Poems and readings to reflect on and shape your faith
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USE FAITH SHAPERS FOR:
- Prayer or in time of personal need
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- Illustrations for a devotional address
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Latest Posts
Faith-shaping Poets
George Herbert (1593-1633) – Faith Shaper
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...
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) – Faith Shaper
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...
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...
Our Father: Hallowed on Earth as in Heaven
Blue Monday
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...
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...
Springtime
By night when others soundly slept And hath at once both ease and Rest, My waking eyes were open kept And so to lie I found it best. I sought him whom my Soul did Love, With tears I sought him earnestly. He bow’d his ear down from Above. In vain I did not seek or cry....
The Other Side
This isn’t death, it’s glory! It isn’t dark, it’s light; It isn’t stumbling, groping Or even faith, ---- it’s sight! This isn’t grief, it’s having. My last tear wiped away. It’s sunrise, it’s the morning Of my eternal day! This isn’t even praying, It’s...
The Bible: Bestowed Word of God
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...
The Bible is dynamite
You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, to turn the world upside down, and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature. Mahatma Gandhi...
The rare herb of silence: and the Word comes
When the doors of the house are shut, Eyes lidded, mouth closed, nose and ears Doing their best to idle, fingers allowed out Only on parole; when the lovely holy distractions, Safe scaffolding of much loved formulae, Have been rubbed away; then the plant Begins to...
This book of stars lights to eternal bliss
Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine, And the configurations of their glory! Seeing not only how each verse doth shine, But all the constellations of the story.... Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good, And comments on thee: for in every thing Thy...
Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person
Happy Tree
There was a bright and happy tree; The wind with music laced its boughs; Thither across the houseless sea Came singing birds to house. Men grudged the tree its happy eyes, Its happy dawns of eager sound; So all that crown and tower of leaves They levelled with...
In Our Hands
No wife, kids, home; No money sense. Unemployable. Friends, yes. But the wrong sort - The workshy, women, wogs, Petty infringers of the law... ... his end? I think we will make it Public, prolonged and painful. Right, said the baby. That was roughly What we had...
Nuclear God?
It is not clear that he can't speak; who created languages but God? . . . We call him the dumb God with an effrontery beyond pardon. Whose silence so eloquent as his? What word so explosive as that one Palestinian word with the endlessness of its fall-out?...
Speak! One Word
‘Thou art a God that hidest Thyself’ (Isaiah 45:15) ... Till Thou givest that sense beyond, To shew Thee that Thou art, and near, Let patience with her chastening wand Dispel the doubt and dry the tear; And lead me child-like by the hand If still in darkness...
Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless
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...
My Valentine
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...
A no-where Person
There is no-where in you, a paradise that is no-place and there you do not enter, except without a story. To enter there is to become unnameable. Whoever is there is homeless for he has no door, no identity with which to go out and to come in. Whoever is...
Felled
O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew - Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender…. Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or...
The Grace of God: Justifying and Converting
Naked in Your Sty
Take off the business suit, the old school tie, the gown, the cap, drop the reviews, awards, certificates, stand naked in you sty, a little carnivore, clothed in dried turds. The snot that slowly fills our passages seeps up from hollows where the dead beasts lie;...
I will lament and love
Ah my dear angry Lord, Since thou dost love, yet strike; Cast down, yet help afford; Sure I will do the like. I will complain, yet praise; I will bewail, approve; And all my sour sweet days I will lament, and love. George Herbert (1593-1633),. Bitter...
Emerging into the kingdom of heaven
This was the moment when Before turned to After And the future’s uninvented timekeepers presented arms. This was the moment when nothing happened. Only dull peace sprawled boringly over the earth. This was the moment when even energetic Romans Could find nothing...
My Trumpetry
From all my lame defeats and oh much more From all the victories that I seemed to score; From cleverness shot forth on thy behalf At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh; From all my proofs of thy divinity, Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me. ...
Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian Living
Disclosure of God
Your disclosure of God Takes the lowliest path…. I must come down like Zacchaeus If I would have you dwell with me; On the roads, and on the shore; In the villages, towns and cities; Down among the cares, the sins, The labours and the sorrows of ordinary people. That...
