'A Church' by R.S. Thomas

Often I try
To analyze the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

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Varieties of Irreligious Experience

https://newhumanist.org.uk/2657/varieties-of-irreligious-experience

'The Place of Prayer' by May Crowther

This is the place of prayer Here, where the inward-pointing nails converge. The ever-narrowing gate when the world of time and space yields up its measured form. Here in the needle's eye Dark upon dark. The aching, echoing void of the hollowed heart suspended at the point of change. Unknowing [and that is the agony] bearing the unknown to the mystery at the place of prayer.

H. L. Mencken on the Meaning of Life

Dear Durant You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle. The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas,

Fides Quaerens Albus

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