Category: theology
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Poet on the Cliff
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Let’s look again at St Aldhelm’s chapel, a small square Norman building on a cliff-edge. It stands at the very tip of a promontory on the Dorset coast called – a bit confusingly – St Alban’s Head. The chapel is small and dark and inside it is very damp. This is because the door…
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High Noon this Easter
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Let’s recall the film “High Noon,” that great Western. The outlaw and his hoodlum cronies are riding into town. They want revenge on the sheriff, the keeper of the law. The sheriff scours the town looking for support, a posse of townspeople who will help him defend their community from the outlaws. The townspeople know…
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The Rule of the Rough Beast
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The “Rough Beast” is a phrase from “The Second Coming” by YB Yeats. Written in 1919, it is a poem that becomes more topical with each passing day. The last three lines of the poem above are a deliberate reference to TS Eliot’s lines from “Four Quartets” – “Humankind/Cannot bear very much reality.” And…
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Rome Burning
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I run a charity called “Hyphen-21”. The charity holds and manages funding for a project which publishes bilingual poem-posters. Since the Spring of 2017, this project has been called “Poems for …the wall” (before that it was called “Poems for…). Since it first began in 1997, “Poems for…the wall” has been funded by the UK…
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Shavings from The Rainbow
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What is God, after all ? If maggots in a dead dog be but God kissing carrion, what then is not God ? And when the war began it seemed that the poles of the universe were cracking and the whole must go tumbling into the bottomless pit. You feel an agony…
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The Angel Overhead
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In his grief, he asked the angel hanging overhead, his faceless confessor : Why, Lord, do sinners’ ways so grossly prosper ? How can you allow the Lie so fatly to preside ? And the angel answered : I invited you to my feast, my laden tables, my radiant halls, and for my reward,…