Lasting friendship
Such love I cannot analyse; It does not rest in lips or eyes, Neither in kisses nor caress. Partly, I know, it’s gentleness And understanding in one word Or in brief letters. It’s preserved By trust and by respect and awe, These are the words I’m feeling for....
Fulfilled
Human persons in every age, always and everywhere, whether they realise and reflect upon it or not, are in relationship with the unutterable mystery of human life that we call God. Looking at Jesus Christ the crucified and risen one, we can have the hope that now in...
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...
Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience
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...
Ageing happily
Who would have thought my shrivelled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite underground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown; Where they together All the hard weather, Dead to the world, keep house unknown…. And now in...
Open to surprise
Sometimes a light surprises The Christian while he sings; It is the Lord, who rises with healing in his wings; when comforts are declining, he grants the soul again a season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain. William Cowper...
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...
Now!
Only the present is thy part and fee And happy thou, If, though thou didst not beat thy future brow, Thou could'st well see What present things required of thee. They ask enough; why should'st thou further go? Raise not the mud Of future depths, but drink the clear...
The Church: Provisional but Necessary
Darkness Comes
What isolates me here in frozen clay But that same tidal shock which fell First upon England in your day? Betrayal of the truth is no new thing Within the fellowship of Christ, yet new Was the cold glare whence alien ripples flashed.... The darkness comes as...
Religion is over
The last quarter of the moon of Jesus gives way to the dark... Religion is over and what will emerge from the body of the new moon, no one can say. But a voice sounds in my ear: Why so fast, mortal? These very seas are baptized. The parish has a saint's name...
The way into church!
I see a door, a multitude near by, In creed and quarrel, sure disciples all! Gladly they would, they say, enter the hall, But cannot, the stone threshold is so high.... But see, one comes; he listens to the voice; Careful he wipes his weary dusty feet! The...
Low Sunday?
Often I try to analyse the quality of its silences. Is this where God hides from my searching?... These are the hard ribs of a body that our prayers have failed to animate. Shadows advance from their corners to take possession of places the light held for an...
The Mission of God
Peace in Palestine?
In the cross of Christ I glory, Towering o’er the wrecks of time; All the light of sacred story Gathers round its head sublime. When the woes of life o’ertake me, Hopes deceive and fears annoy. Never shall the cross forsake me. Lo, it glows with peace and joy. ...
God’s secretary
of all the creatures both in sea and land Only to man hast thou made known thy ways, And put the pen alone into his hand, And made him secretary of thy praise. Beasts fain would sing; birds dittie to their notes; Trees would be tuning on their native lute To...
Saved to save others
Are you content, have you no higher aim Than just to gain admittance at the door, In faintest characters to trace your name Among the list of those who die no more? Do you not feel that you are saved to live? Do you not know you are saved to save? Forgiven that you...
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...
Moral Justice: a Vision of God’s Kingdom
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...
Too close to the shore?
Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true, because we have dreamed too little, when we have arrived safely, because we sailed too close to the shore....
Ring in the Christ
Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand. Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), In Memoriam,
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
Tents are not Homes
This wilderness falls on my way and though a wanderer like Jacob of old here I cannot stay. I remember John the Baptist who chose for his home the wilderness; I remember too the wild sweetness that I have tasted there in these seasons and the temptation to...
No Shore in Sight
If you can stay in the midst of the turmoil unperplexed and calm because you see Jesus, that is God's plan in your life. Not that you may be able to say, 'I have done this and now it's alright.' We have an idea that God is leading us to a certain goal, a desired...
Together truth and beauty are one
I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed? ‘For beauty,’ I replied. ‘And I for truth, - the two are one; We brethren are,’ he said. And so, as...
Autumnal
Mars burns bright and close this October: I watch it through the window, as I lie, too-awake, in the dark. Drawn-in under covers as the cold bites, I shrink, foetal-shaped but old-fleshed, frail. I am autumnal: dry-leaved, mud-under-foot, dark-dayed,...