Category Archives: Devotional

Show us the Father, you pled, And that will be enough for us. He looked into your eyes and, with All the gathering frustration of the teacher Who day after day is ignored, who teaches Quadratic equations that they be forgotten, Beats out iambic pentameters that They be lost in the drumming numbness of heads,Continue reading “Enough (For the Feast of St Philip the Apostle)”

Oh, wretched man, the darkness of self-love does not let thee know this truth. For didst thou know it, thou wouldst choose any pain rather than guide thy life in this way; thou wouldst give thee to loving and desiring Him who Is; thou wouldst enjoy His truth in firmness, and wouldst not move aboutContinue reading “The Broken Mystic (For the Feast of Catherine of Siena)”

The hired hand once saw the wolf That came upon the fold of sheep And, hitching up his garments, fled Far away from the looming wolf And hid himself safe in the woods. The sheep stood waiting, helplessly, And bleated to the silent woods, The cold indifference of the night. The shepherd in another foldContinue reading “The Shepherd, the Wolf and the Hired Hand (Fourth Sunday of Easter)”

If he truly was the young man who fled naked when they seized him by his linen garment while following the one captured in the garden, do we then, perhaps, see in this a truth that fits the shy evangelist well? Does it not match well one whose face evades us, who flees when weContinue reading “The Fleeing Evangelist (For the Feast of Saint Mark)”

I. Cobblestones shine from day-long downpour; public holiday takes dreamy footsteps through mid-week tension. II. The sun too shy to rise this morning, yet rises late as rain from the day slowly subsides. At its going and rising, remember… III. Too early and cold this morning; the Dawn Service dropped into my conscience and satContinue reading “First World Problems: Ten Miniatures for Anzac Day”

Pregnant with its own hopeful future, Bursting with change and the newness of experience Amidst each turn’s cycling familiarity, The year stands: A heaving monument to grace Recognised at each twist and transition, Offerings of comfort opening from The baton-changes of seasons Known all too well, The greetings of those flowers We met the lastContinue reading “The Swelling Year”

The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, died performing Mass on March 24, 1980, the day after preaching a provocative final sermon (text available here) exposing the state violence in El Salvador at the time. He is remembered in the Anglican Church calendar today and so is the subject of today’s poem. The Last SermonContinue reading “The Last Sermon (For Archbishop Oscar Romero)”

Who does not think of St. George as a quasi-impossible personage slaying a dragon and rescuing a princess? And by all means let us so picture him, only turning the wild legend into a parable of truth…Fabrications, blunders, even lies, frequently contain some grain of truth: and though life at the longest cannot be longContinue reading “St. George and the Sifting (For the Feast of St George, Martyr)”