Category Archives: Prayer

The last day

Potatoes at the roundabout,
Herons by the canal,
Pointing the way
On the last day.
We make our way to Tyne Cot,
Last and biggest,
An endless wall of names
Row upon row of stones,
The dead held here forever.
This fought over land
That emerged from mud
Now a perpetual piece of Empire:
A never to be forgotten field.

25.10.2017 Tyne Cot

Grace

For everything there is seasoning ;
There’s a time to eat and a time to fast;
A time to fill your plate and a time to empty it;
A time for the first supper and a time for the last.

25.10.2017, Poperinge

At the name

We find them every time:
Those with names the same
As ours, the same age
As a brother or fellow student.

If this was your local regiment
Would you have volunteered?

“Not me I’m a coward.”
You’re no coward if you understand
That peace is a better way than war,
And you live as if that matters most.

24.10.2017 Fricourt

Air

A white butterfly flew into the crater,
Vast expanse of air lined with grass,
Held up by molecules, supported by atoms,
Summonsed by the mist, called to by birds.

24.10.2017 Lochnagar crater

The ridge 

When you stand at the top of Thiepval ridge,
And see the way they came, weighed down,
And look across the landscape still bearing signs,
One hundred years later you are still speechless.

JAL 24.10.2017 Thiepval

The son

The sun shone on Langermaark today
Which I don’t remember it doing before.
The acorns crunched under our feet,
As the canopy of heroes oaks wept for their sons.
Here they lie; students, artists,
others too numerous to imagine,
With three crosses to recall
the promise made by the Son:
‘Today you will be with me in paradise’.

JAL 23.10.2017

A blessing a Hospital Farm cemetery 

The blessing of the Creator, watching like the deer;
The blessing of the Son, running like the Hare;
The blessing of the Holy Spirit, hovering like the buzzard;
Bless those who tread this holy ground
And those waiting for the final trumpet sound.

JAL 23.10.2017

He descended into hell

Down, down, down
Into the dark earth,
Through the white limestone,
Along the barely lit tunnel,
Past the latrines,
The command post,
The altar and the well,
To eight days of dripping darkness
Of boards for beds and meals from cans,
Of icy water for washing and damp boots,
Before standing ready at the steps
In the cold light of predawn,
When your name’s called and the signal given,
The stone is moved
And like the tomb quitting gardener,
you emerge as a newborn lamb,
To the barrage and the bomb:
A shell bursts overhead
And it’s ‘killed in action’ on the telegram,
And ‘greater love has no one than this’
On the neatly cut stone.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

JAL 22.10.2017
Wellington Quarry, Arras, 1917.

Bridging another Gap

There are lots of gaps along the Wall. Here are some more prayers to fill the gaps.

Prayer in four directions 
I look to the east, from where the sun rises; as the day begins prepare me, body, mind and spirit, for the adventures of today.
I look to the south, as the sun climbs to miday, may my body, mind and spirit be focused on following Christ’s way today.
I look to the north, as the sun passes the zenith and begins to fall, may my body, mind and spirit not fall or fail today.
I look to the west, where the sun sets in a blaze of glory, giving thanks for the day, for the working together of my body, mind and spirit,
Glory to you, God of all directions.

Beside still water
Hush, hush, hush, be still
And know that I am God.
Purple heather, purple fireweed,
Purple thistles , purple knapweed,
Ripening raspberries:
Purple was the Emperor’s colour.
Here, now it is nature’s glory
And homage to the Living God.

Remnant of a pilgrim song
We will walk, we will walk,
Every step that we take,
Every prayer that we make,
We will go on our way with God.

Bridging the Gap

A prayer on a mountain

Glory to you, mountain raiser:
You shaped Creation with your hands
And filled it with your breath.
Glory to you, mountain Walker,
You honoured Humanity with your life,
And breathed the same air.
Glory to you, mountain mover:
You flow through the gaps
A fill us with holiness.
Glory to you Holy Three in One:
For every stone, every step, every breath.

