Malcolm Guite > 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

“In vain we search the heavens high above, The God of love is kneeling at our feet. Though we betray him, though it is the night, He meets us here and loves us into light.”
― Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons: 70 Sonnets for the Christian Year: Seventy sonnets for Christian year

“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

“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

“O place my hands with yours, help me divine The wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.”
― Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons: 70 Sonnets for the Christian Year: Seventy sonnets for Christian year

“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

“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

“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

“Here Coleridge advances the beautiful suggestive idea that the poetic imagination can hold open for us a shape or a space we have yet to grow into. The great works of art and literature are, as it were, making room for our future insights, giving us the shapes, the stories, the images into which the undeveloped antennae of our inner life can grow.”
― Malcolm Guite, Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Our God beyond, beside us, and within.”
― Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons: 70 Sonnets for the Christian Year: Seventy sonnets for Christian year

“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

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

“The Lord of life and love calls us out of nothingness into being, calls us out of darkness into light, and calls us, personally, to turn and begin our lives anew in him.”
― Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness

“Ring out”
― Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

“Deep within the clay”
― 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

“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

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