We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories
Chagall at Chichester
Posted on by James Woodward
A popular feature of Chichester Cathedral is a stained glass window on the north side, designed and created by the French artist Marc Chagall. The window is inspired by Psalm 150, which urges its readers to 'let everything that hath breath praise the Lord'. Vibrant and colourfu
What makes a great politician?
Posted on by James Woodward
Disraeli, or The Two Lives
Douglas Hurd and Edward Young
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2013 £20
Friends will know of my mild obsession with post second world ward political biographies and autobiographies. They are a strange and mildly unsatisfying genre with few jewels on the
THE WISDOM OF AGE
Posted on by James Woodward
Turkish folk hero Mulla Nasr Edin had reached old age
and was sitting in a tea house with friends looking back on his life:
"When I was a young man I was filled with the goal of
awakening everyone and I prayed to God to give me what was
needed to change the world.
One
amazement is the thing
Posted on by James Woodward
The point is the seeing, the grace
beyond recognition, the ways
of the bird rising, unnamed, unknown,
beyond the range of language, beyond its noun.
Eyes open on growing, flying, happening,
and go on opening. Manifold, the world
dawns on unrecognizing, realizing eyes.
Ama
Moving Theory into Practice?
Posted on by James Woodward
Transitions and the Lifecourse
Challenging the Constructions of 'Growing Old'
Amanda Grenier
256 pages, pbk £26.99, Policy Press Bristol- (Ageing and the Lifecourse Series) 2012, ISBN 978 1 84742 691 8.
Most of us in middle age have the experience of living with
Revolutionary Petunia
Posted on by James Woodward
The nature of this flower is to bloom
Rebellious. Living
Against the elemental crush
A song of color
Blooming for deserving eyes.
Blooming gloriously
For Its Self.
Alice Walker
Constant Movement and Opportunity ?
Posted on by James Woodward
It always seems as if the spirit of the river was speaking to me, and telling me how, in its rapid, continuous course, it is setting an example to man how he can most wisely and happily regulate his life. The water is so wise; when it comes to little banks and uneven p
The Priest
Posted on by James Woodward
The priest picks his way
Through the parish. Eyes watch him
From windows, from the farms;
Hearts wanting him to come near.
The flesh rejects him.
Women, pouring from the black kettle,
Stir up the whirling tea-grounds
Of their thoughts; offer him a dark
Filling i
Learning about Loss – Book review
Posted on by James Woodward
The Essential Guide to Life After Bereavement
Beyond Tomorrow
Judy Carole Kauffmann and Mary Jordan
Paperback: £12.99 Jessica Kingsley Publishers
2013, 176pp
ISBN: 978-1-84905-335-8.
In pastoral ministry there are many encounters that remain in the memor
a sunflower
Posted on by James Woodward
Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness—
to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower's thousand golden rooms.
from Mark Doty, Hea
greenness
Posted on by James Woodward
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is greener than anyone knows.
from Richard Wilbur, The beautiful changes
bouquet, sunlight
Posted on by James Woodward
Our sense of these things changes and they change,
Not as in metaphor, but in our sense
Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.
It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.
It is like a flow of meanings with no speech
And of as many meanings as of men.
The Poetry of Love
Posted on by James Woodward
What then is our human relationship with a universe that is not human? It is a relationship of time, it seems, of time and eternity. Because our lives are in time, we are in the world, but because we are not just in time but also in eternity, we also somehow transcend the wor
the scent of mint
Posted on by James Woodward
Oh, the littles that remain!
Scent of mint out in the lane;
Flare of window; sound of bees; —
These, but these.
Three times sitting down to bread;
One time climbing up to bed;
Table-setting o’er and o’er;
Drying herbs for winter’s store;
This thing; that
dandelion
Posted on by James Woodward
unfurling like a green prayer, or a question mark
in a world of answers, or a poem in a world of prose,
cramming his vamped exuberance like a camel
through the eye of a needle, which Jesus thought unlikely,
but not inconceivable, at least for a miracle-worker like himself,
who
as dew clarifies air
Posted on by James Woodward
They say eyes clear with age,
As dew clarifies air
To sharpen evenings,
As if time put an edge
Round the last shape of things
To show them there;
The many-levelled trees,
The long soft tides of grass
Wrinkling away the gold
Wind-ridden waves--all these,
They say, come back to f
Questions and Answers?
Posted on by James Woodward
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
hopeful green
Posted on by James Woodward
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of
Surrender of Self?
Posted on by James Woodward
In his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff captured a major cultural theme of the last five decades of the twentieth century.
Therapy’s triumph in an age of radical individualism has enriched our lives in numerous ways. Almost every facet of our liv