Marking the programme's 55 years on Radio 4

The sound of wild geese brings inspiration to Quaker and author, Alastair McIntosh.

Script:
Good morning.

Have you ever heard the wild geese calling ...
as they draw nigh, in high formation ...
a whispering first ...
the intimation of another world ...
then nearer, nearer, lilting, rising ...
irrupting to crescendo of our own soul’s yearning:

“‘Tis yours, my child,” says God, “to rise this dawn
and dig from where you stand ...
In Earth as is in Heaven”.

And fading now, like brushstrokes blown
the geese have flown and you and I stand there ... alone;
yet drawn together
into high formation.

And so ... it’s down to us, to ground that intimation, that “gift half understood” into this waking day.

And I smile, for when George MacLeod who rebuilt Iona Abbey was asked where he got it from that the wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit, he said: “I don’t know! I probably made it up!”

But there we glimpse the way God prays through us, in brushstrokes of imagination, as wild geese crying.

“Don’t fear, don’t fear” said Patrick Kavanagh, as he contrasted skeins of geese with laden bombers out across the Irish Sea, in 1943.

Don’t fear, don’t fear, as angels say, to raise us to our human calling.

And Kavanagh’s poem concludes; and so too, perhaps, our prayer:

“Only they who fly home to God have flown at all.”

Only they who fly home to God, have flown, at all.