FAITH NEWS SERVICE – Fragments From Holy Ground, a new collection of reflections by chaplain and Anglican Franciscan novice Olly Ponsonby, offers weary souls something rare: permission to stop searching for answers and simply notice grace.
We live in an age hungry for certainty. Bookshelves groan under titles promising five steps to a stronger faith, seven keys to a better life, the answer to every hard question. Fragments From Holy Ground refuses to join that chorus — and that refusal is precisely its gift.
This is a book for anyone who has ever sensed God in a birdsong, a hospital corridor, a quiet bush track, or a season of loss they couldn’t yet explain — and wondered if that sense was enough.
Olly Ponsonby didn’t set out to write a book. An Englishman now settled in Adelaide, Australia, where he serves as a chaplain in aged care, Olly began these reflections as simple newsletter pieces for his congregation. When he left parish ministry, he kept writing — first for a small, faithful readership, then as a way of making sense of the upheaval in his own life.
“Looking back over two and a half years of those reflections,” Olly says, “I realised they formed a quiet conversation about faith, change, longing, home, and the faithfulness of God.”
That conversation is now this book — and it arrives at a moment when readers are exhausted by easy answers and hungry for honesty instead.
Not Theology. Testimony.
Olly is candid that this book stands apart even within his own family. “My brother, Simon, has written several Christian books, but they are deliberately theological,” he explains. “This book is something rather different. It doesn’t set out to win arguments or provide neat answers. Instead, it grows out of lived experience.”
Fragments From Holy Ground is the story of a chaplain, a pastor, and a pilgrim learning — in real time, without a script — to recognise God’s presence in the moments the rest of us rush past. It is, in Olly’s words, a book “comfortable sitting with questions, trusting that faith and uncertainty often walk hand in hand.”
Written in the Tides of Change
The reflections took shape during a season of real upheaval in Olly’s own life — leaving a difficult congregational placement, returning to chaplaincy, and beginning formation as a novice in the Anglican Franciscan tradition. Faith, he writes, moves like the tide: through nearness and distance, arrival and longing — yet always beneath a steady, guiding presence.
That season left its fingerprints on every page. Native orchids, changing seasons, birds, trees, and bush tracks are never mere scenery in this book — they become thresholds where the faithfulness of God is quietly revealed.
An Invitation, Not an Instruction Manual
If Fragments From Holy Ground has one message, it is disarmingly simple: walk with me for a while. Slow down. Notice.
“God is always at work around us,” Olly says, “in conversations, in pastoral encounters, in seasons of change, in poetry and music, and in the natural world if we take time to pay attention.”
Early readers have already called the writing thoughtful, vulnerable, and refreshingly different — a departure from the polished certainty of much Christian publishing. That distinctiveness is intentional. “I never wanted to imitate the voice of other Christian writers,” Olly says. “I wanted to write honestly, in the hope that authenticity might help others recognise something of their own experience.”
Why This Book, Why Now
For readers weary of formulaic devotionals and pat spiritual answers, Fragments From Holy Ground offers something different: companionship instead of instruction. It doesn’t promise to resolve your doubts. It sits with you in them — and points, gently and repeatedly, to the God who is present in the wrestling, the waiting, and the wondering, just as much as in the breakthrough.
As Olly puts it: holy ground is rarely found only in the dramatic moments. More often, it is hiding in the unnoticed places — waiting for someone to slow down long enough to see it.
This is a book meant to be read slowly. An invitation to notice, rather than to arrive.
About the Author
Olly Ponsonby is an Englishman now living in Australia, where he serves as a chaplain in aged care in Adelaide. Ordained in the Uniting Church, he is also a novice in the Anglican Franciscan tradition. Fragments From Holy Ground grows out of his lived experience of ministry, prayer, and ongoing spiritual formation.
Fragments From Holy Ground, published by Ark House, is now available globally.
