Episode 65: Poet Malcolm Guite

Poet Malcolm Guite, on how God comes to us through the arts:

"When God comes to us fully and richly as a person, and in and through the lives of other people, it's almost like we're scared, like God's got too close, so we abstract him again. We turn God into a bunch of propositions and put him back up into some intellectual realm. He's always getting past that and coming back to us. One of the ways I think, in our age, that God does that is through the arts. Because I think our age is so emphasized on analysis and reason and breaking things down into constituent parts, that people are in some sense rebelling against that. They need something with soul, but a lot of people instead of seeing the heart and soul of that as in the gift of the revelation of the gospel, are finding it through the arts instead."

Listen to George and Malcolm Guite talk about the art of poetry and how it cultivates the spiritual imagination. Lots of wonderful is poetry is quoted here, and referenced in the comments below, by Seamus Heaney, Edwin Muir, John Donne, and Malcolm Guite himself.

Listen to the podcast and read the transcript below, or click here for the full video.

George Mason: Have you ever wondered how a word can change your life? Maybe stop you in your tracks, maybe make you imagine that life can be different. Words have that power. We're going to be talking with poet Malcolm Guite about the relationship between words and imagination. Stay tuned for Good God.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life, I'm your host George Mason and I'm delighted to welcome to the program today the poet and priest, Malcolm Guite. All the way from England, Malcolm welcome.

Malcolm Guite: I am very pleased to be here.

George Mason: Wonderful. Well, Malcolm is most known to me as a poet now, and we've had a wonderful visit in the last few days as he's been visiting here with the people at Image who are an organization that produces a journal called the Image Journal and is consistently eager to make the connection between faith and the arts.

Malcolm Guite: Absolutely. I think their take is art, faith, and mystery, it's just, yeah a very deep engagement with both the faith community and the community that produces the arts-

George Mason: But when you use the word mystery we are drawn into both the world of the arts and the world of faith.

Malcolm Guite: Indeed.

George Mason: Yet not everyone makes the connection between the two, right? In fact early on, you didn't either but you were drawn by the arts into faith. Can you say a little bit about that?

Malcolm Guite: That's right. Well I ... as it happens I was brought up in a Christian household but maybe like many teenagers, I thought I'd grown up out of that, I swallowed the lie that somehow material science had disproved it and that it solved and explained every mystery. This was in the days that you used to read sort of B.F Skinners Behaviorism and all of that and I ... but then I had an experience of real epiphany through the arts, through poetry, through actually reading the poetry of Keats.

Malcolm Guite: I just realized that I couldn't reduce everything to a formula, that there's one thing to know the facts but it's another thing to know what they mean. I found in the experience of great poetry but of other arts too, that there was what I've subsequently learned to use a theological, a pleroma of, fullness or overflowing. There was something flowing through these. I understood art and poetry as gift, I understood the language of the muse but I really needed to find who the giver was you know to try and go up stream through the arts to their source. I realized great science also tries to go up stream through all the formula to it's source, that there is a common source.

George Mason: There's imaginative leaps that are made in science.

Malcolm Guite: There are, absolutely. Yeah there's a new, there's some very good work, there's a great British philosopher they call Mary Midgley who's written a book called Science and Poetry, which is just precisely about those imaginative leaps. When I came to faith I actually came to realize that the whole ... beautiful sort of story of a God who is love, who is an exchange of love in persons, who creates and within his creation, then bodies forth the meaning of who he is in a person, in Jesus Christ. I saw that as providing an underpinning really for all the work we did.

Malcolm Guite: I also have been involved in quite a lot of artistic collaboration and working between say poetry and painting or poetry and music and I come to see that ... you know we're made, I believe very firmly that we're made in the image of God. And the God in whose image we're made is both creative and collaborative.

George Mason: Ah, okay.

Malcolm Guite: Because the Father gives glory to the Son and the Son gives glory to the Father and the Spirit. So I came eventually to write a cycle of sonnets going through the whole liturgical year.

George Mason: Right, right.

Malcolm Guite: When I came to the sonnet for trinity Sunday, our setting, our liturgical setting for the Trinity was not some abstract thing, it was in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and it was all about God making us and forming us.

George Mason: Yes.

Malcolm Guite: I began to realize that his creativity is a source for and an invitation to ours. So I don't know if this helps, but this is this poem Trinity Sunday, and I know some artists have found this resonant.

