Poems and readings to reflect on and shape your faith
How to use Faith Shapers:
- Click on ROOMS to pick a theme
- Search for an author/poet by name
- Explore more by using the tags
- Feel free to share Faith Shapers
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
Latest Posts
Our Father: Hallowed on Earth as in Heaven
Longing!
Under the dark trees, there he stands, there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes? I thought I knew a little how he compels, beyond all things, but now he stands there in the shadows. It will be Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning, when I shall wake to see him as...
Harvest Thanks Giving
Thanks be to God for the food on the table; Thank you, our daily cry. Food for today and with more for tomorrow, All of our needs supplied. Crops from the field, fruit from the tree, Vegetables from the ground; Food from the earth, fish from the sea, Plenty to...
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 Dying Rose
A rose, planted by my father’s hands, so long ago. Less fruitful now, thinner, less flowers. “It’s old,” said the man, said the old man, my father. “It’s tired. It’s near the end of its life.” Who’d have thought it? A rose, growing old, tired, dying? My father did....
The Bible: Bestowed Word of God
This book I read
This book I read Floats in my hand like a water lily, Coming out of the nutrient waters of thought And light shines on us both, The morning’s breviary. Diane Wokoski (1937-).
Word of life that fires me
Lord, for the years your love has kept and guided, Urged and inspired us, cheered us on our way, Sought us and saved us, pardoned and provided, Lord of the years, we bring our thanks today. Lord, for that word, the word of life which fires us, Speaks to our hearts and...
God’s love-letter
A man who loves his wife will love her letters and her photographs because they speak to him of her. So if we love the Lord Jesus we shall love the Bible because it speaks to us of him. The husband is not so stupid as to prefer his wife's letters to her voice, her...
Born among the trees and leaves
O who will show me those delights on high Echo. I Thou echo, thou art mortal, all men know. Echo. No Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves? Echo. Leaves. And are there any leaves that still abide? Echo. Bide. What leaves are they? Impart the matter wholly....
Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person
My Morning Star
O Christ, our morning star, Splendour of light eternal, Shining with the glory of the rainbow. Come and waken us From the greyness of our apathy, And renew in us Your gift of hope. Venerable Bede (672-735)
Down to the World’s Cradle
Down to that littleness, down to all that Crying and hunger, all that tiny flesh And flickering spirit – down the great stars fall, Here the great kings bow. Here the farmer sees his fragile lambs, Here the wise man throws his books away. This manger is the universe’s...
Palm Sunday
When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. And monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, And devil's walking parody On all four-footed things. The tattered...
Longing!
Under the dark trees, there he stands, there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes? I thought I knew a little how he compels, beyond all things, but now he stands there in the shadows. It will be Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning, when I shall wake to see him as...
Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless
My Dragon?
The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; The times are winter, watch, a world undone.... And I not help.... Or what is else? There is your world within. There rid the dragons, root out there the sin. ’’Your will is law in that small commonweal....
Christmas Check Out
"I'm not looking forward to Christmas," The lass on the store check-out cries, Pinging the goods on the rumbling belt - The bread, and the wine, and the pies. I watch, as I stand in the fidgety queue As the lassie enlightens us all. "The fuss and the...
Stop the Clocks
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is...
Not Nobody!
In life I worked hard and achieved a great deal but in the end I achieved nothing. Solo Nemo
The Grace of God: Justifying and Converting
Held Fast
I threaten'd to observe the strict decree Of my dear God with all my power and might; But I was told by one it could not be; Yet I might trust in God to be my light. "Then will I trust," said I, "in Him alone." "Nay, e'en to trust in Him was also His:...
On a Friday Morning
It was on a Friday morning that they took me from the cell and I saw they had a carpenter to crucify as well. You can blame it on to Pilate You can blame it on the Jews You can blame it on the Devil But it's God that I accuse 'It’s God they ought to crucify...
Spring is Not our Mating Season
I will not kiss you, country fashion, By hedgesides where Weasel and hare Claim kinship with our passion.... This bare clay-pit is truest setting For love like ours: No bed of flowers But sand-ledge for our petting. The Spring is not our mating season:...
God’s Better Beauty
To what serves mortal beauty? Dangerous; does set dancing blood.... What do then? How meet beauty? Merely meet it; own, home at heart, heaven's sweet gift; then leave, let that alone, Yea, wish that though, wish all, God's better beauty, grace. Gerard...
Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian Living
Ring it Out and In
... The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient...
Forgiven and Forgiving
History teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves - from our recklessness, or our greed. God sent into the world a unique person - neither a philosopher nor a general - but a Saviour, with the power to forgive. Forgiveness lies at the heart of the...
Compassion
We in our prideful counting are answerable to you: Facing the cost of our pride, we choose you; We choose you and your compassion; We choose you, because we trust that, You do not deal with us according to our sins, Nor repay us according to our iniquities. So we...
