‘The Church at Auvers’ is one of my favourite paintings. Van Gogh’s church paintings inspired Elizabeth Jennings poem about the complexity and mystery of prayer.
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The Nature of Prayer
A debt to Van Gogh’s ‘Crooked Church’
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Maybe a mad fit made you set it there
Askew, bent to the wind, the blue print gone
Awry, or did it? Isn’t every prayer
We say oblique, unsure, seldom a simple one,
Shaken as your stone tightening in the air?
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Decorum smiles a little. Columns, domes,
Are sights, are aspirations. We can’t dwell
For long among such loftiness. Our homes
Of prayer are shaky and, yes, parts of Hell
Fragment the depths from which the great cry comes.
Elizabeth Jennings.
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