In his debut collection of stories, Lucas Smith depicts people of faith under challenging circumstances ranging from the historical to the contemporary and futuristic. A vaccine dissenter retreats to a homeless encampment; a Catholic survivor in a post-apocalyptic world writes the scriptures from memory in blackberry ink on animal skins; a police officer secretly volunteers to serve on a firing squad. These are not mere morality tales. As one of Smith’s characters tells us, “An icon is a mnemonic device, an idol is a death sentence”; the icon reminds us, while the idol condemns us. The meat of these stories often lies in discerning what separates the two.
In the opening sentence of “Your Eisenhower Dollar,” Nathan tells himself that “[t]he problem with your life is this: if a gun is ever going to be put to your head, today is the most likely day.” Upon graduating from high school, Nathan visits his sister in Mexico City, hoping to contrive the ultimate iconic gesture with the last of the Eisenhower dollars his deceased grandfather apparently saved from a slot machine. After an anemic upbringing in the Anglican church, Nathan has developed an auto-didact’s Catholicism, long on prayer, short on formality, and susceptible to the exotic:
You are more interested in reading about inquisitorial procedure, miracles of the saints, autos-da-fé, and Vatican intrigue, than in examining your own actions. … You are seduced by the red and gold, the tormented bodies, outstretched arms, reclining padres, stained-glass murals, the icons of the Old Basilica.
A peasant couple crawls on their knees to join Nathan in his pew; in his self-absorption, he shrinks from asking them what their devotion means. Nathan eventually disposes of his coin on Tepayac Hill. But on his return to the metro, an impossible news story crawling unseen on the ticker over his head sent me scurrying back to the story’s beginning. Like Spencer Brydon in Henry James’s The Jolly Corner, Nathan appears to have doubled himself—or, rather, to have externalized an alternate destiny in a passionate moment. “I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me,” James’s Brydon confides to a friend upon his belated return to New York, fully expecting to meet him “at a turn of one of the dim passages of the empty house.” Nathan’s use of the second person beautifully suggests he is telling himself a similar story.
[Y]ou could have lived your whole life without struggle at home in Costa Casa, greeted Fernando the barista at the coffee shop, walked to work, taken girls to the top of lifeguard towers at Corona del Mar, inherited your parents’ houses, invested in stock and silver, accrued mystical poetry in the bottom drawer of your desk, and died surrounded by three of your four children in a hospital room with a view of the mountains and the ocean. A fine life, but you craved judgment.
But whether he, like Spencer Brydon, will actually return to inspect those inherited properties remains uncertain. Similarly, in “Farewell to the Well-Known Old Bailey,” a young man plots his own death in London as a sacrifice for the twin causes of Australia’s Aboriginal and convict culture. He envisions a grand public gesture in the place where convicts were once shipped from England. Here again, perhaps the young man is just telling himself a story—or perhaps he exists on two planes, divided from his inner self. When he sits bolt upright in bed crying, “God help me!” we are left wondering which destiny he has chosen.
“Three Visions of the Bean-Nighe” grapples with the wonders and dangers, the legends and fraught colonial history of Australia. The visions move backward in time, and in each one, the identity of the Bean-Nighe (an omen of death) is mistaken and uncertain. In the first, a modern-day couple retreats to a remote property in Gippsland, just as children from Kongwak Indigenous Academy gather for a ghost story around a campfire on the beach. The truth of Australia’s Aboriginal heritage fundamentally eludes them both; the girlfriend suggests that the indigenous children are “funny” and “cute,” while the school’s attempt to inculcate indigenous culture produces only a childish will to violence.
The story shifts rapidly backward to 1850, as a pregnant woman pursues her scoundrel husband into the wilds where he has taken their son. Is she the woman who gives rise to the Bean-Nighe legend? Or does she mistakenly attribute the story to someone else? At every turn, characters meet with their own doppelgangers, but without recognition. Eventually, the line between icon and idol completely blurs, as negotiations between a search party of mercenary white men and a group of Aborigines are conducted by disingenuous translators. The story’s ending cleverly inverts the iconography of the lost white woman in the bush, who is brought back to “civilization” by men who believe they are searching for an “Irish whore.”
