James Woodward

Last week I travelled to the Midlands for meetings in Birmingham. Walking through the centre later in the day I appreciated the lights and colour and smell of the German market. It was great to see families browsing, eating, drinking and laughing. It was also very good to hear German stallholders enjoying theirBrummie customers.  Three preachers at the bottom of the street braved the cold to proclaim: We are here because of the birthday of Jesus Christ. Don’t forget the message…

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  We are midway through the season running up to Christmas, which is called Advent. One of its key themes is the importance for us to see the possibilities that waiting might bring or us. I overheard a child in Tesco this week say to her brother, “I can’t wait for Christmas”. In her eyes, I glimpsed how children are caught up in the excitement of waiting. The experience of waiting is a common one and it shapes the rhythm…

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O come, O come, thou calling child: the creatures, those both tame and wild, the weak and pow’rful, coax along and change their trembling into song. Rejoice! Rejoice! The vuln’rable shall make us all insep’rable     Jim Cotter Expectant : Verses for Advent

  O Come, O come, thou shaft of fire, to lead us on through dark and mire; through desert bare thou moving cloud protect and guide, fulfil what’s vowed. Rejoice! rejoice! Our God afresh the covenant shall soon enflesh   Expectant : Words for Advent Jim Cotter

  where the moon lives   From the tawny light from the rainy nights from the imagination finding itself and more than itself alone and more than alone at the bottom of the well where the moon lives, can you pull me   into December?   The black moon turns away, its work done. A tenderness, unspoken autumn. We are faithful only to the imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth. What holds you to what you…

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  water Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst.   In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty….

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sweet day SWEET day, so cool, so calm, so bright! The bridal of the earth and sky— The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie, My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die. Only a…

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  In our postmodern culture self-fulfilment has become a matter of individually self-chosen goals. Freedom – in the sense of the absolute autonomy of the individual – has become the single, overarching ideal to which all other goals are subordinated. I must be free to be whoever I choose to be and to pursue whatever good I define for myself. There must be no normative goals, models or ideals for which I should aim. The point is not simply that…

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  patience   An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.   Denise Levertov, The Breathing  

climb the stair   Turn from that road’s beguiling ease; return to your hunger’s turret. Enter, climb the stair chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent and the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone to show you how your longing waits alone. What alchemy shines from under that shut door, spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart?     Enter the turret of your love, and lie…

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  seeds You come to fetch me from my work to-night When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see If I can leave off burying the white Soft petals fallen from the apple tree. (Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite, Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;) And go along with you ere you lose sight Of what you came for and become like me, Slave to a springtime passion for the earth. How Love burns through…

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  coins When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse   to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox:   when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,   I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?   And therefore I look upon everything as…

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