Worshipping...

 Worshipping: After George Herbert, Ashburnham woods, Mielahti, Belonging, Stained glass at Harnhill

After George Herbert

Prayer from the first, a new born baby’s cry

And in the dying soul’s departing sigh.

Defibrillation, jolting us to start

The blood now beating through a broken heart.

Prayer in the desert blooming all alone

A rose whose sweetest scent to heaven is blown.

Prayer in the hubbub, linking all in one

As each lone flower leans toward the Sun.

Prayer in the groaning of a world in pain

The darkness weeping for the dawn again.

Prayer in my faltering words of guilt and shame

The quiet whisper of a healing name.

A living water welling up from deep

A soil that nurtures roots through winter’s sleep

A fire that blazes out with life, not death

A breeze, a gale, the sharing of a breath.

Prayer at the cross’s foot, an agony

That dives down deeper than the abyss in me.

Prayer at its height that, jabbing at the sky

Pierces the Father’s heart with my heart’s cry.

Prayer reaching out, a cosmos to embrace

And gather all its prodigals in grace.

Prayer in the depth, height, length and breadth of love

Prayer of the One in whom we live and move.

Ashburnham Woods

Nothing hurts the eye's peace

But a leaf's small trembling:

Only the tree-dew dropping

Plops in the ear's stillness:

Here in this small pause

Life's million wars upon the heart

Let lapse away, release

The grip kept tight about the soul,

That she too may enter on peace.

Now is the pure moment

Of my unquiet residence

In this two yards of clay,

You and I as all:

I in my swamp of hope,

Memory and desire, You

In the pure circle of eternity

And Your circle touches me

And the word of Your touch is love.

Mielahti

Lovers who cannot drink

Enough of one another

Heaven gazes into

The lake’s still water

And she returns the

Stillness of his shining

Element to element

Embosomed in each other

The brightness draws up

Vapour from the deepness

Replenishes the clouds 

Whose distillation

Flows rippling down

Into the deep again

Her surface shifts, mists, 

Shimmers in his breathings

His image trembles 

Dissolves and is reborn

The workaday land of 

Streets and offices

Now shrinks away 

Into a slip of horizon

While the sky’s shabbat

Opens in vast caverns

Luminous at my feet 

Steps of the Shekinah

All noiselessly 

The water walker approaches

Calling me to step out 

From my staid shore.

Belonging

Master, how many ways are there that I am yours?

As the poem is the poet’s, You conceived me.

As I am my mother’s, by Your Spirit You bore me.

As my hand enacts my thoughts, You embody Yourself in me.

As the field is the warrior’s, You conquered me.

As the hoard is the hero’s, You despoiled my enemies of me.

As the pearl is the merchant’s, with all You had You bought me.

As walls and roof shape me a home, You inhabit me.

As the chair he sits in is the carpenter’s, You fashion me 

As the garden is the gardener’s, You labour in me.

So Yours that if You cease to think of me

I must be quanta fizzling aimlessly

Into the void, and can no longer be.

Then since I am Your own so variously

One more way to be Yours now offer me,

The grace to give myself, entire and free.

So I am Yours, You mine, eternally.

Stained Glass at Harnhill

We are friends of the Bridegroom,

apostles of staid gesture and astonished face.

We strow gifts for the wedding

over the sanctuary floor,

carnadine and cobalt and chrome

confetti for the Lord of light

for the King is coming.

O floor, floor, floor, how blessed

though thirty generations tread you down

is your homely Cotswold stone:

now to be kissed by His gifts of light,

now to kiss His wounded feet,

for the steps of the King of love have borne Him here

and the feast is ready.