My friend Matthew recently started a community of bloggers doing what he calls “Poetry Wednesday.” The idea is simple: post your favorite poetry (yours or someone else’s) on Wednesdays. And that’s it. So here’s mine.

The following is a poem titled The Kingdom of God by Francis Thompson. I know nothing of Thompson other than when he was alive; or this poem, other than that it was quoted in part in The World’s Religions, a book I recently read.

The Kingdom of God

by Francis Thompson

O WORLD invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,—clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Huston Smith is best known for this, his book The World’s Religions, and a miniseries he hosted that inspired the book, called The Religions of Man. His 90 years of experience and lifelong pursuit of knowledge about the world’s major paths of faith are what he is known for.

This book is perhaps one of the most all-enveloping and well known explorations of the major religions of the world. For me it was highly educational, filling in many of the gaps about what I knew of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and others.

But perhaps even more impressive than the sheer facts was that Smith, despite his own upbringing as the child of Christian missionaries, treats each religion with the utmost respect and honor. Apparently he’s taken up multiple faith practices throughout his life and, in so doing, understands multiplicity better than most, and that honoring differences of faith is the perhaps one of the healthiest things we can do in a society that seems to be more splintered day by day.

This is not a book for wimps; it took me a solid two months to read, completely throwing off any reading momentum I’d had up until I started. It’s dense but readable and, if nothing else, is challenging to anyone with preconceived notions about any one religion. Having considered myself to be fairly open-minded until reading this, I’d venture to guess it’s going to be a challenging book for most, but worth reading despite that.

Certainly I have my own struggles with relative and absolute truth, and I have yet to decide if this book helped or harmed in my exploration, but I appreciate all that I learned in the process. If nothing else, it opened me up to more of what humanity as a whole believes (and doesn’t believe) about what is true regarding morals, time, life, death, nature and love. And that is valuable, regardless of the journey.