Elaine Furniss
20 September 2025
Celia Kemp. Weaving a stronger spell. Anglican Board of Mission, 2025
Weaving a stronger spell is a thought-provoking app-based study resource from Celia Kemp, a Melbourne-based writer known for her works such as A Voice in the Wilderness: Listening to the Statement from the Heart and Into the Desert. This one is wonderful because it’s theology about place, and that place is right here, right now, in Melbourne.
The study resource is for the 2025 Season of Creation. With its daily reflections about the stories of Scripture, and the stories of Melbourne and how they resonate today, it could well be used beyond this for thinking about life differently.
The title comes from a CS Lewis quote: “Do you think I am trying to weave a spell … you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly the past 100 years.”
And weave that spell Kemp does, through her daily offerings organised into three parts: Read, Quotes and Questions. Designed for individual reflection it could just as easily be used for small groups or even an interactive sermon or five.
It’s easy to navigate and it needs to be because it’s packed with content: local images, considered theology, quotes from thoughtful writers and Kemp’s own experiences both by and in the Yarra River and beyond.
Kemp’s literary world is wide and deep, and she invites us in for some heavy reading and tough reflections. Day six is a case in point. Entitled We also spread sideways, she describes how the actions of a perpetrator who hurts another might be forgiven, but those injured still suffer as a result. We only have to observe the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to see this.
Read more: Surviving God theologian to speak on preventing church abuse
Daily reflections headings include Transfiguring the Ordinary and Gold Across the Water. A list of headings at the end of the App might have made it easier to return to particular ones.
Kemp writes that the one big insight she gained in moving back to Melbourne is that God is very strongly present not only in the natural world but also in the built environment. And she bases the series of reflections around this.
I gained some important insights: First, there’s the trade-off between private spaces and public spaces, and the parallels between private religiosity and care for the common good. Kemp says: “We tend to ask God for help in our private spaces and measure our faith by such flourishing, but that’s not the Old Testament way.”
She decries the self-satisfied parish church with its concerns for numbers and relevance. A Rowan Williams quote makes the point: “A church which sets great store by tangible fulfilment, spiritual security, hopes satisfied, is bound to be like this a warm little house on an enormous black moor, inside warm and content, outside weeping and loss, intensified by the very presence of the unattainable little haven.” What an indictment!
We are polluters of spirit as well as of the earth itself. Kemp says the well-being of the earth depends on the ethical state of human beings and their actions. Also we don’t mind a God who speaks through nature, but when God says negative things, or there are bad natural outcomes, we aren’t so keen. There’s a lot about dirt and pollution, falling short and sinning egregiously, in this online publication. Kemp aims to shock us out of our complacency and self-sufficiency – and she succeeds.
Celia Kemp is a prophet for Melbourne, and she says some things that cut across the grain of our well-ordered, successful lives. For example, we can have an ordered life full of good things but if Christ is not at the centre of that order, the ordered life may indeed keep us from Christ. “And the really troubling thing is this: our vision is likely to have been so corrupted that when Christ is missing, we hardly notice the difference!” Powerful words.
Weaving a stronger spell is an important piece of work and therefore well worth it for the confrontation, discomfort and raw reality of life in Melbourne.
Elaine Furniss attends St Philip’s Collingwood and Benedictus Church in Canberra online.
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