9 Quotes by Malcolm Guite

Some things are too great to come at directly. Just as we may weave back and forth as we climb a hill, and appear to be going round in circles, yet all the while are coming closer to the summit, so in our religious and spiritual life things may seem circuitous; we may think we have come back to the same spot, but always, if we press on, it is a little higher, a little closer to the truth.

O place my hands with yours, help me divine The wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.

But the Advent hope – indeed, the Advent miracle – was that this unknowable, un-namable, utterly holy Lord chose out of his own free will and out of love for us to become known: to bear a name and meet us where we are.

Both pride and despair are forms of self-absorption and the Christian must try to steer between them, hard though it is.

Dante is here alluding to one of the great lost Christian stories, which we need to recover today: ‘The Harrowing of Hell’. We, who build so many hells on earth, need to know that there is no place so dark, no situation so seemingly hopeless, that cannot be opened to the light of Christ for rescue and redemption.

I have a God who knows what it is to weep and who weeps for me, weeps with me, understands to the depths and from the inside the rerum lachrymae, the tears of things.

Most of us are under pressure, external and internal, to do everything, be good at everything, be accountable to everyone for everything! It is not so. In the divine economy each of us has a particular grace, gift and devotion. Finding out what that is, and learning how to be guilt-free about not doing everything else, may be part of what our Lenten journey is for.

Advent falls in winter, at the end of the year, in the dark and cold, but its focus is on the coming of light and life, when the Ancient of Days becomes a young child and says, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ Perhaps only poetry can help us fathom the depths and inhabit the tensions of these paradoxes.

One virtue of keeping the seasons of the sacral year is that they can help us to redress an imbalance, either in our own spiritual life or in the culture of our church or denomination.