Several interconnected stories detail the pressures of the COVID lockdowns. From his parish situated in the heart of the city, Father O’Riordan faithfully seeks the lost and forgotten despite his personal weakness. A man who has chosen homelessness over “the jab” confronts the archbishop about making his priests accept the vaccine. “I would have preferred that my priests choose to protect others without a command,” the archbishop replies, and the young Father O’Riordan can only hang his head. In “Render Unto,” Father O’Riordan must confront a parishioner who attends daily mass without a mask. When Father reminds him of his duty to render unto Caesar, the man points at his face and replies, “’Is this made in the image of Caesar?’” Smith consistently places the clearest demands for justice in the mouths of marginalized characters who often go to extremes. As the homeless narrator says in “Lions Over the Bridge,”
The tyranny came from thinking you were alone. The tyranny was in the incoherence, the arbitrariness, the pig-headedness of the regulations, the way they twisted the virtues against you.
A seminarian who assists Father O’Riordan at a lockdown funeral expresses a similar feeling about the weaponizing of virtue in “How Can We Know the Way:”
Praying for the dead is one of the few things you know for sure is good and right. Lately, every other virtuous habit has seemed to have a shadow-half, an emanation or a penumbra of unpredictable character entailed in its performance. Keeping quiet, staying home, effacing yourself, all contributing to your crushing loneliness, and is it helping others, who are probably worse off, who don’t have your stubbornness, your priggishness?
Like the two young men who conjure dramatic deaths for themselves—or like the woman whose ordeal mirrors the iconography of the Bean-Nighe—this experience of having “a shadow-half, an emanation or a penumbra” is perhaps a reaction to the enormous pressures of contemporary life. We are all asked to double ourselves, to live one life in public and another in private; and yet our actions redound in unpredictable ways, and sin divides the human heart from itself.
Lucas Smith’s characters struggle for wholeness and authenticity in a fallen world. Overall, Spare Us Yet strikes me as a prayer, not for the dead, but for the living.
Spare Us Yet and Other Stories
by Lucas Smith
Wiseblood Books, June 2025
Paperback, 189 pages
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Kipling’s Spare Us Yet is taken from his ‘Recessional’, a poem written for Queen Victoria, a plea to God that Britain acquiesce to the virtue of humility rather than dangerous pride at the height of its power and expansion.
Assumedly, Lucas Smith’s borrowing assimilates with the critique of Ms Bauer that the stories are for the living not the dead. Smith explores the mind’s fantasies of what could have been, anomalies of virtue. “I would have preferred that my priests choose to protect others without a command, the archbishop replies, and the young Father O’Riordan can only hang his head”. This is precisely the ironic fantasy of many of us clergy who would much prefer to be virtuous by freedom of choice rather than command. Icon and idolatry is humorously seen in the mercenaries searching for a heroine believing she’s an Irish whore.
I suppose we can do all that on paper and it can be called art. Which it is. Although, in effect it’s sardonic with an air of the pride in self that Rudyard Kipling warns against, the artist perceiving himself above the fray within which we mortals live. We can’t dabble with the sacred. But then Fr O’Riordan sends home a real life truth.
I am going to try to make this as simple as possible :
“A vaccine dissenter retreats to a homeless encampment”
https://www.cdc.gov/covid/vaccines/how-they-work.html
the spike protein mimics hepcidin – Google Search
COVID-19 and iron dysregulation: distant sequence similarity between hepcidin and the novel coronavirus spike glycoprotein – PMC
The Vaccine Mandate is unconstitutional by virtue of the fact that FURin , regulates HEPCIDin, which regulates Iron, and both the spike protein of the virus, which imitates HEPCIDin and the vaccine, which causes one to produce the spike protein, in order to mount a defense against the spike protein which imitates HEPCIDin, in certain susceptible individuals , can cause iron deregulation. In addition, Thank God, the vaccine did not last long because it is only logical to assume that by targeting the spike protein which imitates HEPCIDin, everyone that got the vaccine would end up with iron deregulation and either the anemia of inflammation or a build up of iron in various tissues and organs of the body. The Covid Vaccine is antagonistic to The Fourteenth Amendment. I am not a Doctor or an expert on anything, I only know this to be true because of a familiar history of hemochromatosis.
