Something understood - final reflections - part iii. Please note that this session was very interactive with lots of audience participation. It also refers to several poems in great detail - these poems were on handouts that the participants had been given.

George Herbert is one of the great 17th century poet-priests. His poems embrace every shade of the spiritual life, from love and closeness, to anger and despair, to reconciliation and hope. And his work is always rich with audacious playfulness: he seems to take God on, knowing God will win, as if he’s having an argument with a faithful friend he knows is not going to leave. In much of theology and spirituality, God is a critical spectator to human lives, but for Herbert, his sense of relationship with God is primarily of a friendship that can never be broken.

Mark Oakley is Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, overseeing the arts and learning programmes at the cathedral. He writes regularly for the Church Times and The Tablet and broadcasts frequently on BBC Radio 4. His latest, bestselling, book The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry (Canterbury Press) was published last year to great acclaim.

Recorded 14 October 2017.