The poetry of faith: the treasure is everywhere

Fr Philip Carter offers a ministry of spirituality, with a series of meditations on some questions that we may ponder as we consider our life in God.

You will find here his reflections and questions for meditation, images, music and poetry to enrich your life’s journey.

“We live the given life, not the planned”.

Wendell Berry

We need to improve the acoustics. And notice what is going on. Attend to feelings. Face the circumstances of ordinary life. Listen to the language of God in the fabric of our everyday responses and reactions. “There is no secret. The treasure is everywhere. It is offered to us at every moment and in every place” (Jean Pierre de Caussade)

“You alone have the choice
among earth’s countless creatures
to live or die, but while
you live you are part of earth.
Accept. Affirm. Rejoice.”

Gwen Harwood

Image: FaithXLVII, Clematis flammula

“My prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving”.

e e cummings

Reaching out, searching for the light, rising for air. Over this fertile chaos the Spirit hovers and draws the community of creation. Into life. Our praying is not something alien to us; it is the gravitational pull towards our true home….

“Transcendence as a hand reached out…as a deeply and joyously experienced need

to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not…

this is the only real authentic existence.”

Vaclav Havel

Images: Faith XLVII, from the series Medicinal Flowers of Lebanon

Certainly prayer, like poetry, thrives because of its commitment to truth and aliveness. In a sense prayer and poetry need no other justification. It simply has to be real. And we need to be engaged. What the poet W. B. Yeats saw about poetry is true about prayer:

“Blood, imagination and intellect running together”.

Image: Faith XLVII, Asphodelus Microcarpus

The images in this post are from a series of wall art works by South African artist Faith XLVII (liberty Du) who traveled to Beirut to paint curative flowers across the ruins of the city after the port explosion in 2020. Rosehips, horned poppies, chicory, African carline thistle—all these botanicals are used in remedies for common ailments.

Faith’s new series, ‘Medicinal Flowers of Lebanon’ leads us along brittle sites of Beirut, tracing past and present scars etched into the city. Each flower urges us in a sense, towards healing as they grow out of the concrete.

In quest of the divine, she expresses a longing for a deeper connection to the wisdoms of the natural world.

Source: Medicinal Flow ers of Lebanon, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021

Kindle the flint, the tinder
Liven the hearth the stone
Shelter the dying lantern light
Gladden the shadowed home
Into this wilderness of shadows
Come, Light original

Answer our famine yearning
Nourish our blighted fields
Raise all our fallen storehouses
Leaven the bitter yield
Into this emptiness, this hunger
Come, Bread all bountiful.

Out of the blowing starlessness
Over the frozen sea
Into our barren midnight
Up from the fruitless trees
O come

Loosen the cloaks of journeymen
Mend all the broken roads
Wake us from fitful forest sleep
Lighten the lonely load
Into this pilgrimage, this journey
Come, Home perpetual.

For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.

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