Religion

All hail to public hospitals
Which treat us at no cost at all
Come forth and heed the homage call
Give thanks and praise

Admire their shiny corridors
The wonder drugs in well-stocked stores
And colour-coded wings and floors
And curtained bays

Where patients' injuries are healed
By specialists in every field
Equipment-laden trolleys wheeled
In urgency

In response to the news that the Pope wants to change the words of the Lord's Prayer ...

After visiting the hospital yesterday to get my oedema looked at, I sat for a while in the small church of St. Bartholomew-the-Less, conveniently located on the way out of the hospital on the way to the bus stop. I am not a religious person, and I can not even claim that it was an oasis of calm, as the sound of construction work blasted past the big wooden doors and bellowed around the nave. But I fancied a ponder on matters theological.

Barts-the-Less is a chapel of ease, meaning a church building that is accessible to parishioners who can not make it to the proper parish church (in this case, St. Bartholomew-the-Great). The clients and residents of Bart's hospital, and their visitors, surely qualify. For clarity, there was one St. Bartholomew, who had one great church and one lesser one; rather than two St. Bartholomews, one greater in some important respect than his lesser namesake.

It is, as are most places of worship, rather beautiful - unusually light due to its strikingly large windows, and its walls adorned with resolute plaques memorialising some of the Bart's hospital staff through the centuries who saved many lives and then lost their own. I sat on the crimson cushion on the wooden pew. The only other person there was, I think, praying.

SpeakEasy: Spoken Word Brussels is an ‘open mic’ evening of spoken word (and a bit of music) in a basement in the Ixelles area of the city. Modelled on similar events in Paris and London, it has been taking place every two weeks since November last year.

When places of worship
​          become places of wonder
Bright-eyed guides
          will tell wide-eyed visitors
You won't believe
          what people used to believe
And then, with downcast eyes
          they will add
And you'll never believe
          what some of them did
          in the name of what they believed

A century ago, with Britain at war, the Woman's Dreadnought published this poem:

CHRISTMAS EVE
- to man the comfortable

Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so
And if it's there in black and white
Then heaven knows it must be right
But if this weren't the only book
That I so literally took
Then dragons fly and this I know
For JK Rowling told me so.