Waiting on the Word Quotes

“Advent falls in winter, at the end of the year, in the dark and cold, but its focus is on the coming of light and life, when the Ancient of Days becomes a young child and says, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ Perhaps only poetry can help us fathom the depths and inhabit the tensions of these paradoxes.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“One virtue of keeping the seasons of the sacral year is that they can help us to redress an imbalance, either in our own spiritual life or in the culture of our church or denomination.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right,  Ring in the common love of good.  Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old,  Ring in the thousand years of peace.  Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land,  Ring in the Christ that is to be. The”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“Refugee Malcolm Guite  We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,  Or cosy in a crib beside the font,  But he is with a million displaced people  On the long road of weariness and want.  For even as we sing our final carol  His family is up and on that road,  Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,  Glancing behind and shouldering their load.  Whilst”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“But the Advent hope – indeed, the Advent miracle – was that this unknowable, un-namable, utterly holy Lord chose out of his own free will and out of love for us to become known: to bear a name and meet us where we are.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“The knights in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur say to one another, ‘Let us take the adventure that God sends us,’ recognizing that the God in whom we live and move and have our being may come and meet us when and where he pleases, and any door we open may be the door to the ‘chapel perilous’.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“put that theory into practice. I believe that by ‘waiting on the Word’, in every sense of that phrase, waiting on the true Logos, the meaning behind all meanings, and attending closely to the way that meaning is imaginatively bodied forth in poetry, we can begin to unfold a little more of the mystery of our faith, to unpack and open out the contents of those technical words, Incarnation and Atonement. It is my conviction that to do theology well we must bring the poets to the table along with the theologians, and listen carefully to what they say.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“Refugee Malcolm Guite We think of him as safe beneath the steeple, Or cosy in a crib beside the font, But he is with a million displaced people On the long road of weariness and want. For even as we sing our final carol His family is up and on that road, Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel, Glancing behind and shouldering their load. Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled, The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power, And death squads spread their curse across the world. But every Herod dies, and comes alone To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“prophecy as unveiling truth and also speaking to our times, speaking truth to power”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“An archangel from the heights of the heavenly hierarchy kneels courteously and graciously before a young girl from Nazareth; even in the angel's gesture we see the true depth of the kenosis, the self-emptying humility with which heaven courteously comes to reconcile earth.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“Courtesy Hilaire Belloc  Of Courtesy, it is much less  Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,  Yet in my Walks it seems to me  That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.  On”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“What we learn on the journey of this poem is that the devotion of the poor may transfigure cracked and broken, even poor and shoddy material more effectively than the finesse and fine taste of the sceptical rich.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“However much our bios, ‘life of the flesh’, may be headed quietly towards a retirement at Sunset View, this antiphon reminds us that in our true zoe, ‘spiritual life’, we are all ‘dawn-treaders’.”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“O Rex Gentium  O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,  lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:  veni, et salva hominem,  quem de limo formasti.  O King of the nations, and their desire,  the cornerstone making both one:  Come and save the human race,  which you fashioned from clay. O”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“Our little systems have their day;  They have their day and cease to be:  They are but broken lights of thee,  And thou, O Lord, art more than they.  We have but faith: we cannot know;  For knowledge is of things we see  And yet we trust it comes from thee,  A beam in darkness: let it grow. Today’s”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany