A Potter’s Prayer
Rachel Parkes writes:
Mike Sutcliffe and his children Anna and Jacob were regular members of the All Hallows congregation and were missed when Mike moved to live in Cheshire. This poem was written by Mike’s Dad, David Sutcliffe, a priest in the Bradford Diocese, who died this summer. My Dad and David were at theological college together and he was my godfather — we had not been good at keeping in touch and it was great for me to meet up with David again via Mike.
David took up pottery in retirement. The photograph that accompanies the poem was taken not long before he died. I have selected some of the words written as tributes to David as a context to his poem:
‘A lovely, gentle man with a great sense of humour and much kindness, patience and wisdom’.
‘He strove to live life with integrity, compassion, love, laughter and empathy’.
A Potter’s Prayer
I am as clay in your hand.
Like clay prised from the yielding earth,
shapeless and raw, yet full of promise,
I was born and took the first fragile breath,
egged on by midwife’s clout to draw lungfuls of air,
polluted but life-giving.
Washed by the regenerating stream of soft baptismal water,
into a new birth and a new world.
Moulded by pressures of training and experience
and the sure touch of unseen nail-printed hands,
into evolving shape.
Plunged into the white-hot searing flame of testing and proving,
the kiln of divine love.
Burnished to begin the work of wearing down
the bumps and ridges of pride, intolerance, selfishness and fear.
I come to you.
Shape me.
Mould me.
I am but clay in your hand.
And when I seem broken on the turning wheel of life,
battered by the self-inflicted damage of my sin,
dented by accident or hurt,
and feel to be again a mass of unworked clay or broken shard,
then help me to believe that I can be re-formed, re-worked
and given new meaning.
I come to you.
Re-shape me. Remould me.
Divine potter, I am as clay in your hand.
David Sutcliffe