Anthony Oliveira, Canadian author of the bestselling book, Dayspring.Supplied
Attending a Catholic mass is, despite the rigid and exclusionary dogma, an aesthetically indulgent experience. Step foot in any Roman Catholic church and you’ll be confronted by vivid frescoes, featuring the lithe, detailed muscles and sensual curves of biblical figures, embodied. Paintings and sculptures of the Catholic saints often depict agony or ecstasy – or the potent, beguiling combination of the two. To quote the title character of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag of an experience with that show’s Hot (Catholic) Priest, “It’s very intense. It’s very quiet. It’s very, very erotic.”
Anthony Oliveira, Canadian author of the bestselling Dayspring, would agree. “I think all good Christian art is blasphemous,” Oliveira says.
Dayspring is, for lack of a better word, an opus. It is – also for lack of a better word – a gospel: not exactly narrative fiction, not exactly poetry, not quite prose. The book, which spans more than 350 pages, tells the story of Jesus Christ and the disciple who loved him most. This is where the blasphemy – or, at least, “blasphemy” as it might be defined by a more conservative, incurious Catholic, Oliveira suggests – comes in. Dayspring is not a parable about brotherly love; it’s a queer romance.
“If you’re a queer Catholic, when you experience [love] for the first time, it’s like, ‘Oh, well, that means that all of the values and all of the culture that I’ve inherited have been somehow invalidated,’ ” Oliveira says. “One of the things this book is doing is mourning that. Because there’s no position from which a queer person who is responding to a faith tradition is allowed to speak but from one of blasphemy, right?”
Dayspring has three narrators: an unnamed third person, the (also unnamed) male lover of Christ and then Christ himself. The passages written in Christ’s voice are printed in crimson ink, and the book itself is a loose chronology that – like the New Testament – leads to death and resurrection. Interspersed are passages from philosophers and other authors. Consistent to the entire book, however, is a sense of longing, of anxiety and a constant waiting for the inevitable hammer to fall.
Books we're reading and loving this week: Globe staffers share their book picks
Oliveira pulls a spectacular writerly trick here: an underpinning dread that the biblical Christ himself would have felt, anticipating his death for the sins of his followers; so, too, is it a dread felt by many queer people of faith, forced to reconcile their orientation with a doctrine that rejects them on the basis of it.
“This book is interested in the wounds of being a queer Christian,” Oliveira says. “Christ gives us a way to think about that: His hands are pierced, his side is pierced forever. There’s a version of Christianity you could imagine where he comes back from the dead perfect and healed. And it’s like, ‘No, I’m going to have these forever.’ ”
Christ, Oliveira says, becomes somewhat of an icon for what it means to be queer in this world, maybe even in a way that builds community. “This book is sort of saying, look: Here are my wounds. Do you want to touch them? Go on, put your fingers in there.”
Dayspring is, in other words, personal. Oliveira began writing parts of it when he was 16 years old, but the book really had its nascency in 2019, with his National Magazine Award-winning piece of the same name, published in the online literary magazine Hazlitt. That piece has many of the book’s most distinctive calling cards, from Oliveira’s barely secular prose to his breathtaking ability to integrate actual biblical verse into his writing.
Dayspring by Canadian author Anthony Oliveira.Supplied
He comes by this honestly: Oliveira was raised Catholic and has a PhD in 17th-century literature. In discussing the book, he cites inspirations, such as the Catholic saints Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Ávila, whose stories academics have long believed have queer undertones. He cites, too, his lived experience as a gay man navigating his feelings – both academic and personal – toward the traditions that he once called home.
“I truly believe that I didn’t really feel the way church is supposed to feel,” he says, until he finished academia and began working at the world’s largest LGBTQ bookstore, Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto. “Working at drag brunch there felt more like church than church ever did. You feel community happening in the space in front of you, where people feel safe with each other and people get to laugh with each other. Like, ‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I,’ right?”
That last bit, for the uninitiated, is Matthew 18:20. As so many who have been raised in the faith (this writer included) can attest, the effects of Catholicism are long-lasting. Asked about his current relationship with the church, Oliveira laughs. “I feel like the shortest answer to that is the book you just read,” he says, then cites a Bible passage in which Jesus tells a parable of two sons who are asked by their father to go till the fields.
One says “I will,” and doesn’t; the other says “I won’t,” and does. “Which of these has done his father’s will?” Oliveira asks, quoting the parable, and Christ. “Am I Christian? I was kicked out before I got to have an opinion about that. But I’m trying to do the Father’s will.”