and dogma, the story of Jesus is the unlikely story of a man who talked a lot about radical love.
In Catholicism, the Passion—crucifixion, death, and resurrection—is an event that shatters time. Jesus is always dying, forever hanging on Calvary’s hill, his human body a mangled wreck. Oliveira’s depiction of the crucifixion is the most deft of his retellings. This event returns again and again in the text, culminating with a remarkable passage in the voice of two soldiers nailing Jesus onto the cross:
hey. listen it’s like going to sleep i
promise
what a brave boy. don’t cry
he’s so far gone we probably don’t even have to break
shut the fuck up man look at him.
Here, what shatters time is the tragedy and trauma that bring John, and the reader, back to this moment over and over.
Dayspring combats ideas older than Christianity about the strict dichotomy between flesh and spirit, and it does so with stunning language, innovative form, and rich imagery. This dichotomy is concretely harmful, and in opposing it, Dayspring becomes a story of fierce, unending love; it is what I always wanted Catholicism to be. It is a story about people who are human and fallible and queer in every way. It’s a new gospel for anyone who misses what they know also hurt them. In his acknowledgments, Oliveira acknowledges the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, saying, “They were not right; they were not kind; they were not safe. But when I wake sometimes the old hymns are still in my ears, and when I pray it’s with the prayers they taught me. Thank you for the parts that were beautiful.”