Poetry and faith …

… Rowan Williams on Charles Causley, the poet who fed his theological imagination. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Is there, I ask him, something in Causley’s poem about the perils of not taking our own lives seriously?

“Yes. I think that’s bound up with the same thing really, that we don’t know how to live. To put it in unhelpful prose, it seems as though the poem is saying: All that actually gives me life, gives me energy and hope, or anchorage in reality, all of that also frightens me so much that I want to run and not only run but want to strike out at what seems to promise what is good for me. We are living in a society which doesn’t seem to know where its life or health is, and I think that’s one of the reasons I’d like to see the poem engraved in granite in public places.”