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Showing posts from October 23, 2016

Faith and George Herbert

The George Herbert window in All Saints’, Bishop Burton, near Beverley in Yorkshire:  ‘L ord I have loved the habitation of thine house .’  An address given at Evensong on Sunday the 23 rd of October at St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of a series on ‘Heroes of the Faith’. [Poem: Superliminare] Thou, whom the former precepts have Sprinkled and taught, how to behave Thyself in church; approach, and taste The church’s mystical repast. Avoid, profaneness; come not here: Nothing but holy, pure, and clear, Or that which groaneth to be so, May at his peril further go. The people who work on the other side of the hedge of the car park of this church come to learn there is life after politics. Or we hope they do. The poet George Herbert lived a life that could be described as before and after politics. “Power seldom grows old at court,” he says in one of his Outlandish Proverbs, and he experienced the truth of that saying in his