Poems and readings to reflect on and shape your faith
How to use Faith Shapers:
- Click on ROOMS to pick a theme
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USE FAITH SHAPERS FOR:
- Prayer or in time of personal need
- Resource for a group meeting
- Illustrations for a devotional address
- Material for a church study course
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Faith-shaping Poets
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Our Father: Hallowed on Earth as in Heaven
Father’s Day
Then, kneeling down to Heaven's Eternal King, The saint, the father, and the husband prays: Hope "springs exulting on triumphant wing," that thus they all shall meet in future days; there, ever bask in uncreated rays, no more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear; together...
War knows no Power?
Dear! Of all happy in the hour, most blest He who has found our hid security, Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest, And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’ We have found safety with all things undying, The winds, and morning, tears of men and...
God is Smart
… God is smart. Westerners have analysis. We have synthesis. Westerners have a strong sense of individualism. We have a strong sense of community. Because Westerners have a strong sense of the value of the individual, They are able to take personal initiatives. It’s...
Walk with God
The Lord of all, himself through all diffused, Sustains, and is the life of all that lives. Nature is but a name for an effect Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fires By which the mighty process is maintained, Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight Slow...
The Bible: Bestowed Word of God
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Revelation before religion
Thus man by his own strength to heaven would soar: And would not be obliged to God for more. Vain, wretched creature, how art thou misled To think thy wit these God-lie notions bred! These truths are not the product of thy mind, But dropped from heaven, and of a...
Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person
Christmas: Poetry or Prose?
Christmas Eve! Five Hundred poets waited, pen Poised above paper, for the poem to arrive, bells ringing. It was because The chimney was too small, because they had ceased to believe, the poem had passed them by on its way out into oblivion, leaving the doorstep bare...
It was himself he played
… I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers, Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis, As we sat there or warmly applauded This player who so beautifully suffered For each of us upon his instrument. So it must have been on Calvary In the fiercer light of the...
Glory in the Silence
Was he baulked by silence? He kneeled long And saw love in a dark crown Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree Golden with fruit of a man’s body. R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Song at the Year’s Turning, 1955.
Christ My King
No one can come to spiritual delight in the contemplation of Christ’s godhead except he come first in imagination by painful identification, by compassion and steadfast thinking on his humanity. Walter Hilton (1343 – 96), Toward a Perfect Love. ...
Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless
Slope to perfection
Because we cannot be clever and honest and are inventors of things more intricate than the snowflake – Lord have mercy. Because we are full of pride in our humility, and because we believe in our disbelief – Lord have mercy. Because we will protect ourselves from...
Imagine: living is easy
Let me take you down, ‘cos I’m going to strawberry fields. Nothing is real and nothing to get hung up about. Strawberry fields for ever. Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see… John Lennon (1940-80), The Beatles, 1967.
A wedding has been
Elaenor Rigby picks up the rice in the church Where a wedding has been, Lives in a dream; Waits at the window, Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for? John Lennon (1940-80) and Paul McCartney (1942- ).
Man was made to mourn
A few seem favourites of fate, In pleasure’s lap carest; Yet think not all the rich and great Are likewise truly blest: But oh! What crowds in every land, All wretched and forlorn, Thro’ weary life this lesson learn, That man was made to mourn. Many and...
The Grace of God: Justifying and Converting
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Give me a thankful heart
Thou hast given so much to me, Give one thing more, a grateful heart. See how thy beggar works on thee By art. Wherefore I cry, and cry again; And in no quiet canst thou be, Till I a thankful heart obtain Of thee: Not thankful when it pleaseth me; As if thy...
Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian Living
Get a glory
Oh you gotta get a glory! In the work you do, A Hallelujah chorus In the heart of you. Paint or tell a story, Sing or shovel coal, But you gotta get a glory Or the...
Girl of two worlds
I am the girl of two worlds, My heart belongs to here and there, Two worlds profoundly different, United in my highest regard. Do I live in or between these two worlds? I am the girl of two worlds.
Our love hath no decay
The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass Is elder by a year now than then it was, When thou and I first one another saw; All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday. Running, it never runs from...
