by revd | Feb 13, 2026 | Believers
Lent is a tree without blossom, without leaf, Barer than blackhorn in its winter sleep All unadorned. Unlike Christmas with decrees The setting-up, the dressing-up of trees, Lent is a taking down, a stripping bare, A starkness after all has been withdrawn Of surplus...
by revd | Feb 2, 2026 | Faith Shapers
Son of a noble family moving in royal circles, George Herbert (1593-1633) was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow in 1616. However when he was there, according to Isaak Walton, he was ‘apt to a consumption, and to...
by revd | Jan 29, 2026 | Our Father
I remember this woman who sat for years In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing And leafing at the far end of the lane. Straight out past the TV in the corner, The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush, The same small calves with...
by revd | Jan 23, 2026 | Our Father
In this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has not yet come. R.S. Thomas...
by revd | Jan 2, 2026 | Faith Shapers
Academically brilliant as an Oxford University student, in 1866 Gerard Manley Hopkins left the Anglican Church, to which both of his parents were deeply committed, to become a convinced Roman Catholic. Following his personal ‘conversion’, he obeyed an inner ‘call’ to...