Malcolm Guite: So Trinity Sunday. "In the beginning, not in time or space, but in the quick before both space and time. In life. In love. In co-inherent grace, in three in one, in one and three, in rhyme, in music, in the whole creation story, in his own image, his imagination, the triune poet makes us for his glory. And makes us each the others inspiration. He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance, to improvise a music of our own. To sing the chord that calls us to the dance, three notes resounding from a single turn. To sing the end in whom we all begin, our God beyond, beside us, and within."

Malcolm Guite: I think that illusion in a sense, in beyond, beside and within to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, when you come to that mystery, ... prose isn't good enough, reason alone isn't good enough, no demonstration is good enough. To approach that mystery, you know like Jesus says, "You got to love God with all your heart, and all your soul," and one of the things you need to bring to the table is art and imagination because they can help us to say many things at the same time.

Malcolm Guite: A beautiful shape, whether it's in words or paint, or sculpture, or in the shape of the liturgy, a beautiful shape holds the mystery far better than a kind of lot of...

George Mason: So this is an interesting notion about holding the mystery. So, there ... there are those who want to explain mysteries as if they're solving a riddle. They're settling what the puzzle is and in doing so there's a way of sort of draining all the mystery out of life.

Malcolm Guite: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. There's a great Scottish poet, Edwin Muir, wrote a poem about the incarnate one and he, which is a great affirmation of Jesus as incarnate, the poem but it starts with, I mean I'm sorry to say it starts with his experience of bad church as a kid.

George Mason: Yes, yes.

Malcolm Guite: You know what he says? He says, "The word made flesh is here made words again," he says, "The word made word."

George Mason: Just words.

Malcolm Guite: "In flourish and arrogant crook," and then he says this, "Here the," ... bad explanation, he says, "Here the mystery is impaled and bent into an ideological argument." You know.

George Mason: Ah. Right, right.

Malcolm Guite: But he goes on to say this, "Better gospel in mans natural tongue," you know, so what he's looking for, he says there's a certain kind of bad theology which, ... when God comes to us fully and richly as a person, and in and through the lives of other people, it's almost like we're scared, like God's got too close, so we abstract him again. We turn him into a bunch of propositions and put him back up into some intellectual realm. He's always getting past that and coming back to us.

Malcolm Guite: One of the ways I think, in our age, that he does that is through the arts because I think our age is so emphasized on analysis and reason and breaking things down into that constituent parts, that people are in some sense rebelling against that. They need something with soul, but a lot of people instead of seeing the heart and soul of that is in the gift of the revelation of the gospel, are finding it through the arts instead.

Malcolm Guite: Now instead of throwing up our hands in horror and saying, "Oh no but you should be in church." We should be saying, "How are the arts mediating to you even a little bit of the mystery?" Maybe we can see all the arts as bit like the hem of Christ's garment, you know? The woman touched the hem and something happened, you know some power hit, she was healed. Now she just wanted to sneak right off into the crowd didn't she?

George Mason: Yes.

Malcolm Guite: But Jesus stopped, he said, "Somebody touched me." And they said, "Oh you know," and he called her. This woman who thought she'd just get a quick fix and disappear, you know because she was worried about her issue of blood and she didn't think, he calls around. And do you remember he calls her, "Daughter of Jerusalem." She totally belongs. So I sometimes see all of our engagement with the art as like, spreading wide the beautiful hem of Christ garment.

George Mason: Ah lovely.

Malcolm Guite: And letting his power flow through it, but we then say, "Well if that happens," if I'm engaged with other poets or musicians and they say, "Where's this coming from?" They really ask me that question. I'm not going to impose it on them, but if they say, I say, "Well do you know my faith tells me that creativity has a source in a creator," and we can take the conversation from there.

George Mason: Well so, it has a source that is beyond us that is given to us in a sense and so it's sort of drawing upon that which is coming to us more than our making it. This reminds me of W.H. Auden's line, "Poetry makes nothing happen."

Malcolm Guite: Happen, yeah. Yeah.

George Mason: Which of course one might take, should take ironically because Auden's a poet, if you break it down it makes no thing happen perse in that there's something mysterious beyond this thingness of the world.

Malcolm Guite: Yeah absolutely.

