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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Elected

Elected

Though the mariner sees not the polestar, yet the needle of the compass which points to it tells him which way he sails: thus the heart that is touched with the loadstone of divine love, trembling with godly fear, and yet still looking towards God by fixed believing,...

The Bible: Bestowed Word of God

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Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person

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He’s Gone

He’s Gone

‘He’s gone,’ says Joseph, and, with Pilate’s leave Eases the nails and lowers him from the Tree’ Wraps him in reverent and tender thoughts And lays him in the cave called Memory.   That cave is deeply hewn in Joseph’s heart: All that’s within will always be his own:...

Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless

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‘My birthday wish for you’

‘My birthday wish for you’

See Scandal praying with her sharp knees up, And Virtue stood at Weeping Cross, And Courage to his leaking ship appointed, Slim Truth dismissed without a character, And gaga Falsehood highly recommended, The green thumb to the ledger knuckled down.   Greed showing...

The Grace of God: Justifying and Converting

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Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian Living

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Stand apart and together

Stand apart and together

Sing and dance together and be joyous But let each one of you be alone Even as the strings of a lute are alone Though they quiver with the same music.   Stand together yet not too near together, For the pillars of the temple stand apart And the oak tree and the...

Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience

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Believers: Assured, Called and Prayerful

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Our Saving Victim 

Our Saving Victim 

In making victims we are judged, until we turn to the saving Victim. We are insistently and relentlessly, in Jerusalem, confronted… with a victim who is our victim. When we make victims, when we embark on condemnation, exclusion, violence, the diminution or oppression...

The Church: Provisional but Necessary

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People not without a history

People not without a history

A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England.   With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling We...

The Mission of God

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Worth more ‘real’ than life’s ‘illusion’

Worth more ‘real’ than life’s ‘illusion’

This poet parasite of grief Lives on the falling, leaf by leaf, Of life’s illusion, glad to see The nakedness of misery. He probes his pen deep down within, To make a sonnet of a sin. A Realist, revealing less Life’s beauty than its bitterness. Yet purer eyes than his...

Moral Justice: a Vision of God’s Kingdom

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Glory: Now and Then, Here and There

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Reason, master of what I fancy

Reason, master of what I fancy

Fancy next her office holds but know that in the soul are many lesser faculties, that serve reason as chief. Among these fancy next her office holds; of all external things, which the five watchful senses represent, she forms imaginations, aery shapes, which reason,...