'Here hangs a man discarded' by Brian Wren

A Hymn by Brian Wren to the tune 'Kocher'

Here hangs a man discarded,
a scarecrow hoisted high,
a nonsense pointing nowhere
to all who hurry by.

Can such a clown of sorrows
still bring a useful word
when faith and hope seem phantoms
and every hope absurd?

Yet here is help and comfort
for lives by comfort bound,
when drums of dazzling progress
give strangely hollow sound:

Life, emptied of all meaning,
drained out in bleak distress,
can share in broken silence
our deepest emptiness;

And love that freely entered
the pit of life's despair,
can name our hidden darkness
and suffer with us there.

Christ, in our darkness risen,
help all who long for light
to hold the hand of promise,
till faith receives its sight.

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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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