Friends' Meeting House, by U A Fanthorpe

Lent, Day 18

(in Frenchay, Bristol)

When the doors of the house are shut,
Eyes lidded, mouth closed, nose and ears
Doing their best to idle, fingers allowed out
Only on parole; when the lovely holy distractions,
Safe scaffolding of much-loved formulae,
Have been rubbed away; then the plant
Begins to grow. It is hard to rear,
Rare herb of silence, through which the Word comes.
Three centuries of reticent, meticulous lives
Have naturalised it on this ground.

And the herb is the Vine, savage marauder,
That spreads and climbs unstoppably,
Filling the house, the people, with massing insistent shoots
That leaf through windows and doors, that rocket through chimneys,
Till flesh melts into walking forms of green,
Trained to the wildness of Vine, which exacts
Such difficult witness; whose work is done
In hopeless places, prisons, workhouses,
In countinghouses of respectable merchants,
In barracks, collieries, sweatshops, in hovels
Of driven and desperate men.

It begins here
In the ground of silence.

Totally love this. Rushing around trying to change the world without first grounding yourself in God will only lead to frustration; equally, if your connection with Him who hurts doesn't lead you into "hopeless places", then something is wrong. Just the phrase, "the wildness of Vine", would win me - He is indeed not tame, but wild - and wonderful.

Went in the rain with my eldest, after a grocery shop, to look for a Roman ruin I'd heard of, near Lichfield. And we found it - incredible to me that we live so near something like this, and I have NEVER even heard anyone mention it. Off the main street of a hamlet called Wall, are the remains of a village, Letocetum, from the 1st century, which grew up below an older fort, built beside Watling Street - the main road from here to London. Not a soul in sight the whole time we were there.

Left to itself, if our garden is anything to go by, this ivy would, savage marauder that it is, take over the whole place. May your kingdom come, blessed Vine!