Night's Bright Darkness

by Sally Read

Staunchly atheist Sally Read converted to Catholicism in the space of nine electric months. In 2010, Read was heralded as one of the bright young writers of the British poetry scene. Feminist and deeply anti-Catholic, she was writing a book about female sexuality when, during her research, she spoke with a Catholic priest. The interview led her on a dramatic spiritual quest that ended up at the Vatican itself, where she was received into the Catholic Church.

Unsurprisingly, this story is written in the vivid language of poetry. Read relates her encounters with the Father, the Spirit and then the Son exactly in the way they were given to her—timely, revelatory and compelling. These transforming events threw new light onto the experiences of her past—her father's death, her work as a psychiatric nurse and her single years in London—while they illumined the challenges of marriage and motherhood in a foreign country. As she developed a close intimacy with the new love that erupted into her life, Christ himself, she found herself coming to embrace a faith she had previously rejected as bigoted and stifling.