A nothing day full of
wild beauty and the
timer pings. Roll up
the silver off the bay
take down the clouds
sort the spruce and send to laundry marked,
more starch. Goodbye
golden- and silver-
rod, asters, bayberry
crisp in elegance.
Little fish stream
by, a r
autumn rose
Posted on by James Woodward
yellow, sadness, colour fading: flower,
the sun and rain have had their way with you
and yet you are rich, you are immaculate
against all you kept your excellence intact.
buttercup
Posted on by James Woodward
I never knew the earth had so much gold—
The fields run over with it, and this hill
Hoary and old,
Is young with buoyant blooms that flame and thrill.
Such golden fires, such yellow—lo, how good
This spendthrift world, and what a lavish God!
This fringe of woo
What is Gospel?
Posted on by James Woodward
The Gospel is the shocking, provocative, revolutionary, subversive, counterintuitive good news that in your moments of greatest
despair, failure, sin,
weakness, losing,failing,
frustration, inability, helplessness, wandering, and falling short.
God meets you
in the garden
Posted on by James Woodward
Whatever you hoped,
you will not find yourselves in the garden,
among the growing plants.
Your lives are not circular like theirs:
your lives are the bird's flight
which begins and ends in stillness--
which begins and ends, in form echoing
this arc from t
AGING AND THE TRANSITORINESS OF LIFE
Posted on by James Woodward
In old age something special happens to reality. Its hardness is softened by the experience of transitoriness. Persons who once seemed indispensable die. One after another disappears — parents, teachers, onetime superiors first, contemporaries next.
One has the feeling tha
God gifts us
Posted on by James Woodward
To be human is to recognize our lives as gift.
We do not exist and then God gifts us; our very existence is gift, and it is Gods story of triune love that continues to work passionately and extravagantly in us.
That is what rooted means. Our lives become meaningful wh
a golden heaven
Posted on by James Woodward
@
@
@
A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.
A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.
Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.
(No light, no gold, no
waiting
Posted on by James Woodward
Waiting is not a passage of time to be traversed but a condition of our being.
In waiting, time enters our bodies; we are the time that passes.
We wait even if we are not aware that we are waiting.
The instrumental nature of ordinary waiting - where we usually wait for somet
bring me a sunflower
Posted on by James Woodward
bring me a sunflower; I want it to grow
in my sunscorched seasalted homeland.
It will show all day to the blue sky mirror
the sadness of its sunward face.
shadows make for clarity, don't they?
all things flow, and then dissolve
first into colour, then into
Ways into death and its narratives
Posted on by James Woodward
Quietus: The vessel, death and the human body
An exhibition by Julian Stair Winchester Cathedral Autumn 2013
FB friends will have seen some (not very good) photographs of Winchester Cathedral caused in part by a failure to take my specs on my journey ! However the mai
seeking out what is real ?
Posted on by James Woodward
Tension, then, is an inescapable feature of our spirituality and no one was more insistent upon this that von Hugel.
'Christianity', he wrote, 'can and does develop in man a temper, a state of soul, which so deeply and delicately, so sharply and steadily perceives and feels th
rose
Posted on by James Woodward
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of
my heart.
The w
Does belief change in old age?
Posted on by James Woodward
Belief and Ageing
Spiritual pathways in later life
Peter G. Coleman (Editor) Paperback, 192 pages Policy Press Bristol 2011
ISBN 9781847424594 2011
Most of the books on my shelves about religion and ageing are written out of the United States of America. There are
autumn
Posted on by James Woodward
The leaves are falling, falling, as from far away
from distant gardens, somewhere in the sky
they drift and wave, like someone saying 'no'
and through the night the earth is falling, too
falling like all the lonely night sky stars
and all of us. Thi
Moral Medicine?
Posted on by James Woodward
On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics
Edited by M. Therese Lysaught and Joseph J. Cotva Jr. With Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey
Publisher: Erdmans Michigan 3rd Edition 2012, 1,162 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8028-6601-1 no price marked
Th
the opening and the close
Posted on by James Woodward
The Opening and the Close
Of Being, are alike
Or differ, if they do,
As Bloom upon a Stalk.
That from an equal Seed
Unto an equal Bud
Go parallel, perfected
In that they have decayed.
Emily Dickinson
A radical rethink on health care – Church Times Review
Posted on by James Woodward
Remodelling Medicine Jeremy Swayne Saltire Books £39.98 (978-1-908127-00-6)
THERE are consultations in UK general practice every day. Many of us will be grateful for our doctor's skill and humanity in diagnosis and treatment. As patients, we present an extraordinary
RS Thomas on Prayer
Posted on by James Woodward
There are nights that are so stillthat I can hear the small owlcallingfar off and a fox barkingmiles away. It is then that I liein the lean hours awake listeningto the swell born somewhere inthe Atlanticrising and falling, rising andfallingwave on wave on the long shoreby the vil
a leaf
Posted on by James Woodward
When in still air and still in summertime
A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
Its drifting in detachment down the road.
Howard Nemerov