Contemplation’s door to wisdom and virtue
Virtue could see to do what virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And wisdom’s self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation, She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings That in...
Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience
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Beauty beyond reason
… here you stand, adore and worship, when you know it not, pious beyond the intention of your thought, devout above the meaning of your will. Yes, you have felt, and may not cease to feel, The estate of man would be indeed forlorn If false conclusions of the reasoning...
Believers: Assured, Called and Prayerful
Search me, O God, and known my heart today
Search me, O God, and known my heart today; Try me, O Lord, and know my thoughts, I pray; See if there be some wicked way in me: Cleanse me from every sin and set me free. I praise you, Lord, for cleansing me from sin; Fulfil your word, and make me pure within;...
Longing to believe
While faith is with me, I am blest; It turns my darkest night to day; But, while I clasp it to my breast, I often feel it slide away. What shall I do if all my love, My hopes, my toil, are cast away? And if there be no God above To hear and bless me when I...
A Falling Leaf
… My life is in the falling leaf: O Jesus, quicken me. My life is like a faded Leaf’ My harvest dwindled to a husk; Truly my life is void and brief And tedious in the barren dusk; My life is like a frozen thing, No bud or greenness can I see: Yet rise it shall – the...
My Signal Box
The signal box sometimes feels like one of those invitation tests: go to the wilds, endure the emptiness of yourself and return reformed. Confront that which is most you: stray to the dark realm of your bruised heart and let the light in, let the grand voice of...
The Church: Provisional but Necessary
Praying in a deserted church
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...
Church: a meeting place for me and God
In a busy world, A place to be still; In a divided world, A place to find friendship; In a confusing world, A place to find direction; In a sinful world, A place to know the love of God. A place for loving, When the world hates; A place for hoping, When the...
I knew it all, dividing tact from truth
I was the chapel pastor, the abrupt shadow staining the neutral fields, troubling the men who grew there with my glib dutiful praise of a fool’s world; a man ordained for ever to pick his way along the grass-strewn wall dividing tact from truth. I knew it all,...
How to go to church
When once thy foot enters the church, be bare. God is more there, than thou: for thou art there Only his permission.... Resort to sermons, but prayers the most: Praying's the end of preaching.... In time of service seal up both thine eyes, And send them to...
The Mission of God
Your Kingdom Come
It’s a long way off, but inside it there are quite different things going on: festivals at which the poor man is king and the consumptive is healed; mirrors in which the blind look at themselves and loves look at them back; and industry is for mending the bent bones...
I Am a Child of God
When a person acquainted with the music of God appears, one who is wise both in words and deeds (Luke 7:32)… then this person will produce the sound of the music of God, since he has learned from all this how to strike the chords at the appropriate time: now the...
The purpose of a poem
… to save from death, decay and ruin the actual moment of vision and response, and keep in the real world…. Sophia De Mello Breyner (1919 -2004).
Not another redemption song?
Won’t you help to sing These songs of freedom ? ‘Cos all I ever had ; Redemption songs. Bob Marley (1945-81).
Moral Justice: a Vision of God’s Kingdom
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Human rights matter
W’en wi can’t face reality Wi leggo wi clarity; Some latch on to vanity, Some hol’ insanity, Some get vision, Start preach relijan But dem can’t make decision W’en it come to wi fight; Dem can’t make decision W’en it comes to wi rites. Linton Kwesi Johnson...
Glory: Now and Then, Here and There
Taking the world into my arms
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder If I have made of my life something particular, and real, I don’t want to find myself...
Nothing can die
In the book of the earth it is written: Nothing can die. In the book of the Sioux it is written: They have gone away into the earth to hide. Nothing will coax them out again But the people dancing. Mary Oliver (1935-2019), Ghosts, 2017. ...
Living in two worlds
I am the girl of two worlds, My heart belongs to here and there, Two worlds profoundly different, United in my highest regard. Do I live in or between these two worlds? I am the girl of two worlds. My heart is here when BAM! Disaster strikes there. Someone needs me,...
I am immortal diamond
Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal; beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This jack, poor potsherd,...