Seth (England) : A Bishop’s Faith Crisis Helped Him Develop Stronger, More Empathetic Faith

As a history teacher, Seth’s experience with exploring his questions and concerns about church history beautifully parallels the lines from Robert Frost about how woods can be “lovely, dark and deep.” Seth shares how he still mitigates the mundane aspects of every day faith and how he has learned to appreciate his lived experiences and interactions with others as a form of worship.

     The Gerard Manley Hopkins poem referenced in the podcast is “Pied Beauty.”

“Pied Beauty”

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Further Reading in Faith is Not Blind:

“The witness more powerful than sight applies to the role of actual, demanding experience in developing a witness that one knows the Savior. It is one thing to know about Him, but quite another to know Him. And that higher degree of ‘knowing’ usually comes after complexity. Often it comes because of the complexity.”

(Faith Is Not Blind, Chapter 11 “A Witness More Powerful Than Sight,” p. 91)