The Word in the Wilderness Quotes

“a mature and balanced faith is not one that has refused the agony and the wrestling but one that has been through them and grown from the experience.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Receive this cross of ash upon your brow
Brought from the burning of Palm Sunday's cross;
The forests of the world are burning now
And you make late repentance for the loss.
But all the trees of God would clap their hands,
The very stones themselves would shout and sing,
If you could covenant to love these lands
And recognize in Christ their lord and king.
He sees the slow destruction of those trees,
He weeps to see the ancient places burn,
And still you make what purchases you please
And still to dust and ashes you return.
But Hope could rise from ashes even now
Beginning with this sign upon your brow.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“And every common bush afire with God;  But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,  (Aurora Leigh, lines 61−3)”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Some things are too great to come at directly. Just as we may weave back and forth as we climb a hill, and appear to be going round in circles, yet all the while are coming closer to the summit, so in our religious and spiritual life things may seem circuitous; we may think we have come back to the same spot, but always, if we press on, it is a little higher, a little closer to the truth.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Both pride and despair are forms of self-absorption and the Christian must try to steer between them, hard though it is.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“I have a God who knows what it is to weep and who weeps for me, weeps with me, understands to the depths and from the inside the rerum lachrymae, the tears of things.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Dante is here alluding to one of the great lost Christian stories, which we need to recover today: ‘The Harrowing of Hell’. We, who build so many hells on earth, need to know that there is no place so dark, no situation so seemingly hopeless, that cannot be opened to the light of Christ for rescue and redemption.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Most of us are under pressure, external and internal, to do everything, be good at everything, be accountable to everyone for everything! It is not so. In the divine economy each of us has a particular grace, gift and devotion. Finding out what that is, and learning how to be guilt-free about not doing everything else, may be part of what our Lenten journey is for.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“it is good to fold poetry into our prayer life.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“a world in which no one is credited with a soul, everyone is analysed in terms of complexes and chemicals and valued only as a potential consumer. It is a world where no meaning or value is given us or lasts for ever, where we choose not between eternal destinies but between lifestyle options, where we compensate for our meaninglessness and poor self-esteem with sex and shopping; but we still despair when death comes.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“So here’s the deal and this is what you get: The penthouse suite with world-commanding views, The banker’s bonus and the private jet, Control and ownership of all the news, An ‘in’ to that exclusive one per cent, Who know the score, who really run the show, With interest on every penny lent  And sweeteners for cronies in the know. A straight arrangement between me and you, No hell below or heaven high above, You just admit it, and give me my due, And wake up from this foolish dream of love … But Jesus laughed, ‘You are not what you seem. Love is the waking life, you are the dream.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Again and again I find Dante’s poem gives me glimpses both of places I have been and of places I may well yet find myself; in doing so it gives me a map, and with the map a way forward.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“I have often noticed how interesting footpaths and bridleways start just beyond the brambles at the end of tarmacked roads marked ‘dead end’. And it seems to me that this is very often where prayer starts too.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Love’s as hard as nails,      Love is nails:   Blunt, thick, hammered through   The medial nerves of One   Who, having made us, knew   The thing He had done,   Seeing (with all that is)   Our cross, and His.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“The great statesman and Dante enthusiast, W. E. Gladstone, said: ‘The reading of Dante is not merely a pleasure, a tour de force, or a lesson; it is a vigorous discipline for the heart, the intellect, the whole man.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“But at the same time he is God, and his action in defeating the devil in resisting the temptation, casting back the tempter, and creating and holding a space in which right action is possible, is done not just privately on his own behalf but with and for all of us. In the old Prayer Book litany there is a petition that says, ‘By thy fasting and temptation, good Lord deliver us.’ If Jesus were simply set before me as an example of heroic human achievement I would despair. His very success in resisting temptation would just make me feel worse about my failure. But he is not only my exemplar, he is my saviour; he is the one who takes my place and stands in for me, and in the mystery of redemption he acts for me and makes up, in his resistance to evil, what is lacking in mine. I emphasize”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“And for most of human history most human beings experiencing compassion would have had the chance to do something immediate and particular about it because any suffering they witnessed would be local to them; they could at least begin to engage in the great ‘works of mercy’ of which Jesus speaks in Matthew, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick. But because of instant news exchange, our generation has the daily experience of exposure to suffering on a large scale that is at once vivid and distant. We see the hungry, the naked and the ill every evening on our TV screens but we cannot immediately or directly contact the person whose tears we are seeing, whose tears may have provoked our own. What to do? Of course we can support the relevant NGOs, we can contribute to the DEC appeal, and we know, intellectually, that we are making a difference, however small. But still we are haunted by that particular face, the one whose actual need we saw, whose desperate need we couldn’t meet. The danger then is that the natural link between compassion and action is severed;”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Muir has a very strong sense of the rootedness and particularity of this world as the only place where our faith can become substantiated and real.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Offered a horse by the king to help him on his travels, he gave it to the first beggar he met.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“the one Word shines through and undergirds the myriad things we encounter”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“We have been travelling together in this book through 48 days together, but if George Herbert is right, it has only been one day! From now on there is just the single, eternal day of resurrection, and by its light we can look back over our long pilgrimage and see the glory of this day, hidden once but shining now, in all we have been through.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“the familiar friend or lover who offers you a hand as you rise in the morning: Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“the familiar friend or lover who offers you a hand as you rise in the morning: Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Yet in that prising loose and letting be He has unfastened you and set you free.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“not high and inaccessible as Isaiah found it when he saw the Lord mighty and lifted up, but close, humbled below us, kneeling at our feet to wash us, or broken and placed into our hands to feed us.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Amazingly and wonderfully, he who took our human nature shares with us his divine nature”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“In vain we search the heavens high above, The God of love is kneeling at our feet.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“The alabaster jar of precious ointment Is broken open for the world’s true lover.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“today he came in righteous anger to clear away the blasphemous barriers that human power-games try to throw up between God and the world he loves.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Can I invite Jesus in to all of that? And if I do, what will happen?”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness