Poems and readings to reflect on and shape your faith
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Latest Posts
Our Father: Hallowed on Earth as in Heaven
Affluence or temperance
Imposter! Do not charge most innocent Nature, As if she would her children should be riotous With her abundance. She, good cateress, Means her provision only to the good, That live according to her sober laws, And holy dictate of spare Temperance. If every just man...
Praying for Lucy
Come down, O Christ, and help me! Reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy Lake of Galilee: The wine of life is spilt upon the sand, Me heart is in some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my...
Feeling the Cold?
I found Him not in world or sun, Or in eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye; Nor through the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun:… A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s coldest part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up...
Flood our Hearts
God of time and God eternal, God beyond millennia; God whose fingerprints reveal you In the atom and the stars: Flood our hearts with hope and wonder, Fill us with your healing love. God, in Jesus, you have lived life, Shared constraints of...
The Bible: Bestowed Word of God
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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...
Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person
We need a suffering God
When this world’s pleasures for my soul sufficed, Ere my heart’s plummet sounded depths of pain, I called on reason to control my brain, And scoffed at that old story of the Christ. But when o’er burning wastes my feet had trod, And all my life was desolate with...
Jesus of the Scars
If we have never sought, we seek Thee now; Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars; We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow, We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars. The heavens frighten us; they are too calm; In all the universe we have no place....
Am I indifferent too?
When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed him by They never hurt a hair of him, they only let him die; For men had grown more tender, and they would not give him pain, They only passed him down the street, and left him in the rain. Studdert Kennedy...
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...
Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless
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...
Set me Free!
Hear me, O God! A broken heart Is my best prayer; Use still thy rod That I may prove Therein thy love. If thou hadst not Been stern to me, But left me free, I had forgot Myself and Thee. For sin’s so sweet, As minds ill bent Rarely repent, Until they meet Their...
I am a stately palace
My God, I heard this day, That none doth build a stately habitation, But he that means to dwell therein. What house more stately hath there been, Or can be, then is Man? To whose creation All things are in decay. For man is ev’ry thing, And more…. Since then, my...
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...
The Grace of God: Justifying and Converting
The uninvited guest comes
When we are weak, we are strong. When our eyes close on the world, then somewhere within us the bush burns. When we are poor and aware of the inadequacy of our table, it is to that uninvited the guest comes. R.S. Thomas, ...
Judas: the first to be forgiven
In Hell there grew a Judas Tree Where Judas hanged and died Because he could not bear to see His master crucified Our Lord descended into Hell And found his Judas there For ever hanging on the tree Grown from his own despair So Jesus cut his Judas down And took him in...
Give me simplicity
A wreathed garland of deserved praise, Of praise, deserved unto thee I give, I give to thee, who knowest all my ways, My crooked winding ways, wherein I live, Wherein I die, not live; for life is straight, Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee, To thee, who art...
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...
Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian Living
The gift has been given
Be still my soul, and steadfast. Earth and heaven both are still watching though time is draining from the clock and your walk, that was confident and quick, has become slow. So be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you...
Faces of sunflowers follow the sun
Come with me into the field of sunflowers. Their faces are burnished disks, their dry spines creak like ship masts, their green leaves, So heavy and many, fill all the day with the sticky sugars of the sun. Come with me to visit the...
God knows what he’s about
When God wants to drill a man, And thrill a man, and skill a man, When God wants to mould a man To play the noblest part; When he yearns with all his heart To create so great and bold a man That all the world shall be amazed, Watch his methods, watch his ways; How...
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...
Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience
Listening now and forever?
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice: now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever, which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron...
In the beginning was the word
We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965).
A 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,...
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...
Believers: Assured, Called and Prayerful
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...
An unaccustomed wine
I bring an unaccustomed wine To lips long parching next to mine, And summon them to drink…. And so I always bear the cup If, haply, mine may be the drop Some pilgrim thirst to slake, - If, haply, any say to me, “Unto the little, unto me,” When I at last...
Is Anybody There?
Prayers like gravel flung at the sky's window, hoping to attract the loved one’s attention. But without visible plaits to let down for the believer to climb up, to what purpose open that far casement? I would have refrained long since but that peering once through my...
Icy Inscape
The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; The times are winter, watch, a world undone; They waste, they wither worse; they as they run Or bring more or more blazon man's distress, And I not help.... Hope holds to Christ the mind's own mirror out To...
The Church: Provisional but Necessary
To see God only, I go out of sight
Seal then this bill of my divorce to all On whom those fainter beams of love did fall; Marry those loves which in youth scattered be On Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses), to thee. Churches are best for prayer, that have least light: To see God only, I go out of...
The tree of life in the garden with Christ
Our Lord into his Garden comes, Well pleas’d to smell our poor Perfumes, And calls us to a feast divine, Sweeter than honey, milk or wine. Eat of the Tree of Life, my Friends, The Blessings that my Father sends; Your Taste shall all my dainties prove, And drink...
Have I forgotten the church somewhere?
Sometimes a man rises from the supper table and goes outside. And he keeps on going because somewhere to the east there’s a church. His children bless his name as if he were dead. Another man stays at home until he dies, stays with plates and glasses. So, then...
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 Mission of God
The call-out from our comfort
From our low seat beside the fire, Where we have dozed and dreamed And watched the glow Or raked the ashes, stopping so We scarcely saw the sun and rain above Or looked higher Than this same quiet red or burned out fire Tonight we heard a call. And so we cannot sit...
Not my feet, Lord
Swift, tired, true, headstrong, tender, merciless – your feet have more persona than your head: born for earth that you may be freed for sky – Does anything that serves you serve like this? So why should someone say, ‘Not my feet, Lord – far rather wash my hands or...
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...
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...
Moral Justice: a Vision of God’s Kingdom
No voice of mourning
What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries for them from prayers or bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill,...
Blind. Does it matter?
Does it matter? Losing your sight? There’s such a splendid work for the blind: And people will always be kind, As you sit on the terrace remembering, And turning your face to the light. Siegfrid Sassoon (1886-1967), 1918.
We share our wound
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...
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,
Glory: Now and Then, Here and There
Not death but glory
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 speaking face to...
In case of fire
And whereas I had said; letters and photos And seen myself muscling through the flames, You would go back especially for your houseplants – Those dreamy weeping figs, this stocky yucca – What’s worth remembering remembered, leaving Both hands free for carrying out the...
I held your hand
I held your hand. The ancient bone beneath the flesh had been there since the dawn of time: you were an immemorial fact which none could cancel. Our staunch pact could not be broken. None could rinse away the rhyme and reason of that Elie beach with everything...
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...