The Prophet by George MacDonald

Speak, Prophet of the Lord! We may not start
To find thee with us in thine ancient dress,
Haggard and pale from some bleak wilderness,
Empty of all save God and thy loud heart,
Nor with like rugged message quick to dart
Into the hideous fiction mean and base;
But yet, O prophet man, we need not less
But more of earnest, though it is thy part
To deal in other words, if thou wouldst smite
The living Mammon, seated, not as then
In bestial quiescence grimly dight,
But robed as priest, and honoured of good men
Yet thrice as much an idol-god as when
He stared at his own feet from morn to night.

Note: This poem is in the public domain and can be found here. George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister. MacDonald was a pioneering fantasy writer and a mentor to fellow writer Lewis Carroll. Along with his fairy tales and works of fiction, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology.

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My Faith Today

I am the daughter of a heterosexual White Christian couple from Tennessee. I am the granddaughter of many generations of southern families. I am unclear if any of my family ever owned slaves, but I won’t rule it out. I was raised in the church, but in reflecting upon everything I learned as a child, it was not the church that taught me how to be a good person – it was my mother and my grandmothers.

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A Saint for Our Times (graphic art)

This is a picture I took from Wikimedia Commons of a statue of Julian of Norwich, an English anchoress from medieval times who is regarded as an important Christian mystic. Julian (1343-after 1416) wrote Revelations of Divine Love after seeing visions (or “shewings“) of the Passion of Christ. She was on her deathbed at the time of the visions, but she recovered and wrote about the visions sometime later.