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Good morning. There was a moment in a service recently when the congregation broke into spontaneous applause - though not in response to anything I had said or done! We were preparing to baptise little Jessica and her seven year old sister brought along something which delighted us - a poem she had written to welcome the new baby’s arrival. I don’t know why I should have been surprised that she expressed her feelings in poetic form. It’s how people across the generations have celebrated and lamented the significant occasions in their lives and it’s why we have a Poet Laureate who is tasked with marking such events in the life of the nation.

The Christian church has a long tradition of priest-poets. Gerard Manley Hopkins was one such. He trained in the Jesuit seminary outside St Asaph in North Wales.  His poem, Pied Beauty, celebrates the diversity of God’s creation and the beauty of supposed imperfection: 

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.  

Wordsworth famously said that poetry is ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. So today, ‘National Poetry Day’, I hope that we can all find some of that tranquillity, and time to recall those moments that have moved us. 

God of power and love, by whose Word creation was called into being, help us to hear and share the words of life, that the earth may resound to your praise and glory. Amen