{"id":12636,"date":"2026-01-21T22:51:27","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T22:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=12636"},"modified":"2026-01-21T22:55:55","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T22:55:55","slug":"spare-us-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/21\/spare-us-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"Spare Us Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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There is No Middle Path<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Lucas Smith\u2019s short story collection Spare Us Yet<\/em> finds apathy an inadequate response to the world. His characters\u2019 encounters with God compel them to contemplation, and then to action.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Eric Cyr<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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We live in a world of commotion. Constant action, reaction, over-reaction. Noise, clutter, rapid-fire images and information that can distract us so fully with whatever matter is at hand that we never take up questions of deeper meaning. Carving out enough stillness in our lives to think and reflect requires intentional effort. One job of fiction is to slow us down and create the space needed to think, to contemplate, and to engage with questions of what is right. Lucas Smith\u2019s Spare Us Yet<\/em> offers that space and challenges readers to ethical contemplation and the weight of individual action.<\/p>\n

Though Spare Us Yet<\/em> is published by an American publisher, Wiseblood Books, most of the stories in this debut collection are set in Smith\u2019s home country of Australia. The brief first story, \u201cPrelude: Unit 1002,\u201d provides an overarching image for the collection. The narrator is an angel assigned to watch over a church and its altar. The church has been deconsecrated, emptied, its contents boxed and locked up in a storage container. When even that unit is sold and the altar destroyed, the angel narrates:<\/p>

I fix my gaze on that lovely haunting place, then into the pile of particles, into the sparkling blades, and out and up into the heavenly realm again. Bliss. But have I failed? <\/span>Lord, forgive them. Amen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no stretch to see the church of this story as the universal Church\u2014wounded from within and without, but not abandoned. The angel keeps watch in his place, even as the Church about him suffers. Though an angel, he is plagued by doubt of conscience: Has he done what he ought? Has he failed in his duties? He considers that he could attack the men who destroy the altar, but realizes that \u201ca wrong is a wrong.\u201d If he acts wrongly in defense of right, he \u201cwould become a demon.\u201d Faith, in Smith\u2019s work, is not just an abstract belief, but an animating way of life with immense bearing on our daily actions and choices, particularly in a secular age.<\/p>\n

\u201cFarewell to the Well-Known Old Bailey\u201d features a protagonist desperate for meaning. He loiters in London\u2014\u201ccoming back to recolonise England,\u201d he tells a group of international tourists\u2014away from his normal life and responsibilities at home in Australia, thinking about some violent, dramatic gesture toward meaning. What \u201cstarts as a thought experiment\u201d becomes a plan for a suicidal demonstration. As he deliberates what to do and why to act at all, the protagonist works back and forth through ideas about \u201csystems of oppression,\u201d activism, primary values, and whether an action can make any difference at all.<\/p>\n

Along the way, spending months in isolation in London as he deliberates, the second-person narrative observes that, \u201cIdling took more out of you than you thought it would.\u201d The use of second person voice in this story is an expert choice, because the line doubles perfectly as an accusation against so many of us, idling away time on our phones or with other distractions, passing uneasy days away without focus or purpose; to paraphrase C. S. Lewis\u2019s fictional demon Screwtape, doing neither what we want to do nor what we ought to do. The narrator\u2019s final observation as he looks out at London is that it \u201clooks like phone chargers and thumb drives.\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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But knowledge is not the same as feeling, nor is it always comfortable, and the knowledge of faith and hope are subjected in us, imperfect beings, to bouts of fear and doubt…<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Several of the stories take place during the Covid lockdowns. The lockdowns provided\u2014or for some, occasionally forced against their will\u2014a level of space and stillness we otherwise rarely encounter in twenty-first century life. Many suddenly found themselves facing their thoughts, lives, and consciences in a way we can typically avoid in the hustle of life. In Smith\u2019s stories, the lockdowns create space to focus on human response and the individual conscience in a setting and experience readers can immediately recognize.<\/p>\n

