Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 24 – Hope God does not give us strange flowers every year,  When the spring winds blow o’er the pleasant places  The same dear things lift up the same fair faces: The violet is here. It all comes back: the odour, grace and hue: Each sweet relation of its life repeated… Continue reading Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 24 – Hope

Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 23 – Spiritual Fellowship  Love can never give an adequate account of itself;  it is invariably a dealing with infinite values, and when we come to that we come to God.   That is what we are doing now where true love is;  can death do anything to alter it?   No, indeed, it can but shatter… Continue reading Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 23 – Spiritual Fellowship 

Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 22 – Spiritual Fellowship Granted that time will heal most wounds, it still remains true that the deeper the nature the more there is to heal, and that there is something holy in the sorrow of wounded love. …..I do wish with all my heart that every mourner in the world… Continue reading Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 22 – Spiritual Fellowship

Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 21 – The Dead For the dead we have always with us, being enshrined in our hearts;  so that when we say the places that once knew them know them no more, we except one place that is consecrated for ever to their blessed remembrance,  (Follen) Those who are gone you have.   Those… Continue reading Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 21 – The Dead

Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 20 – The Dead Mourn not for her as gathered to the Past. Her past has power upon the coming years,  And she herself, O mourner, will outlast  Her dust, this marble, and all human tears. (Tennyson) I hate the black negation of the bier,  And wish the dead, as happier… Continue reading Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 20 – The Dead

Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 19 – Love and Death To the faithful, death is only the last best sacrament.   However imperfectly, with whatever grievous failures, they have held their lives, they have not held them as their own; and neither terror nor dismay is in their hearts when the call comes to relinquish them.   They know that… Continue reading Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 19 – Love and Death

Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 18 – Dying Bring none of these; but let me be,  While all around in silence lies,  Moved to the window near, and see  Once more, before my dying eyes, Bathed in the sacred dews of morn  The wide aerial landscape spread The world which was ere I was born,  The… Continue reading Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 18 – Dying