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.
“To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star”.
W H Auden
“Mysteries must
Be our way of life. Without them we might
Stop trying to learn and hoping to succeed
In the work we half-choose and giving the
love we need.”
Elizabeth Jennings
Image: Marian Hall, Desert landscape, Xenotopia II
We are inescapably involved in mystery, inexhaustible truth, where we allow the ordinary to uncover its hidden energy and glory. It is best appreciated and described through the allusive medium of the imagination. We don’t want more information: we want wonder.
“God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of wonder….”
Dag Hammarskjold
Images: Marian Hall, Desert landscapes from the Xenotopia series
“the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything
rather than void”
Denise Levertov
With the Wise Men in W. H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, we can follow the star to the nativity crib, and in the encounter with the humanity of Jesus, discover and value the gift of our own humanity.
“To discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this star”.
W. H. Auden
Image: Zarina, Beyond the stars
Zarina, an artist whose elegant works on paper ruminated on her elusive relationship to the concept of home
“Always, wherever, whatever, however,
When I am able to resist
For once the constant pressure of failure to exist,
Let me remember
That truly to be man is to be man aware of Thee
And unafraid to be. So help me God”.
David Gascoyne
Image: Marian Hall, Be more daisy
One of the great mysteries of human life is freedom. Love, “the Great Asker”, risks all so that we might find the courage to resist “the constant pressure of failure to exist”. However strong the downward pull away from being and life seems there is a voice, deep within us, that calls us home to ourselves, to know who we are and whose we are.
Prayer is acknowledging that there is in every one of us a built-in capacity for the infinite.
Prayer is “God’s breath in man returning to its birth”.
George Herbert
The images in this post are mostly from the artist Marian Hall who works predominantly in fabric, creating images with printed and embroidered fabric. She says of her work
My work is primarily inspired by nature. This can be unfamiliar landscapes or some element of nature that I haven’t really noticed before. I enjoy exploring how the new subject can inform an artwork and the possibilities for creating it. Often my work has a feeling of spaciousness.
Her blog post describes how she developed her award winning piece Be more daisy.
Kindle the light
Bifrost Arts
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.
