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 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. …

A Year of Inspirers (13) – “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet”, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins was so sensitive to the beauty of nature, he prized the “wildness” and “wilderness” of life on our earth: “What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” (From ‘Inversnaid' https://www.bartleby.com/122/33.html) On …

A Year of Inspirers (4) – William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth inspired me with words about beauty and  transcendence... It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free; The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea: Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with …

Spiritual Reflection: What is Spirituality?

  There is ethics, there is philosophy, there is psychology, there is religion...and then there is spirituality! What is spirituality, then? To start with, I wouldn’t want to be too specific about spirituality.  I think that would be a mistake. Perhaps one way of thinking about spirituality is as a series of overlapping circles, but …