Tidying up the bookshelves...

apart from being a good way to get rid of dust and cat-hair residues (wow, I am such a skanky housekeeper) is also a great way to be reminded of books you forgot you had.
So, I now have an excuse to include in here the first verses of a poem I've always loved, since before I had the faintest idea what he was going on about (I'm not guaranteeing that that bit's changed).
Franci Thompson was a "Victorian mystic... who trained as a priest but was found to have no vocation" and died in 1907, a poverty-stricken opium addict. The Hound of Heaven seems to me terribly evocative of both the sense of feeling that there is some kind of God out there, but being unable to come to personal and psychological terms with that feeling and its meanings, and also of the kind of terrible and vengeful God we seem to have been reading about in the Old Testament so far:

"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I feld Him, down the arches of the years;
I feld him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy.
They beat - and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet -
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.'"

(The Hound of Heaven, Francis Thompson, Phoenix Paperbacks)