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
Faith-shaping Poets
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Our Father: Hallowed on Earth as in Heaven
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Enthral me
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurped town to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to...
The Bible: Bestowed Word of God
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Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person
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I notice the sign and wonder why
Some of us run, some loiter; Some of us turn aside To erect the Calvary That is our signpost, arms Pointing in opposite directions To bring us in the end To the same place, so impossible Is it to escape love…. R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Mass for Hard Times,...
Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless
Life’s but a walking shadow
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,...
Stir a flower and trouble a star
All things by immortal power Near or far Hiddenly To each other linked are That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling a star. Francis Thompson (1859-1907), The Mistress of Vision.
D Day: Lest we Forget
Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe— Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart...
Human-kind
Know thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in...
The Grace of God: Justifying and Converting
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Prodigal Homecoming
I sense the excitement in his mind: The prodigal taking all that he had And moving out, a feeling of freedom in the air, Stretching the strings that held him back, Rejecting home Familiar, undervalued, And stepping out into the world…. Yet every new excitement...
Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian Living
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My conscience speaks
My conscience umpire; whom if they will hear, Light after light well used they shall attain, And to the end persisting safe arrive. This my long sufferance, and my day of grace, They who neglect and scorn shall never taste; But be hardened, blind be blinded more, That...
Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience
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In despair is the music still playing?
O God, can a man find you when he lies with his face downwards And his nose in the rubble that was his achievement? Is the music playing behind the door of despair? Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67).
Believers: Assured, Called and Prayerful
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...
Translate my prayer
Translate our prayers He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow When I attempt the ineffable name, murmuring “Thou” And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing though art. Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers...
Myself in you and you in me
I would have knelt long, wresting with you, wearing you down. Hear my prayer, Lord, hear my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals have kept up their shrill cry, explaining your silence by their infirmness. It begins to appear this is not what prayer is...
Autumn Leavings
And if, as autumn deepens and darkens I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms and trouble and dissolution and distress and then the softness of deep shadows folding, folding around my soul and spirit, around my lips so sweet, like a swoon, or...
The Church: Provisional but Necessary
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What life have you
What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community, And not community not lived in praise of God. Even the anchorite who meditates alone, For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God, Prays for the church, the body of...
The Mission of God
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Save your journeying soul
When your ship Long moored in the harbour, Gives you the illusion Of being a house; When your ship Begins to put down roots In the stagnant water by the quay: Put out to sea! Save your boat’s journeying soul, And your own pilgrim soul, Cost what it may. Dom...
Moral Justice: a Vision of God’s Kingdom
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The First Anniversary
Less passionate, the long war throws Its burning thorn about all men, Caught in one grief, we share one wound, And cry one dialect of pain. We have forgot who fired the house, Whose easy mischief spilt first blood; Under one roof we lie; The fault no longer...
Glory: Now and Then, Here and There
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His birth and our death?
… Were we led all that way for birth or death? There was a birth, certainly, we had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different; this birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death. We returned to our places,...