`If nothing else, K. D. Miller deserves points for bravery.

`Miller is an accomplished short story writer whose latest book, Holy Writ, is a collection of essays on the subject of her religion. Among other things, she outs herself as a regular church-going Anglican.

`This is not cool. Being Buddhist is cool. Being a Mother Earth pantheist is cool. Being agnostic is ho hum, but perfectly acceptable, if not the norm, among Canadian literati. But Anglican? ``I'm still not sure why, at the age of thirty-nine, I started sneaking into an Anglican mass on Sunday mornings,'' she writes. ``I was so terrified of being seen doing this supremely uncool thing by anyone I knew that I travelled blocks out of my way to get there, walking briskly, head down, just short of ducking behind trees.''

`Raised a Presbyterian, the Toronto-based Miller began a ``long slouch toward atheism'' in her late teens. In her 30s, she reversed direction and eventually found a spiritual home in the Anglican Church - where, at 39, she was confirmed in 1990.

`Holy Writ is an apology, in the classic sense of an explanation or defence, for this move. Miller also sent a questionnaire to 16 writers published by Porcupine's Quill (the publisher of her short story collections) asking them about their religious affiliations and the connection, if any, between such affiliations and their writing. In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention I was one of those writers - the reader may find a couple of my philosophical gems quoted by Miller. She also prints in full four essays sent back by Melinda Burns, Robyn Sarah, Antanas Sileika and John Metcalf.

`These essays, and the quoted remarks of her correspondents, certainly do add liveliness and diversity to the book. I like Russell Smith's robust statement of 100 per cent unabashed materialism. ``I am hostile not just to organized religion but to any form of spiritual belief . . . to any talk of spirit or chakras or life-force or gods or fairies or elves,'' he pronounces.

`Then there's the acute observation of Elizabeth Hay, who was born into a Quaker family. ``You can't go to a Quaker meeting without shaking everybody's hands afterward,'' she comments. ``Supposedly the most direct form of communion with God, unmediated by a minister, it makes you most aware of the people around you.'' This reminds me of Annie Dillard's comment that she became a Catholic because nobody at Mass asked her to bake a casserole.

`But the book is Miller's show. The belief prompting it is summarized succinctly in her introduction: ``I may be wrong, but I believe we are by nature worshipful creatures. We sense in our bones that there is something bigger and better than our immediate circumstances, and we want to know and be known by it. I believe the creative impulse, the desire to make beautiful things, is a desire to be at one with our Creator.''

`The relationship between creativity and spirituality lies at the core of Miller's faith. ``Writing stories is the way I pray,'' she notes early on - a statement repeated a number of times throughout the book.

`Miller reaches for analogy to bolster this statement. ``To search for the right word is to search for the word that tells the truth,'' she writes. ``And the struggle to portray a character honestly, that is, free of cliché or stereotype, is a struggle to love that character.'' Moreover, ``the attitude of writing, with its surrender of conscious control and its willingness to wait in silence, is identical to the attitude of prayer.''

`Art, it must be said, seems to have an inner coherence that suggests a larger coherence in the world that produced it. It is not just as a believer in God but as a writer that Miller can say, ``I tend to look for connection, order and meaning.'' Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, ``We love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down.''

`Miller's form of Christianity, in fact, bears close relationship to the faith of such 19th century men of letters as Emerson and Matthew Arnold, a faith that looked to Christ but could not stomach the Christian creed. Arnold's Literature And Dogma, with its belief in ``something not ourselves that maketh for righteousness,'' echoes Miller's craving for ``something bigger and better than our immediate circumstances.''

`Arnold prefaced his book with the flat statement, ``Miracles do not happen,'' and in this respect Miller also follows suit. ``The accounts of (Christ) walking on water and stretching a loaf of bread to feed thousands are fables as far as I'm concerned,'' she writes. ``They have great symbolic value; but to take them literally is to render Christ a magician or party trickster.'' This is far too glib. In fact, to take these accounts literally is to render Christ the opposite of a magician or trickster. The latter deal in illusion through sleight of hand, which is not what Miller, presumably, is talking about. Nor do these accounts, taken literally, suggest that Christ is acting as a magician in the occult sense - that is, as someone achieving supernatural results through the recitation of certain formulas or the performance of certain prescribed actions.

`There is no doubt, however, that miracles are a scandal to many readers of the New Testament. Miller would prefer to finesse this scandal, and the whole problem of the historicity of the Gospels in general, by regarding Christ in the light of a fictional character. ``Reading His story as fiction is the way to make it my own. And to make it real,'' is how she puts it. ``Faith and remembrance,'' she writes. ``With the imagination, they form a kind of trinity. And they're all we ever have, I suppose, in the end. No matter what in fact happened.''

`But is she serious about the second member of that trinity, remembrance? If so, then it matters a great deal whether remembrance is true. We all know that memory is tricky - but on the basic trustworthiness of that faculty we base a great deal, in law and politics, and in every area of life. ``What in fact happened'' matters terribly, and not just in the reading of the Gospels.

`It won't do to get around the question of remembrance by making everything fictional, as the sacrament of the Eucharist becomes, in Miller's view, ``a tiny, symbolic meal.'' If the Eucharist is a symbol, Flannery O'Connor said, to hell with it. If the resurrection never happened except on a symbolic level, then to hell with Christianity. Russell Smith's good ``old-fashioned rationalist mechanistatheist'' views are more palatable than Miller's ``agnosticism with a spritz of Jesus.''

`To make everything a fiction has the curious effect of making fiction less interesting, since fiction most comes alive when it points to something beyond fiction. After a while, Miller's frequent references to the act of writing begin to weary the reader, much as do the enthusiasms of a health nut talking about diet and exercise. And Christ as somebody's fictional character always seems less compelling than what is on offer, for better or worse, in the Gospels.

` ``I am a Christian because I am imaginatively hooked on the story of a convicted felon who not only gets away with it, but goes on to be an all-time international bestseller,'' Miller writes. ``What is his crime? Growing up. Finding his voice, telling the truth with it and not giving a damn what anybody thinks.''

`Is Jesus Christ as a first century Norman Mailer really that fascinating?'