PrawfsBlawg: Anticipating Mandatory Vaccination–10 Years Ago
“RBD and Hepcidin Mimicry: Some research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, specifically its Receptor-Binding Domain (RBD), might mimic hepcidin, potentially contributing to iron dysregulation in COVID-19 patients. This hepcidin-mimetic action of the virus could lead to iron overload in tissues and a decrease in serum iron levels, further exacerbating the disrupted iron homeostasis.“
hepcidin and RBD in Covid 19 – Google Search
It is not possible to have informed consent in regards to this vaccine as this is a new technology which can have long term consequences, especially for those susceptible to iron deregulation and imbalances of Furin, HEPCIDin, and thus Iron, because the proper balance of iron in both our blood, and in our tissue, is necessary for maintaining health and fighting disease, and thus, because individual persons have different levels of HEPCIDin in their body, and thus iron, the mandate could not possibly have passed The Law Of General Applicability Test.
I think medicine has gotten to where “compulsory vaccination” for SARS-CoV-2, is unsupportable; since the disease is treatable on ordinary means in non-prejudicial transactions and without having to generally inject anything.
This should be addressed according to possibilities of its own legal category not “general applicability” or “compelling interest” or “neutrality”.
What happened during COVID was medical and public administration failures trying to impose themselves according to ad hoc assertions and ad hoc “official policy”; which simultaneously shielded bad actors, bad science, bad medicine, bad injections, bad ideas and bad announcements and administration.
According to SCOTUS BLOG, if there is a discretion to grant an exemption, general applicability could not apply. If this has a bearing on public vaccination policies it would partly explain the high pressure to make people take COVID injections. In the case of the COVID scares, a further incidental conundrum was choices of injections like J&J or Pfizer amidst available non-mRNA “more ordinary” types like Sinopharm.
According to WIKIPEDIA, the Supreme Court has a mind to overrule Employment Division v. Smith “general applicability”, as indicated by Alito, Clarence and Gorsuch in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021).
Not sure I grasp the legal sense or workings of the categories mentioned. I suspect it is becoming difficult to match up different areas of life, such as medical health decisions and employment practices, to generalized laws. There is no reason why they can’t be addressed on their own terms in their own contexts like “as applied” laws.
Well what could this have to do with Bauer’s well composed article? In the “pandemic” there was a lot of shape-shifting and projecting. It simply can be that laws -any laws- are available for such use in an obliging way by those who would have power in them. In fact the law already knows about such corruptions, it didn’t begin in 2020.
God bless you ND. As seen in Bauer:
‘ As one of Smith’s characters tells us, “An icon is a mnemonic device, an idol is a death sentence”; the icon reminds us, while the idol condemns us. The meat of these stories often lies in discerning what separates the two. ‘
‘ But whether he [ Nathan ], like Spencer Brydon, will actually return to inspect those inherited properties remains uncertain. ‘
‘ At every turn, characters meet with their own doppelgangers, but without recognition. Eventually, the line between icon and idol completely blurs, as negotiations between a search party of mercenary white men and a group of Aborigines are conducted by disingenuous translators. ‘
‘ We are all asked to double ourselves, to live one life in public and another in private; and yet our actions redound in unpredictable ways, and sin divides the human heart from itself. ‘
WIKIPEDIA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Division_v._Smith
SCOTUS BLOG
https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/06/protecting-free-exercise-under-smith-and-after-smith/
Edit: paragraph 7 should read as follows:
Well what could this have to do with Bauer’s well composed article? In the “pandemic” there was a lot of shape-shifting and projecting. It simply can NOT be that laws -any laws- are available for such use in an obliging way by those who would have power in them. In fact the law already knows about such corruptions, it didn’t begin in 2020.
Based on my limited research, it can be seen that, starting October 2020, there are a number of articles in the NIH library arsenal that have been confessing that Ivermectin can been reasonably considered and reasonably used for effective treatment for COVID 19. Surely the evidence of official blatant self-contradiction, baseless dis-corroboration and illegal misleading in some degrees, even criminal, is not out of reach.
Oct. 7 2020
Ivermectin: an award-winning drug with expected antiviral activity against COVID-19
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7539925/
Dec. 2 2020
A five-day course of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 may reduce the duration of illness
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7709596/
Jun. 21 2021
Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8248252/
Jul. 26 2021
A five-day course of ivermectin may reduce the duration of COVID-19 illness
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8312054/
Jan. 6 2022
High-dose ivermectin for early treatment of COVID-19 (COVER study): a randomised, double-blind, multicentre, phase II, dose-finding, proof-of-concept clinical trial
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8734085/
Feb. 6 2023
Effect of Higher-Dose Ivermectin for 6 Days vs Placebo
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2801827
Mar. 11 2024
Ivermectin for treatment of COVID-19: A systematic review and meta-analysis
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10950893/
Edit: … can have been reasonably considered and used …