George Mason: But it makes nothing happen.

Malcolm Guite: Exactly.

George Mason: That is the word creates something-

Malcolm Guite: Exactly and often what the poetry does is precisely to create in the bits slow, I mean you could think of poetry as language slowed down a little so that you get to savor it. At the end of a poem there is necessarily silence but it's a different kind of silence than the silence at the beginning of the poem. That's the same with music as well, that it enriches something and then something happens in that. Now that something that happens at the end of the poem is not entirely in the gift of the poet, it's something that the reader also brings.

Malcolm Guite: You know there's a wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney called The Rain Stick where he talks about when you're up in the rain stick you hear this downpour, the beautiful sounds of the music of water, yet he knows it's only grit and dried seeds and implicitly in this poem he says, "I'm kind of upending the rain stick of the poem into you, I mean you are the rain stick the words flow through you and each reader's imagination, their own creativity brings out the music."

George Mason: Right.

Malcolm Guite: There's a movement between the two, so I think the poet often experiences the poem as a kind of gift and receives it and does their best to be faithful to what they're being given.

George Mason: Well then the reader-

Malcolm Guite: Then the reader receives it.

George Mason: Receives it. So you mentioned Seamus Heaney and so his wonderful poem Digging.

Malcolm Guite: Oh it's glorious yeah.

George Mason: Which is glorious when he talks about watching his father and his grand father before them dig with a spade in the ground and how they were farmers in the like and that he would never be that but-

Malcolm Guite: But, yeah he says, "I've no spade to follow men like them between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests, I'll dig with it."

George Mason: The squat pen rests, I'll dig with it. Exactly.

Malcolm Guite: And when you go back through the poem you realize that all those things he said about different kinds of digging, about the nicking and slicing and going down-

George Mason: Yes.

Malcolm Guite: And the cutting through roots and going down for the good stuff, you suddenly realize that all of that is also about writing.

George Mason: Exactly.

Malcolm Guite: It's not just I'll dig, it's every kind of digging, you know.

George Mason: But then when you read something like that, you're not suppose to only, I think hear Seamus' experience with his father and his coming to vocation, you're also supposed to say, "How did I come to mine?" Right?

Malcolm Guite: Oh absolutely.

George Mason: So here's... I'm reading this, and realizing my father and grandfather before me, were ship pilots in New York harbor right, and they thought that this what I should do as well and in every possible way, you know I should've been a captain on the sea. So it forced me to ask, what's the pen in my hand?

Malcolm Guite: Oh yeah that's very good, yeah.

George Mason: So then I think about my work now and I think, I'm piloting a people of God.

Malcolm Guite: Absolutely.

George Mason: That this is a journey that we're taking at sea and we have a direction to take so this is my work and it's not that different.

Malcolm Guite: And that's a beautiful long image of the church herself as a ship and stepping aboard a ship. I always love the way, right at the beginning of the gospel Jesus gets into somebody's boat and they push out a little way so he can preach and then there's a great moment when he says to Peter, "Launch out into the deep."

George Mason: Yes, yeah, right.

Malcolm Guite: Now I think that's actually true and there's a great sermon by John Donne, John Donne was a wonderful poet in the late 1630, 17th century who was then called by God to be a preacher and brought the poetry into the preaching, but he's got a sermon in which he says, here's this lovely phrase, he says, "When God calls somebody to be a secretary of the Holy Ghost, he never overwrites who they are and what they've been before," so he gives two examples. He says, "When he called David from the sheepfolds and from looking after the sheep to be king of Israel, he called him from one kind of shepherd into another."

George Mason: There you go.

Malcolm Guite: And when David took up the pen, as it were, under the guidance of the Spirit, he filled his Psalms with images of shepherding and he said, "I am the good shepherd." That thing had a promise and then he, rather more daringly John Donne, because everybody knew, everybody listened to in St. Paul's cathedral knew that John Donne was a famous love poet.

George Mason: Right, right, right.

Malcolm Guite: Led to love poems to lots of people.

George Mason: The Flea.

Malcolm Guite: Yeah exactly. So John casually, by this time fully ordained says, "You know, think about Solomon," he says, "You know Solomon was famous for his many love affairs and his many wives and concubines but God called him to write a piece of scripture, God called him to write the Song of Songs which is Solomon's and he didn't censor him. He didn't say, he said, "Bring me all that passion and now let's turn it to the story of how God is our lover, how he comes into our souls."

