Vicars are meant to be people of prayer. I offer to pray for people; it can seem very inadequate but it is often all I can do. The problem is that I am not very good at it. I take some comfort from the poet RS Thomas (who I recently wrote about). Thomas found his prayers were often met by silence but he realised that God was in the silence. His poem “Folk Tale” explores this. I too, just occasionally see the movement of the curtain.
Prayers like gravel
flung at the sky’s
window, hoping to attract
the loved one’s
attention. But without
visible plaits to let
down for the believer
to climb up, to what purpose open
that far casement? I would
have refrained long since
but that peering once
through my locked fingers
I thought that I detected
the movement of a curtain.
Rev David Poyner