Australia had especially severe lockdowns and curfews, and the stories reflect this reality. They are also filled with personal conflict of conscience. In \u201cLions Over the Bridge,\u201d the narrator has lost his home because he won\u2019t receive the Covid vaccine. \u201cHow Can We Know the Way\u201d is about a woman\u2019s funeral during lockdown. The second-person narrative focuses on a young man serving at the altar, preoccupied with the dead woman and her family who is not allowed to be with her because of contact limitations. In \u201cRender Unto,\u201d a different young man comes into conflict with his pastor because he refuses to wear a mask at Mass.<\/p>\n

These stories, within the particularity of Covid lockdowns, bring up questions about what we ought to do in the face of conflicting goods. What ought we to do when a legitimate authority implements policy that we believe is wrong-headed or even dangerous? At what point are we to disobey? Several stories show characters butting up against these questions and coming to the conclusion that they ought to follow the dictums of their own consciences, following what they believe to be the true good in spite of contrary rulings of authority. Good fiction uses concrete, tangible situations that stand in as well for more universal realities, including realities of conscience and right and wrong, and Smith accomplishes this well in his Covid stories.<\/p>\n

One final story that brings together these themes of faith and the demands it makes on our lives and conscience is \u201cMr. Humberstone\u2019s Trial,\u201d which follows a young man falsely accused of rape by a former girlfriend after she cannot accept his conversion from a sort of modern rationalism to Catholicism. The two have separated after Mr. Humberstone\u2019s turbulent conversion, and the narrator tells us that:<\/p>\n

A feeling of psychic weight that he could only describe as oppression by God came upon him, yet he knew that even the thought was blasphemous. God was a gentleman who did not force himself on you. Let no man say that God is tempting him into sin. Sometimes he avoided God for a few hours of relaxation, and he thought that all that was over, that he could go back to pleasant life. But of course, there was nothing else except atoms and he rushed back to God in fear. There was no middle path.<\/span><\/p>\n

This line, \u201cThere was no middle path,\u201d is central to understanding Smith\u2019s work. There is no middle path for these characters, for the lives they live or, most essentially, in the world they inhabit. For Mr. Humberstone, there is either a God whom he must follow, demanding a major change to his life; or there is not, and there is no source of ultimate meaning in life. There is either God and meaning, or there is nothingness. Once he has plumbed reality, \u201ccrawling, a few knees and elbows at a time, drawn by an irresistible force\u201d toward God and transcendent truth, there is no comfortable, casual existence left open to Mr. Humberstone, because \u201cGod\u2019s hand is in everything.\u201d Having accepted Catholicism through long study and against his own complacency, he must completely change his life to follow God, or accept a reality devoid of any meaning at all.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the passage quoted above, we read:<\/p>

Mr. Humberstone knew what the problem was. He was pursuing a subjective state of well-being through the feeling of faith. The important thing was to know that God was real no matter what he thought. Knowing this did not make him feel better.<\/span><\/p>\n

Smith strikes so cleanly, so succinctly at a powerful truth here. We want both to know the truth and to feel good; to feel safe and comforted all the time. But knowledge is not the same as feeling, nor is it always comfortable, and the knowledge of faith and hope are subjected in us, imperfect beings, to bouts of fear and doubt\u2014oftentimes because of our own sin and guilt. Our consciences are so often wracked with doubt and uncertainty, and yet there is no escaping some kind of action\u2014for even inaction is a moral choice.<\/p>\n

But through all of this, there is hope. Smith refuses to accept the distractions of modern life as holding all there is for us, or to accept a dismissive view of the soul. He shows us the unavoidable doubt of the modern world, and calls us to be faithful in spite of that. He demands that we, in the words of Humberstone, seek \u201cGod\u2019s hand in everything.\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Eric Cyr<\/strong> is a musician, writer, and teacher whose work has appeared in Dappled Things<\/em>, Great Lakes Review<\/em>, The Windhover<\/em>, Our Sunday Visitor<\/em>, and elsewhere. He has released two albums with his band Cyr and the Cosmonauts<\/a>. His first book of stories, Here It Snows in June<\/em>, will be released in late 2026.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Spare Us Yet<\/strong> was published by Wiseblood Books on June 24, 2025. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucas Smith\u2019s short story collection Spare Us Yet finds apathy an inadequate response to the world. His characters\u2019 encounters with God compel them to contemplation, and then to action. Review by Eric 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