On Hadrian’s Wall,  13.08.2017

Changing the world at Passchendaele

As together we remember the 100th Anniversary of the one of the bloodiest muddiest battles of WW1 I would like to share some glimpses of the ripples that spread out from Passchendaele and that we can still appreciate today. This way of using personal memoir to inform mass mourning and remembering has become something of a mark of our commemoration of the 100th anniversary of what, in the Register of Silcoates School, is interestingly referred to as The Great European War.

A father and a son
Abraham takes Isaac up a mountain and prepares to slaughter him. Wilfred Owen uses the same image in on of his war poems ‘The Old Man and the Young‘. There must have been many fathers and sons died in WW1, and I know one pair.
Harry and Ronald Moorhouse, father and son, both formerly of Silcoates School, died on the same day, at the Battle of Passchendaele: it is said less than thirty minutes separated their dying. They were professional soldiers. Harry had first served in South Africa, and was a contemporary of John Yonge the war-time Headmaster of Silcoates. The story goes that on 9th October 1917, Ronald was brought in wounded. Harry lept up to find medical help for his son and was killed in the process. Even though this story is recorded their names were never reunited with their bodies: they are listed with thousands of others on the walls that surrounded Tyne Cot Cemetery. We visit them every year with our students.

Two women
Nellie Spindler was killed on 21st August 1917. She was a Staff Nurse from Wakefield, serving with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, and is one of only a very few British nurses who were killed in action on the Western Front to be buried with full military honours. Brought up a Roman Catholic, she was the daughter of a police sargeant in Wakefield. She trained as a nurse in Leeds and eventually found her way to the Western Front under the command of a Matron from Batley. She was killed, aged 26, when a shell fell on the tent in which she was sleeping and is burried in Lijssenthoek Military Cenemtery. We visit her every year too.
Constance Coltman is a different matter. She was a pacifist. On the 17th September 1917, at the height of the Battle of Passchendaele, she was ordained to the Christian Ministry in the Congregational Union of England and Wales by four other pacifist ministers, one of the first women to be ordained in Britain. Many men had gone to war, and quite a few women, and that had changed Britian quite a bit. Women did war work, and some campaigned for peace: Constance was one of them. We will remember her ordination in September this year.
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The story of war is always the story of the lives of ordinary people, both women and men. Wars also often mark a change, geographical maybe but also social. Many things change with war, some of which are forgotten and some remembered a long time later. We are still learning lessons from WW1. ‘Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it’: best we keep learning then.

In our coming and our going
The peace of God

30.07.2017, being the 100th Anniversary of GS Golding, remembered at Thiepval.

Twomplet

O God you are my interpreter,
In you I put my trust,
For those challenging times
When face to face or virtually present to each other
We need One to bridge the gap:
We need One with intercultural experience to shepherd a diverse flock.
In this scary landscape where misunderstanding can have life changing consequences,
we need your Spirit of openness in us:
May we not assume evil.
The terrain is yours: websites, social media platforms and a host of other global connections and undulations.

May our praise and prayers twitter on and on and on.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

#twomplet is an on line version of Evening Prayer in German shared through Twitter, that I enjoy with my friend @janestranz who translates it for me

Prayer for a dying friend

The tide is going out,
The sand is smooth,
The rock pools isolated.
Standing on the shore,
The horizon joins the sky
At the edge of the world.
How often have we stood like this
And hoped to stand here again.
But the waters are moving faster now,
Tugging, pulling, more insistent,
Determined even, leaving:
Is there still time to visit the rock pools?
The treasures they contain,
Reminders of others days,
And memories to retain,
Until the next tide.
Our fingers touch, our minds too:
Can we let go yet?

God of the tide and the shore,
With your Spirit in us,
May the letting go and the loss
Be possible this side of your horizon

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Still bearing the wounds of the cross

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
How long will ours last?
We want grief over and done with,
Our injuries healed and pain taken away.

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
In this stillness, wait with us,
As the women waited at the cross.

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
As we recognise in each other our shared wounds,
Help us to bear them together, holding fast to the light.

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
That were so life changing for us all,
Be with those who bear unfathomable changes, give them life.

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
May we your cross-wise ones, following in your way,
live your wounded life together in love, and may your kindom come
On earth as in heaven.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

A prayer for Ascension