Poems and readings to reflect on and shape your faith

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Latest Posts

Jeu d’esprit

Flame-dancing Spirit, come, Sweep us off our feet and Dance us through our days. Surprise us with your rhythms, Dare us to try new steps, explore New patterns and new partnerships. Release us from old routines, To swing in abandoned joy And fearful adventure. And in...

Elections

Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear All that; it is their promises that bring despair. If beauty, that anomaly, is left us still, The cause les in their poverty, not in their will. If they had power ('amenities are bunk'), conceive How their insatiate...

May Magnificent

All things rising, all things sizing Mary sees, sympathising With that world of good, Nature's motherhood.   Their magnifying of each its kind With delight calls to mind How she did in her stored Magnify the Lord.   Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89),  The May...

Hardy and Harry’s Seasons

This is the weather the cuckoo likes, and so do I When showers betumble the chestnut spikes and nestlings fly And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at the Traveller's Rest, And maids come forth sprig-muslin dressed, And citizens dream...

Dayspring

At heaven's gate, at break of day, Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think of thee - and then my state (like the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate ; for thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings, that...

War

Waste of muscle, waste of brain, Waste of patience, waste of pain, Waste of manhood, waste of health, Waste of beauty, waste of wealth, Waste of blood, and waste of tears, Waste of youth’s most precious years, Waste of glory, waste of God,- War!   Geoffrey...

Quiet Revival?

I walked abroad in Easter Park, I heard the wild dog’s distant bark, I knew my Lord was risen again,- Wild dog, wild dog, you bark in vain. Stevie Smith (1902-71), Conviction (11),1978.

George MacDonald (1824-1905) – Faith Shaper

George Macdonald was born in Huntly, in the western part of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, the son of a farmer and his wife Helen MacKay (1790-1832). He was educated in country schools where Gaelic myths and Old Testament stories were common currency. At King’s College,...

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) – Faith Shaper

Emily Dickinson’s father was a leading local lawyer and treasurer of the well-known Amherst College, founded in 1821. From 1840 she was educated at the Academy and then for a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. At the age of 23 she withdrew from most social...

John Milton (1608-74) – Faith Shaper

John Milton rejected the faith of his Roman Catholic father. He became a strongly Protestant Puritan, and a radical Christian with regard to the contemporary culture and powers in the land, including the Crown, Parliament and the Church. Although in 1630, he...

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) – Faith Shaper

Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Abused as a child by her father and neglected by her mother, she commented ‘I was very little. But I had recurring nightmares; there’s damage.’[1] She described the setting: ‘It was...

Faith-shaping Poets

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Our Father: Hallowed on Earth as in Heaven

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Thank you, Lord

Thank you, Lord

… if all the world Should in a pet of temperance feed on pulse, Drink the clear stream and nothing wear but freize, The all-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised, Not half his riches known, and yet despised; And we should serve him as a grudging master, As a...

The Bible: Bestowed Word of God

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Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person

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I am immortal diamond

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,...

Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless

What I do is Me

What I do is Me

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves - goes itself; myself  it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.   I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings...

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Distracted from distraction by distraction

This twittering world Only a flicker Over the strained time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after...

Buy me a home in a perfect hell

Buy me a home in a perfect hell

I would buy me a perfect island home, Sweet set in a southern sea, And there I would build me a paradise For the heart o’ my Love and me.   I would plant me a perfect garden there, The one that my dream soul knows, And the years would flow as the petals grow, That...

All you need is love

All you need is love

I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye; Nor  through the questions men may try, The pretty cobwebs we have spun….   Love is and was my Lord and King, And in his presence I attend To hear the tidings of my friend, Which every hour his...

The Grace of God: Justifying and Converting

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A debtor to mercy alone

A debtor to mercy alone

A debtor to mercy alone, Of covenant mercy I sing; Nor fear with thy righteousness on My person and offering to bring. Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-78).

Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian Living

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Power must subserve wisdom

Power must subserve wisdom

Power and Wisdom But what is strength without a double share Of wisdom? Vast, unwieldy, burdensome, Proudly secure, yet liable to fall By weakest subtleties; not made to rule, But to subserve where wisdom bears command.   John Milton (1608-74), Samson...

Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience

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Time passes, waiting

Time passes, waiting

… Young I pronounced you. Older I still do, but seldomer now, leaning far out over an immense depth, letting your name go and waiting, somewhere between faith and doubt for the echoes of its arrival.   R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Frequencies,...

Believers: Assured, Called and Prayerful

Crippled soul, let it be so

Crippled soul, let it be so

… ‘Crippled soul,’ do you say? Looking at him from the mind’s height; ‘limping through life on his prayers. There are other people in the world sitting at table contented, though the broken body and the shed blood are not on the menu’ ‘let it be so,’ I say. ‘Amen and...

Need a Window?

Need a Window?

In darkness the poet needs a window 'You speak as though No sunlight ever surprised the mind Groping on its cloudy path.' 'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window Before it enters a dark room. Windows don't happen.' So two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low...

The dream is gone

The dream is gone

… When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse Out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown; the dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb.   Pink Floyd, 1979 in the context of the pop...

A flash of rare delight

A flash of rare delight

Though I believe the resurrection truth, that good triumphant in the  end is known. Yet all of life seems twisted so by grief that  joy and sorrow have together grown. So to  endure is all that I can give. Enjoyment is a flash of rare delight. While only Christ...

The Church: Provisional but Necessary

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Churchgoing

Churchgoing

A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much can never be obsolete Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitate with it to...

The Mission of God

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Busy Bees

Busy Bees

Prophets of a future not our own! The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, It is even beyond our vision.                                                     We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction Of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work....

Moral Justice: a Vision of God’s Kingdom

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Glory: Now and Then, Here and There

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His birth and our death?

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,...