Reborn
And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing. Oh my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night. George Herbert (1593-1633). The...
Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience
I am the live God
… These people know me only in the thin hymns of the mind, in the arid sermons and prayers. I am the live God, nailed fast to the old tree of a nation by its unreal tears. I thirst, I thirst for the spring water. Draw it up for me from your heart’s well...
Spring into Life
Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with the fragrance of the fields and the freshness of the oceans which you have made, and help me to hear and to hold in all dearness those exacting and wonderful words of our Lord Jesus Christ, saying: Follow me. Mary Oliver...
God’s fantastic move
Tripping over Joy What is the difference Between your experience of Existence And that of a saint? The saint knows that the spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God And that the Beloved Has just a Fantastic Move That the saint is now continually Tripping...
Sing Hosanna
Holy Spirit, New-Life Giver, Rushing wind, and gentle inner flame, Come, inspire us, strengthen, fire us, to the glory of your name. Find the riches of Christ in the stranger In the poor and those without...
Believers: Assured, Called and Prayerful
Big Decision
To every man there openeth A Way, and Ways, and a Way. And the High Soul climbs the High way, And the Low Soul gropes the Low, And in between, on the misty flats, The rest drift to and fro. But to every man there openeth A High Way, and a Low. And every man decideth...
Caged Skylark?
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells - That bird beyond the remembering his free fells, This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.... Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest -...
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...
Only a Watcher!
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say; And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field, And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day. On Christ they do and on the martyr may; But be the war within, the...
The Church: Provisional but Necessary
You’re Welcome
You're welcome until you're homeless. Until you're drugged up, or drug dealing. Welcome until you're angry, or angsty, or anything other than sane.... Welcome until it's harder to let you in than keep you out. Until the questions you carry are a gospel of...
Tree of Life: Upside Down
There is a tree grows upside down, Its roots are in the sky; Its lower branches reach the earth When amorous winds are nigh. One lone bough there starkly hangs A Man just crucified, And all the other branches bear The choice fruits of the Bride. When...
Love You to Death
I am beginning to understand I saw a sign once; outside a church. It said Are you really living or just walking around to save the expense of a funeral? I didn’t know that Love is real life, and everything else is just a more or less entertaining way of dying, and I...
Restore Us
Where our walls Are broken down Rebuild us God Where streets Are neither safe nor sound redeem Rekindle fires of once strong praise Rebound your joys in tone and phrase From ancient stones of walls Once raised for you… Return Messiah King Let these stones sing...
The Mission of God
Kingdom Come
Lord, it belongs not to my care whether I die or live: to love and serve thee is my share, and this thy grace must give. Christ leads me through no darker rooms than he went through before; he that into God's kingdom comes must enter by this door. Come, Lord, when...
Caged Skylark?
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells - That bird beyond the remembering his free fells, This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.... Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest -...
Holy Island – What Me?
Leave me alone with God as much as may be, as the tide draws the waters close in upon the shore, make me an island, set apart, alone with You, God, holy to You. Then, with the turning of the tide, prepare me to carry your presence to the busy world, beyond...
Peace
When will you ever, Peace, wilddove, shy wings shut, You round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? When, Peace, will you Peace? I'll not play hypocrite To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows...
Moral Justice: a Vision of God’s Kingdom
War Wounded
Across our planet earth there bleed the wounds of war, with livelihoods destroyed and cherished homes no more; the people flee, abused and scarred and travelling far, poor refugees. Across our planet earth the wounds of war go deep with generations taught...
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).
The writing on the wall
Silence like a cancer grows And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made. And the sign flashed out its warning, In the words that it was forming, And the signs said, ‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls And tenement halls, And...
Victory?
Professional Sports The endless carnival of those sports constitutes a dramatic affirmation of power, wealth and virility in which victory is accomplished by many abusive exploitations, all in pursuit of winning and being top of the heap of the money game....
Glory: Now and Then, Here and There
SKYLIGHT
You were the one for skylights. I opposed Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed, Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling, The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling. Under there,...
Son Worship
To long for the unsettling, unsetting Son is dangerous. Saints and Starets, sinners and seekers have found that Christ takes them at their word who say that they want, or would like, to know him. Holy Fools have met him in the derision of sophisticates....
Deathbed
Now, when the frail and fine-spun Web of mortality Gapes, and lets slip What we have loved so long From out our lighted present Into the trackless dark We turn, blinded, Not to the Christ in Glory, Stars about his feet, But to the Son of Man, Back from the tomb, Who...
World Without End
This world is not conclusion; A sequel stands beyond, Invisible, as music, But positive, as sound. It beckons and it baffles; Philosophies don’t know, And through a riddle, at the last, Sagacity must go. To guess it puzzles scholars; To gain it, men have...