Varieties of Irreligious Experience

'The Coming' by R.S. Thomas

And God held in his hand A small globe. Look, he said. The son looked. Far off, As through water, he saw A scorched land of fierce Colour. The light burned There; crusted buildings Cast their shadows: a bright Serpent, a river Uncoiled itself, radiant With slime. On a bare Hill a bare tree saddened The sky. Many people Held out their thin arms To it, as though waiting For a vanished April To return to its crossed Boughs. The son watched Them. Let me go there, he said.

'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.

'Golgotha' by John Heath-Stubbs

In the middle of the world, in the centre Of the polluted heart of man, a midden; A stake stemmed in the rubbish From lipless jaws, Adam’s skull Gasped up through the garbage: ‘I lie in the discarded dross of history, Ground down again to the red dust, The obliterated image. Create me.’ From lips cracked with thirst, the voice That sounded once over the billows of chaos When the royal banners advanced, replied through the smother of dark: ‘All is accomplished, all is made new, and look- All things, once more, are good.’ Then, with a loud cry, exhaled His spirit.

Fides Quaerens Albus

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