George Mason: Beautiful.

Malcolm Guite: So Solomon takes his first vocation and it becomes fulfilled in his final vocation.

George Mason: Let's put a comma there for a moment and we're going to come back and I want to pick up from that into more about your sense of vocation and your sense of pricking an imagination by what you do.

Malcolm Guite: Yeah okay. Thank you.

George Mason: Thank you for continuing to tune into Good God. This program is made possible by the contributions of friends of the program and we are delighted that they continue to support it so generously so that we don't have to ask for additional support every episode, I'm sure you're glad about that too. If you'd like to know where else you can tune in to find Good God, whether in a video format or audio, or even to get a transcript of the program, go to www.goodgodproject.com, that's our website and it's the best place to go to receive an archive of all the previous episodes and to get a new one each week if you'd like. Thanks again for your support.

George Mason: We're back with Malcolm Guite and Malcolm we were just talking about your sense of vocation as a poet and what you hope poetry does through you as a gift to the world. I think many people are not in the habit of reading poetry, we have all sorts of other media and the like and poetry seems to demand a little more of us, right?

Malcolm Guite: Yeah but of course it gives more too. Actually, do you know I had a very interesting, we were talking about Seamus Heaney earlier, I had a very interesting conversation with Seamus Heaney on this very subject when I interviewed him, when he won the Wilfred Owen prize. He was talking about how poems didn't necessarily, people didn't necessarily remember a whole poem. So he's saying, like how does poetry work? And he said, "A poem is not a poem when it's just in print. It's not even a poem when it's a bunch of thoughts in the reader, it only gets to begin to be a poem when it's breathed into being and read out loud."

Malcolm Guite: But he said, "I know that poems will not be memorized in the way they were in the past," but he hopes, he said, "When the poem is really at most a poem, is not when you're reading the poem of thinking you're doing poetry, it's when you're out there in the middle of life, something is happening, you can't quite deal with it, things aren't in focus and suddenly a phrase from a poem," like you quoted the poetry makes nothing happen, "Comes into your mind and offers you a clarification."

George Mason: Yes.

Malcolm Guite: Then this is Heaney's own phrase, he said he, "Hoped that his poetry would offer people," and this is how he put it, "Phrases that feed the soul."

George Mason: Nice. Phrases that feed the soul.

Malcolm Guite: Just phrases that feed the soul.

George Mason: Wow.

Malcolm Guite: So that was, and I feel the same way, I mean about my own poetry that I'm trying to listen for a certain kind of music, I'm trying to restore a sense of beauty in the way language is used, but I'm trying to phrase things in a way that will be memorable and helpful, and lucid in the sense that they will elucidate things for people.

George Mason: For that to happen, there has to be a way for us to be interrupted in our normal lives.

Malcolm Guite: Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

George Mason: And to be open to those interruptions, you have a poem I think-

Malcolm Guite: Yeah so I have, so this is, I mean it's kind of partly kind of a light hearted thing but sometimes you start with a jest and it you know. So one time I was supposed to be giving a talk on poetry which is illustrated with a handout of some of my poems and I didn't have the handouts done so I thought, ... there'll be a photocopying room, which there was, just by the lecture hall. I thought it'd be a real simple photocopy, I'd just put it in and press the button. But it turned out to be one of these really complicated ones with lots of trays and I couldn't, but there was nobody there to help me so I pressed a button and did my best and the whole thing after a little while jammed up. I had to just take what poetry I could and all these flashing lights you know, open door B, jam, you know the bell was going ... so I went off.

Malcolm Guite: After the lecture I was sneaking past the door and as I feared you know this woman came out, tall striking woman with one of my poems crumpled up in her hand. She pointed her finger at me and she said, your poetry is jamming my machine. And I thought, that's a great line.

George Mason: Let's use it.

Malcolm Guite: You know, that's a good line, let's use that. So afterwards we sorted it out and she actually started reading my poem. So I wrote this poem for her. It's snappily titled, I'm Being Told My Poetry's Found In A Broken Photocopy, but I realize it was opening up a lot of other stuff as well. So, it goes like this, it's a villanelle so you get these repeated lines a bit like a photocopy, so here we go.

