Making Connections podcast

The poems posted in the past week featured in the recent service led by the Urban Unitarians at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel. Our first podcast features extracts from the service, including a short guided meditation. Just click on the player below to listen. Posted by Kate.

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From "Cornwall In Adolescence"

In quest of mystical experience,

I knelt in darkness St. Enedoch,

I visit our local Holy Well,

Whereto the native Cornish still resort,

For cures for whooping cough, and drop bent pins,

Into its peaty water... Not a sign,

No mystical experience was vouchsafed:

The maidenhair just trembled in the wind,

And everything looked as it always looked...

But somewhere, somewhere underneath the dunes,

Somewhere among the cairns or in the caves,

The Celtic saints would come to me, the ledge

Of time we walk on, like a thin cliff-path,

High in the mist, would show the precipice.

By John Betjeman- Posted by Scott

Mother Teresa's Anyway Prayer

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may cheat you.
Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight.
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough.
Give your best anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

-Mary Oliver

Posted by Eleanor