In the name of goodness and love and broken community.
In the name of meaning and feeling and I hope you don’t screw me…
In the name of darkness and light and ungraspable twilight
In the name of mealtimes and sharing and caring by firelight
In the name of action and peace and human redemption
In the name of eating and drinking and table confession
In the name of sadness, regret, and holy obsession,
The holy name of anger, the spirit of aggression
In the name of forgive and forget and I hope I get over this
In the name of father and son and the holy spirit
In the name of beauty and beaten and broken down daily.
In the name of seeing our creeds and believing in maybe
We gather here, a roomful of strangers
and speak of our hopeland and talk of our danger
To make sense of our thinking, to authenticate lives
To humanize feeling and stop telling lies
In the name of philosophy, theology, and who gives a damn?
In the name of employment and study and finding new family
In the name of our passion our loving and indecent obsessions
In the name of prayer and of worship and demon possession
In the name of solitude and quiet and holy reflection
In the name of the lost and the lonely and the without direction
In the name of efficiency, stupidity, and the wholly ineffectual
In the name of the straight, the queer, transgender and bisexual...
~ from In The Shelter (Hodder and Stroughton Ltd, 2016)