malcolm guite
just taking him in a little here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TVL0V_mkxk]:
notes/quotes from 2024 8 min video clip – Malcolm Guite’s Lessons From a Life In Ministry:
(ridley alumni’s thoughts on a life in ministry) You should never think you’re the only person working in the vineyard. You should never think it all goes down to you.. never be a one man show.. the more you try to hold everything yourself.. the more unnecessarily exhausted you become
1 min – (conduction) ministry with people in devastating state.. if you keep all people’s energies.. you’ll drown.. i let things pass thru me down to god.. he is my grounding.. it’s about being a conduit rather than an originator.. letting him do the heavy lifting..
3 min – (books, poetry and ministry) i’m an academic and i love reading.. so not hard to schedule it in .. but started getting squeezed out.. bishop gave me a sabbatical.. i thought All I wanted to do was read poetry, the poetry had gotten squeezed out of my life from so much ministry and pastoral care.. so i soaked myself in all of poetry.. i found it actually refueled my faith.. thru my imagination and soaking myself in poetry again..
4 min – (staying creative in a big organisation) genius of church is that it exists in little places.. i like working small.. i’m very much a small is beautiful sort of person..
small is {ginormous} beautiful
5 min – When I became a university chaplain I had a lot more freedom and I enjoyed that freedom to invent and make and do and discern where the spirit was already moving. when i was a chaplain at polytechnic.. i was a chaplain without a chapel.. I could do sort of pop-up eucharists. i enjoyed a lot of freedom
6 min – (essential items for ministry) My whole spirituality is deeply centered in the eucharist.. I love that God doesn’t stay high and mighty, he came down, and Jesus comes even further down.. in communion.. jesus was saying at last supper: ‘This is all of me for all of you.’ I love the practicality, physicality and particularity of communion. the shared meal.. an open door, you just have to be available and present.. so dependent on not having office hours.. my great gift/grace was the power to be glad to be interrupted.. and be absolutely at disposal of that person.. that’s the way i think ministry is
8 min – (staying inspired) – one of my heroes/models of the faith is george herbert.. the poet/priest of the 17th cent.. the opening 4 words of his best poem.. which is called love ‘love bade me welcome’.. that goes right to the heart of my spirituality.. christ in god bidding me welcome.. and me now to be made an open door .. bidding other people welcome..
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[https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Word-Advent-Christmas-Epiphany/dp/1848258003]:
Waiting on the Word: A poem a day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany Paperback – August 31, 2015
Advent is a season of waiting and anticipation in which the waiting itself is strangely rich and fulfilling. Poetry can help us fathom the depths of Advent’s many paradoxes: dark and light, emptiness and fulfilment, ancient and ever new. For every day from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day and beyond, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. In the spirit of the season, he blends the familiar and the new, ranging from from spiritual classics such as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert and Christina Rossetti, to contemporary voices Luci Shaw and Scott Cairns. His own acclaimed sequence of sonnets for the great Advent antiphons are also included.
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“The Moons” was also included in Guite’s Advent anthology, Waiting on the Word.
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be you. 