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Preface

Cathedrals seem to be among the scarce places where church congregations are growing, perhaps because they offer place and worship for people to encounter God without being corralled into ‘parish strategies’, or dragooned into impersonating submarines or orang-utans in ‘action songs’.

Cathedrals magnetise visitors without demanding immediate membership, and inherent commitment. They introduce the Christian past into the secular present, and patiently celebrate the presence of God in a society where s/he is felt often to be as redundant as a coal miner, or as optional as a poet.

Cathedrals intrigue, so people respond. They are generous in many ways, including their encouragement of discerning God through the arts. They take risks, often using the arts experimentally in creative theology, venturing into the radical and the prophetic.

They provide spiritual hospitality to the jaded; a place with the risen Christ to re-imagine the familiar, and dare fresh potential. They share space to renew and redeem lives, in the companionship of the Holy Spirit. They offer sanctuary.

Most of these poems reflect aspects of the life and faith of one cathedral. They were drafted, after a life in journalism, in a new role as the first Poet in Residence of Carlisle Cathedral. Like journalism, they grew from notes, conversations, observations, reflections and experiences; from being there.