A Triptych in Three Voices
After The Bishop's Wife
I. Bishop Brougham’s First Sermon After Christmas
II. Julia’s Epilogue
III. Professor Wutheridge’s Reflection
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Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. - Hebrews 13:2
Preface
In every soul, faith passes through three tempers: ambition, love, and understanding.
The Bishop builds toward heaven with his own hands, only to find the scaffolding was pride. Julia stands in the quiet light that follows repentance and rediscovers God in the smallest tendernesses.
And Wutheridge, the scholar who doubted everything, comes last, bearing the gift of recognition: that wonder and wisdom need not be foes.
These three voices form a single season of the spirit: Advent, Nativity, and Epiphany—the waiting, the becoming, and the seeing.
Each speaks alone, yet all share the same snowfall, the same streetlight, the same silence where angels might walk unseen.
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I. Bishop Brougham’s First Sermon After Christmas
Now falls the snow, so pure, so still,
It muffles bell and steepled hill.
The world lies white, and I within
Count every grace I lost to sin.
For once my prayers were chiseled stone,
And faith, a thing I called my own -
A monument to what I knew,
But never to the love I slew.
I built His house with borrowed pride,
And left my heart unsanctified.
I fed the poor, I blessed, I taught -
But not for God. For what? For naught.
Then came a man...no wings, no flame,
Yet light obeyed him all the same.
He smiled as though he’d known my wife,
And read the footnotes of my life.
He stilled my pulse, he stayed my climb,
He turned my sermon into rhyme.
And where I’d sought the voice of kings,
He spoke of sparrows’ trembling wings.
Each stone I’d laid, each vow I’d made -
I saw the debt they’d left unpaid.
My daughter’s laughter, faint and far -
That was my lost cathedral star.
So now I preach, if preach I must,
With ash upon my pride and dust.
No mitre bright, no martyred claim,
Just one forgiven, whispering name.
The Lord I serve wears labor’s skin,
He kneels with those I’d fenced within.
He builds His church in widow’s hands,
Not in the height of my commands.
And if He comes this night once more,
He’ll pass the gold, the marble door,
To find, where once my sermons stood,
A hearth, a loaf, a little good.
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II. Julia’s Epilogue
He speaks, and snow begins to fall
Along the nave, upon us all -
Not flake on flake, but word on word,
The gentlest sermon ever heard.
No marble gleams, no trumpets rise,
Just candlelight in parish eyes.
No talk of sin or kingdom come,
But bread and hearth, and call of home.
I watch him there, his shoulders bowed,
His voice a hush, the proud unproud.
Once every line he spoke was fire,
Now every pause is something higher.
He names the poor, the lost, the small,
The widow’s hand, the stable stall.
I think of nights when prayer grew thin -
And find the answer here, within.
For God was never far away,
He waited through my quiet stay -
In mending cloth, in pouring tea,
In keeping faith invisibly.
He turns, and in his weary face
I see not power, but found grace.
The light that angel left behind
Now burns in human, humbled kind.
And when his sermon’s end is near,
I find my own heart’s meaning clear,
No miracle could prove love true
As one who breaks, and then renews.
So let the snow fall where it may,
Upon the pulpit, hymn, and day.
The Lord has come, not winged nor wild -
But home, beside me, reconciled.
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III. Professor Wutheridge’s Reflection
I used to think the soul a sort of jest -
A trick of language, meant to ease the dark.
I gave my years to parchment and debate,
To footnotes longer than my prayers.
The world was catalogued, not felt.
I knew the bishop once - a climbing man,
Polished, purposeful, too proud to blink.
We spoke of cathedrals, marble pride,
Of angels as the furniture of myth.
I thought myself the wiser of the two.
But that was before the snow that year -
Before the light that moved as if it breathed.
Before the hush in Julia’s eyes,
And the look that crossed his face
Like one who’s finally heard forgiveness spoken.
I mocked belief, yet envied its design,
The way it made of sorrow something sung.
And still, when he first came to me,
His faith was only wood and grant and name.
A kingdom built on blueprints and fatigue.
Then came the stranger - yes, I saw him too.
Not wings, but presence. The kind that shifts
The weight of air, and makes a man remember
The one good thing he never said aloud.
A sort of music made of conscience.
Since then, my books have grown more quiet.
They murmur when I pass, not boast.
I’ve left the dust where once I’d scold it off;
I rather like the look of age,
How it forgives what time forgets.
Sometimes I pour two glasses by the fire -
A foolish habit, yes, but harmless.
For who can say what guests are sent
To those who linger too long with their thoughts?
And when I hear the bishop preach again,
His words less perfect, more alive -
I think perhaps the soul exists,
Not in the scholar’s proof or the priest’s decree,
But in the pause between them,
Where wonder slips back in.
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Closing Note
Each of us meets the angel differently.
The bishop, in his pride;
Julia, in her patience;
Wutheridge, in his late astonishment.
But grace is democratic - it visits all, even those who no longer expect it.
GBS
1992
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