Lament & Hope

Lament & Hope

By Rev'd Jon SwalesReligion & SpiritualityChristianity
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Lament & Hope episodes

  • After the Chorus

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    Words: Rev'd Jon Swales

    Music Pixabay: Piano Lament

    After the Chorus/After the Noise

    I wrote this travelling by train through the Alps from Rome to Paris, after reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” 

    These two poems trace a movement from the triggered body, where worship can still feel like threat yet there still,  despite numbing and distance, is a desire for encounter. 

    I. After the Chorus

    Do not come to me now  

    as soft advice.

    Not as the bright smile  

    at the church door.  

    Not as the chorus swelling  

    through the speakers,  

    all uplift  

    and upward hands.

    The room is singing  

    its predictable liturgy —  

    the slow one,  

    the anthem,  

    the key change meant  

    to lift the heart —

    and something in me  

    locks.

    The body remembers  

    what the mouth  

    still cannot say.

    One chord,  

    and the old rooms open.

    The brand.  

    The corporate style.  

    The lanyards.  

    The smoothness of it all.

    Words weaponised  

    like daggers:

    ‘you bring nothing of value  

    to this place.’

    And suddenly I am back there,  

    inside the room  

    where harm was done  

    and called itself ministry.

    So come like weather.

    Come like rain  

    against the chapel windows  

    when the singing grows too loud,  

    when joy itself  

    feels like threat.

    Break the locked places.

    There are pews inside me  

    still occupied by ghosts,  

    whole liturgies of fear  

    recited in the blood,  

    old shames hanging there  

    like vestments  

    in the dark.

    I have called it resilience.  

    I have called it faith.  

    I have called it carrying on.

    Still the walls sweat.

    Still the heart,  

    that small battered flat  

    above the old sanctuary,  

    lets in every echo  

    except peace.

    So come not as guest  

    but as the one  

    who knows the building  

    was never theirs.

    Kick in the swollen door.

    Shatter the stained glass  

    of the god they handed me —  

    the one who looked too much  

    like power,  

    too much like control,  

    too much like men  

    who mistook harm  

    for holiness.

    Burn what must burn.

    The false shepherd.  

    The polished liturgy.  

    The songs that ask the wounded  

    to rise too quickly.

    Batter my heart,  

    threefold mercy,  

    Father of the bruised,  

    Christ of the locked room,  

    Wild Goose moving  

    not in the amplifier’s roar  

    but in the tremor beneath it.

    Undo me.

    Not as they undid me.

    Not to wound  

    but to make room  

    for breath.

    For I have been  

    an occupied city,  

    streets patrolled by fear,  

    every chorus a siren,  

    every bridge lifted in worship  

    a trigger.


    4 min

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A podcast journey of prayer, poetry and teaching from Rev'd Jon Swales.