Today, aoother poem from Cameron Preece. This one explores lent from a cosmic perspective.
A Divine Embrace, by Cameron Preece
Imagine hands, worn by the world’s creation, Cracks in them, deep enough to envelope time itself, Fingerprints, recognizable only on the land on which you stand,
And those you greet—even yourself—marked With grooves older than time,
Imagine gaping wounds within wrists, Created by tyrants that look just like you, But despite excruciata, An arm—extended in embrace?
And what of the arms that flung stars into space, What is it to be enwrapped gently within them? Imagine the warmth felt Pressed against your chest, A love so amazing, so divine, That songs were sung by humankind —A gesture of thanks From a guilty people,
Today, I pulled a book formerly published by Proost by Cheryl Lawrie. Back then, she was working in prisons, and this book is a gem, full of lovely poetry and liturgy, often from meditation spaces and installations that Cheryl had been part of curating. I loved this book, and we used parts of it within our own community. I also remember Cheryl fondly for her kindness as she edited my own poetry collection, ‘Listing’.
This book contains some liturgies for lent, and I am going to recreate a couple of them here. They tell another story of the innovation around small group spiritual practice that was being recorded and spread through Proost. I remember fondly how simple rituals could carry such profound depth. Cheryl’s work is a perfect example of this.
Some nails are placed on a table along with a piece of wood and a hammer
Jesus hung on the cross in the company of sinners.
In the eyes of people who wanted him to die, he was a sinner. He spoke the truth about love, relationships, the church, the world, God… and people weren’t willing to hear it.
Sometimes we’re not either.
Take a nail and hold it in your hand. Think of a truth about God, pointed to by Jesus, which you find most difficult to hear and believe.
Is it that you are loved completely?
Is it that others are loved completely too?
What is it for you?
Take a nail and hammer it into the wood.
A length of white cloth that can be easily ripped
When the women went to the garden on the Sunday morning to anoint Jesus’ body, they discovered that he wasn’t in the tomb. He wasn’t where they thought he would be.
Resurrection rarely happens as we would expect.
New life isn’t the same old life recreated. It’s new life.
Rip some of the white fabric and take it with you.
Today we offer a quote from the above beautiful book by Glynn Maxwell, on the unnecessary nature of poetry.
Art, drawing, writing, poetry – are marks made in time by this gazing creature. Poetry has been unnecessary for almost all creation. Strictly speaking it still is. But it happens to be my savannah, this strictly speaking and it may well be yours, so let’s advance together, alert, curious, naked – or at least two of those – into our first landscape, admiring once again what we can’t be without.
One more poem from the first Proost Poetry collection, ‘Learning to Love’. This one is by Paul Grant, whom I have never met, but love his writing. This one does that wonderful thing of making the ordinary transcendent. Forgive me that it look backwards into the winter, but it is worth the regression.
Prodigal, by Paul Grant
And morning comes in an undertakers coat A blackbird's bright notes Tap December's blindness.
The harlequin tablecloth is a map of unrest: A fagged ashtray piles north And south's ruby sediment stains a glass, West is a drained bottle of port, East keeps vigil over black leather texts.
I am pressed flowers Between a skim of days Sick with the pottage of tried and tired happiness.
Outside A silver bloom Of glitter frost Is sharp and hard as holiness.
I climb the back road To find you in the dark.
Gravestones. Stillness. Snow underfoot. The depth of presence Revealed And sovereign silence stirs In a heart Hushed by beauty Born, to bring us home.
Today is the first day of Spring. It feels wide open with possibilities, despite all that we know or fear. Above is a picture of our kitchen table, full of sketches and designs for illustrations to to a book that Michaela is working on. I love the mess of it all – in the background is a ceramic bird sculpture she made that had such character that it needed a story…
I looked for a poem that somehow captured what this scene brings to me. This looking is in itself a pleasure—digging deep into the old Proost poetry collections, finding poems like encounters with old friends. It feels like such a mess of possibility and beauty, much like the table above.
In that context, I chose this one, from Talitha.
Lift up a stone, by Talitha Fraser
Lift up a stone and You will find me there I am in the hole of Your doughnut The spaces between The stars I am down behind the sofa Cushions with the lint and Loose change I can be seen in the raindrops Sliding down the window pane Smelled in Johnson's baby shampoo Heard in the drawer opening To put away your clothes In the soft folds of the wrinkles In the corner of your eye I am there.
And in the dark earth, a flower found itself again, and pushed out into the daylight at the mans feet.
He lay down and looked at this wonder. It held him in the spell of its delicate beauty.
