Poems and readings to reflect on and shape your faith

How to use Faith Shapers:
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USE FAITH SHAPERS FOR:
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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...

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...

Wrack of mortal things!

Man at the best a creature frail and vain, In knowledge ignorant, in strength but weak, Subject to sorrows, losses, sickness, pain, Each storm his state, his mind, his body break, From some of these he never finds cessation, But day or night, within, without,...

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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What is the purpose?

In the beginning God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness. And God said, ‘Let us make creatures out of mud, so mud can see what we have done.’ And God created every living thing that now moveth and one was man. Mud as man alone could...

The Bible: Bestowed Word of God

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Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person

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Coming Soon

It is 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. I modernise the anachronism of my language, but...

Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless

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Life’s illusions

Life’s illusions

 I’ve looked at life from both sides now, From win and lose and still somehow It’s life’s illusions I recall; I really don’t know life at all.    Joni Mitchell (1945 - ), 1967.

The Grace of God: Justifying and Converting

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Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian Living

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Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience

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Believers: Assured, Called and Prayerful

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What is next Lord?

What is next Lord?

The assured Christian is more motion than notion, more work than word, more life than lip, more hand than tongue. When he hath done one work, he is a-calling out for another. What is next, Lord, says the assured soul, what is the next?   Thomas Brooks ( -1680),...

The Church: Provisional but Necessary

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Vicar of large things in a small parish

Vicar of large things in a small parish

I was vicar of large things in a small parish. Small-minded I will not say; there were depths in some of them I shrank back from, wells that the word ‘God’ fell into and died away, and for all I know is still falling. Who goes for water to such must prepare for a long...

The Mission of God

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Moral Justice: a Vision of God’s Kingdom

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Glory: Now and Then, Here and There

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You will need it

You will need it

  Have you built your ship of death? O, have you? O, build your ship of death, for you will need it.   D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), 1933.