“Michael Martin is one of the most original voices in contemporary Christian writing. Who else could yoke bee-keeping and the Holy Grail, marriage and Berdyaev, or see sparks of divine wisdom in poets from Robert Herrick to Eleanor Farjeon? He shows us that in our exile from God and his presence in creation we also lose ourselves. But Martin’s regenerative poetic prose offers us new ways to reconnect, through the indwelling of Sophia. This is a stirring call to wake up to the Christian faith in its cosmic dimension: a message we need to hear all the more urgently at this time of environmental crisis.”
—ALISON MILBANK
author of God and the Gothic
“At the very end of his Consolations, we find sixth-century Boethius describing how things are known not according to their natures but according to the nature of one who is comprehending them. Since his hours were numbered, he had put his life and his upcoming death into eternal perspective, remarking that foresight is not opinion but knowledge based on truth. ‘The eternal,’ he said, ‘has knowledge of the whole of life, can see the future, and has lost nothing of the past.’
“In an August 1960 journal entry, Thomas Merton observed that the prophet is ‘one who cuts through great entangled knots of lies.’
“Michael Martin’s Sophianic capacity to see through events and conditions prophetically while encountering the eternal lovingly is nowhere more urgently disclosed than in his 2021 volume: Sophia in Exile. If estrangement from the REAL is one of the more virulent conditions undermining life today, the regenerative antidote, Martin says, has to do with reorientation. This choice requires integral seeing, within which the Sophianic or Wisdom structure of the world becomes apparent again. It makes great sense to me that an active musician-poet-farmer-theologian would be uniquely constituted to reflect the very movement, breath and poetic imagination needed to make abstraction impossible and Christian Wisdom apparent. The author is a prolific and apocalyptic writer whose insightful scholarship is tensile and bold. History shows how some have buried, exiled and dismissed the Sophianic through fear or similar maladies, but in this, his most personal and agapeic work to date, Michael Martin explores, walks and shares the radical substance that heals and restores while also moving mountains. These pages lovingly return Sophia’s Wisdom to the center of life — to hearth, to home, to heart, and thus, to the very center of our lives as well.”
—THERESE SCHROEDER-SHEKER
Chalice of Repose Project
“Michael Martin is one of the few writers—perhaps the pre-eminent writer—who manages to successfully present esoteric thoughts and make sense of invisible spiritual realities. In Sophia in Exile he provides the elements of a Sophianic understanding that combines mystical luminosity with poetic metaphysics with extensive scholarship: in history and philosophy, psychology and myth, narrative and literature. By also documenting little-known thinkers on this theme, he unveils a broader, diverse presence of the Divine. Martin’s enthusiastic faith, integral mind, and straightforward approach opens up a life of enchantment that leaves the reader filled with gleams of God’s glory.”
—LUCINDA M. VARDEY
author of The Flowering of the Soul
“Michael Martin’s writing is prophetic and apocalyptic. He writes against these denatured times, while at the same time laying bare what is really present, what has always been present, and what will always be present, if we but trust in it: Sophia, the creative Wisdom of God. These essays are life-giving and health-giving, as though from the pen of a Catholic Thoreau. Martin reads and thinks widely and fearlessly, and wastes no words. No doubt because he writes from the heart—from the home place.”
—JONATHAN GELTNER
translator of Five Great Odes
