International Gold Winner of the Readers’ Choice Book Awards (What Light Was), novelist Shawn Callaway Hays delivers The Spacious Unclosed, a radiant synthesis of theology, cosmology, and poetic liturgy. It stands as a twenty-first-century metaphysical masterpiece—an answer to the age-old “Do you understand what you are reading?” The poem’s voice is that of a prophetic seer, archivist of cosmic language, and unashamed believer in the transfiguring power of hermeneutical humility. The ultimate image is light from above, tongues like fire, theophanies that are musical, intimate, and unclosed. This is scripture in verse, metaphysics in metaphor, and a sacred feast of interpretation for the reader seeking not only knowledge, but illumination. Hays invites readers on a lyrical pilgrimage through sacred space, liturgical time, and metaphysical insight. This epic poem traverses the arc of divine encounter—from winter solstice shadows to Pentecostal flame—charting the hermeneutics of scripture as a living, breathing drama. The Spacious Unclosed reads like a stunning mystagogic epic, reverberating with the layered intertextuality, building a liturgical theology through cosmological metaphor and hermeneutical pilgrimage. Hays renders interpretation not as passive reading, but as a sacred act of communion—a symbolic Eucharist of word and witness. Alongside scripture, the poem weaves in luminous threads from Rilke, Herbert, Whitman, Voltaire, Wilde, and Cowper, forming a rich dialogue between poets, prophets, and the Spirit of Language itself. Through vestments of oracle stones and metaphors reawakened, the poem explores how meaning is transmitted and from the veiled signs of cleromancy and the staff of Hermes, to the collapse of Enlightenment certainty and the mystical pulse of choral time. Each canto enacts a feast—Advent, Passover, Triduum, Pentecost—guiding readers toward a higher grammar of understanding, in which the divine is not only spoken but embodied, not only heard but sung. The Spacious Unclosed is a metaphysical epic structured as a seven-part pilgrimage through interpretive revelation, aligning poetic cosmology with the sacred act of reading. Drawing on scriptural touchstones, theological tradition, and poetic testimony, it explores how divine knowledge is transmitted—through symbol, gesture, ritual, and inner encounter. Each of the seven parts functions like a station in a liturgical or metaphysical I. Winter Solstice in Oratorio Adventist establishes the sacred hermeneutic act as prophetic and priestly, invoking cleromancy and Hermes’s staff.II. Three Nativities Confederate Embodied White moves toward synthesis, portraying East and West spiritualities as destined for a union that outgrows old wrath and mythic violence.III. That Myrrh Encounter and Gold Shine Carols critiques modernity’s spiritual boredom and Enlightenment’s sterile disenchantment through symbols of ennui, irony, and false spectacle.IV. Sackcloth and Palm Branch Ashes Purple reflects on human limitation and epistemological humility, using sacramental and cosmological language to dramatize existential uncertainty.V. Passover Mandatum Lamb Supper reframes doctrinal formation as an intuitive and communal receptivity to revelation, a spiritual pedagogy enacted in childhood wonder and maternal metaphor.VI.