Luminous Darkness: The Passion of the Last Words

by Carol Scott, Caitlin Smith Gilson, Conor Cunningham (Foreword)

The Seven cycles of poetry—rooted in each of Christ’s Seven Last Words—intend a unified philosophical and theological dwelling. Here, the poet begins from the irresistible force of finality, the very wager of existence itself, and makes herself dialogic magnet, working to draw in and draw out the core of the human and divine relationship. On Good Friday, we are taught the poetry of our Lord. It is an inlaying of our words imbedded in the Word, a submersion into the delectation, anguish, thirst, neediness, ecstasy, and the surrender of the dying God.



If that first and often lasting invitation into faith, not faith in general but this faith and this Person, Christ, is given to us through Beauty, it is the monumental task of the artist to help us experience the Beautiful, to recover Beauty in our lives. Each of the cycles of poems pertaining to the Seven Last Words will be accompanied by art by co-author and artist Carol Scott. Here, the unabashedly Beautiful reanimates those lost wells of experience so that we can, once again, feel the poetizing Word enfleshed, Word made flesh, the Word of our flesh human and divine.

447 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 6, 2025