I should have been listening to the sermon, but ...

I have moderate hearing loss and sometimes find it hard to follow what's being said in church: when the building echoes, when there's a lot of noise (from the kids, the musicians or the ministers!), when the sound system isn't working or isn't adjusted right or simply doesn't exist. Then I try to find other ways of engaging with what's going on. 

So yesterday morning, as the Chapel Centre in Billesdon began a new sermon series on the book of Proverbs and I couldn't quite follow it all, I started looking through the opening chapters first myself. Two things struck me. The whole book is in poetry (like so much of the rest of the Bible), a fact which we don't give nearly enough attention. And in English translation many of the lines seem to fall out as near tetrameters, mostly iambic: 

Listen, my sons, to a father's instructions ...

Let the wise listen and add to their learning ...

Thus you will walk in the ways of the just ...

I open my lips to speak what is right ...

So I started jotting down lines, then playing with them, then rearranging them, then paraphrasing others, and before long I was halfway into a poem of my own, A Song of Sophia. I finished it off this lunchtime and I'll post it right after this post. 

(Sophia is the Greek word for Wisdom, and the personified figure of Wisdom in the opening chapters of Proverbs was often seen by early Christians as a representation of Christ.)