Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ee cummings, estates ministry, little church, poetry, small church
I am extremely grateful for a friend who shared this poem by ee cummings with me. I hope it is OK to reproduce it here. It is something I shall be living out of for a while. It makes me ask questions; I am not sure I agree with it all; but is is profoundly important to those of us who are part of small churches and inhabit their joys and sorrows, and have inklings that they are close to the Gospel and the Kingdom and the heart of God; that they have much to teach the wider Church. If you don’t own books of ee cummings poetry, go and buy one if you can. It will help you be alive.
I am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
–i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness
around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains
i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
–i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing
winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)
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