A Year of Inspirers (9) – Celebrating George Herbert

“Love bade me welcomeBut my soul drew back...” So begins one of George Herbert’s great poems, called “Love (III)”. Although Herbert is not very well known as a poet, he writes with a powerful simplicity.  He understands love, suffering and inner struggles. Many of his lines have inspired me.  This is how his poem "The …

A Year of Inspirers (5): Henri Nouwen & “The Return of the Prodigal Son”

Henri Nouwen has inspired me in so many ways. He was born on 24th January 1932. “Return of the Prodigal Son” is a wonderful book by him that inspired a whole collection I wrote, called “Returning to the Father”. Fleeing Again and again I have fled the hands of blessing . Made myself deaf to …

A Year of Inspirers (4) – Inner Fire

“The Fire of Love” is a great name for any book. Richard Rolle, its author, is remembered on 20th January. His wonderful work on mysticism has inspired me again and again. ~ Be absorbed in that blessed love . Blazing in your Soul . That fires such sweetness and such devotion . Know nothing but …

A Year of Inspirers 2021 (1) – love and illumination, and the desert – T.S.Eliot

For me, T.S.Eliot is the writer of time, of love, of spirituality, and of "the desert". He writes about the spiritual desert -"The Waste Land" - as he calls it in one of his most influential early works. Lines from "Choruses from The Rock" These lines were inspired by his poetry: Movements of Time I. …

The Inspiration of St. John of the Cross

I first came across St. John of the Cross through a small paperback version of “The Dark Night of the Soul”.  Perhaps it spoke to my consciousness that all was not well in my spirit, and that although sometimes I was elated in worship and prayer, at other times I felt far from God and …

A Year of Inspirers (19): St. John of the Cross

This is one of the most amazing diagrams I have ever come across... St. John was a poet and an artist as well a great spiritual teacher, and I love this mysterious diagram he drew to illustrate "Mount Carmel". The middle section near the bottom has the words "nothing nothing nothing....", which inspired this short …

In Memory of Wilfred Owen

~ Called From country walks and hills ~ To be wounded By words ~ Which would sing In shrill, demented voices ~ Of all Of human pain ~ Of war And of the pity of war. ~ Written in memory of the English poet, Wilfred Owen, who died November 4th, 1918. The phrase "Shrill demented" …

You Led Me Beyond

~ You led me beyond City streets ~ To sunrise skies And forms ~ That filled life-giving Imagination ~ For beauty And for revelation. ~ A tribute to the poetry of William Wordsworth, with this poem by Wordworth particularly in mind: My heart leaps up when I behold⁠A Rainbow in the sky:So was it when …

A Year of Inspirers (18) – St. Teresa of Avila

Teresa of Avila is remembered on 15th OCtober. I first came across St. Teresa of Avila through her book "The Interior Castle", and it revolutionised the way I thought. "The soul's beauty and capabilities are so immeasurably great" she writes.   For me, that said that I mattered, that what was inside was precious and valuable, …

A Year of Inspirers (17): “The earth, the seas, the light…” of Thomas Traherne

. He is the poet of joy and ecstatic lines: . . He is the poet of wonder: . . Thomas Traherne, who is commemorated on 10th October, wrote about "flow" long before the contemporary psychologist Csikszentmihalyi did... . . Thomas Traherne's poetry was only discovered in the 20th century, though he lived in the …