He dreamed again of this new beginning. This new springtime.
Is it now father? Is now our time?
One of the most commonly downloaded resources offered by Proost in the past was Si Smith’s wonderful ’40’, which was made up of 40 deceptively simple and powerful images of Jesus in the desert. Later, I wrote a ‘script’ for using alongside these images, which then became a Proost book.
We had hoped to make this resource available again this lent, but it will now have to wait for next year. This post is a sneak preview.
It was this kind of connection and exchange that I valued most about Proost, and most wanted to revive as we began to think about a new version of Proost. Friendships formed around shared projects and the sense of finding people who are on similar paths.
’40’ will always be special to me. At the time, I was exploring an idea of wilderness spirituality in the Apophatic tradition – all those desert saints who sought emptyness to seek an encounter with the unknowable God. In this way, Jesus in ’40’ is a pilgrim too, wandering in search of connection, feeling this draw out into desert not through certainty but through an almost desperate longing for deeper, for more whole. Jesus in divine via humanity, not inspite of it.
Here is the last image in the series, along with the poetry that accompanied it in the book.
So, the journey continued—back into a world of men—
To all the homes and houses And the broken-down old shacks To the Priests and the soldiers To the slaves and the fat cats
To the athlete and the cripple To the beggar and the king To the broken and the dying And those who have no song to sing
To the place where children squabble And the old folk gossip in the square And the singing from the synagogue Calls the town for prayer
To all this living and this loving This fecundity of life…
The Proost revival project is taking place in a very different context to the Proost that was – you don’t need me to tell you this. We have explored some of these differences via our podcast, for example, this one with Dr Katie Cross. Proost #1 was an organisation at the edges of Church, gathering material from activists and people who had the gift of not fitting in. This edge is now much harder to map, particularly as we see a diaspora of people who have left Church- although as Katie points out, the spiritual quest is very much continuing.
There are many voices inside and outside calling for a new evolution of the structures, doctrines and theological contructs of faith. Here at Proost, we want to engage with this process through art. One such voice is John Philip Newell, whose latest book starts like this:
We are living in a time of immense transition as old systems of authority and belief are questioned. A new vision of reality is trying to be born. Earth and humanity need healing. The way we have lived on this planet is unsustainable. And the way our societies are plagued by racisim, injustice and violence is wrong. We need change. Religion as we have known it has failed to address the most urgent challenges of humanity, including the threatened plight of earth. These issues are not just ecological, and political, and economic. They are also spiritual.
Back in the 1980’s, as a young boy, I was told that AIDs was God’s way of punishing Gay people for their gayness. Even though I didn’t believe this to be true even then, Gay people were ‘other’ to me. They belonged to a different world that was ‘dirty’ somehow – or at very least alien and impossible for me to understand.
This was the truth given to me by good religious people. Whilst homophobia is still very much a part of our religious institutions (and elsewhere) things have changed. How did this happen? Wht shifts apparently fixed narrow views? How are people set free?
This might offer us some clues.
I offer this today as our lent meditation as the Proost we are building seeks to engage with our context through spirituality and art, and there is much to learn here about embodyment, about community and about how change which seems impossible takes generational intent.
Today, we feature another poem from the second Proost poetry collection published in 2018, called ‘Learning to Love’. This one is by Stephen Holmes, and I think goes deep into the heart of what Proost is about, that is, it is a Justice poem. Lent calls us to repentance from our participation in injustice. Let the words wash over you and transform you from within.
Envy, by Stephen Holmes
Don't envy me my faith. It is not The comfort you concieve. Nor An opiate, dulling pain. No, It is a blister caused By rubbing against Injustice, Inflamed anew Each day, raw and wet, And always, Always, Weeping.
“Also in this he shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazelnut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding, and thought: ‘What is this?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen apart in dust as it was so small. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasts, and ever shall last because God loves it.’ And so everything owes its existence to the love of God.”
Julian of Norwich’s Hazelnut
Julian of Norwich once wrote of a vision in which she saw the whole of creation contained in something as small as a hazelnut. It was fragile, seemingly insignificant, yet it endured—held together entirely by the love of God. This idea, that love sustains all things, is both comforting and challenging. Love is not merely a gentle, pleasant force; it is something deeper, something that transforms and endures.
For today’s Lenten reflection, I invite you to listen to a poem read aloud by Steve Page, Love is Not Nice. His words, delivered with clarity and depth, invite us to consider love in a different light—perhaps as something that moves beyond sentimentality into something truer, more difficult, and more profound.
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