Malcolm Guite: "My poetry is jamming your machine, it broke the photocopier, I'm to blame. With pictures copied from a world unseen. My poem is in the works, I'm on the scene, we free my verse and I confess my shame. My poetry is jamming your machine. Though you berate me with what might have been, you stopped to read the poem just the same, and pictures copied from a world unseen subvert the icons on your mental screen and open windows with a whispered name. My poetry is jamming your machine for chosen words can change the things they mean and set the once familiar word aflame with pictures copied from a world unseen. The mental props give way on which you lean, the world you see will never be the same, my poetry is jamming your machine with pictures copied from a world unseen."

George Mason: Oh my goodness.

Malcolm Guite: So it's a bit of fun really.

George Mason: How fun. Yes, but also, beautiful in the sense that what you're saying is, there is a kind of angularity of how God intervenes in our lives.

Malcolm Guite: Yeah God does, I mean a lot of the parables of Jesus are disruptive of what people think is the normal case.

George Mason: Right, right.

Malcolm Guite: But it's not random disruption, I want to say that you know, there's a way in some forms of modern art that assumes that as long as you're offensive and disruptive it's art. Now I don't think that's the case, I think there is a time when you need to write something which people might find quite shocking but that's only because you've got something to say. So my, I've Jammed The Machine, fine, but Photocopy, of course the photos part of Photocopy goes back to-

George Mason: Light.

Malcolm Guite: Light and I wanted to suggest that poetry brings a light to us that wouldn't have shown otherwise.

George Mason: Very good.

Malcolm Guite: When I say, "I set the once familiar world aflame with pictures copied from a world unseen," I was thinking of that moment in Exodus when Moses sees the burning bush, you know he's walked past that bush every day with his father and their sheep, didn't think there was anything there, suddenly he turns aside and although the bush is still as bushy as ever it was, something new is there, there's a new light shining from it. He takes off his shoes from off his feet.

George Mason: Oh this is Elizabeth Barrett Browning right?

Malcolm Guite: Yeah exactly. Every common book, "Earth's crammed with heaven," she says. "And every common bush ablaze there seen among," yeah, we're singing off the same images.

George Mason: Yes we are.

Malcolm Guite: She's great, she's great.

George Mason: She certainly is.

Malcolm Guite: So, then you realize the poem might at least take you to stand aside, it might make you look. Now I would not give poetry the office, which I believe is only God speaking through the Spirit in scripture, that having made stand aside, having opened his eyes, then the Lord, the Spirit has to speak and he often does it through the scriptures and the voice has to say, "Take off those shoes from off thy feet."

George Mason: Yes.

Malcolm Guite: And then we're ... but if poetry, like I said in the earlier session, is the hem of the garment or if it can be the light from the familiar bush suddenly transfiguring a vision, that's a very good starting place. That's what got Moses' attention.

George Mason: Yes, yes. Well, and this is the incarnation we talk about. So, C.S. Lewis has this way of talking about how, as human beings, we come to know one another, the mysterious nature of our personalities, only through the body. Right, so there has, on this side of the grave, we are bodily creatures in search of that spirit that is the unique mystery of the person and it takes work, whether through a word that comes to the light, through the meaning of it and ... so it doesn't happen apart from it, we're not this sort of disembodied-

Malcolm Guite: Yeah absolutely.

George Mason: We're not trying to leave the body.

Malcolm Guite: No, no, no, not at all.

George Mason: Then he has this beautiful image of resurrection life in which actually what's happening is, even now the saints are, they know one another spiritually and they're moving back toward bodily existence the other way which I think is delightful to think about.

Malcolm Guite: Yeah. That's, I mean Lewis, I mean is endlessly fruitful and helpful here. Actually you know talking about the poetry that just suddenly makes you aware of, opens a window or makes, of course Lewis famously describes how that happened for him when he was a young Atheist and it wasn't even an explicitly Christian book, although it was written by a great Christian imagination, George MacDonald.

George Mason: George MacDonald.

Malcolm Guite: When he's reading that book Phantastes on the train and he says it's almost as though the light from the book wasn't simply, it was beginning to transfigure everything, the railway carriage, the woods outside, and he has that beautiful phrase, he says he felt like he, "Crossed a border," and then he says something like, "I suppose in a way my imagination was baptized."

George Mason: Ah.

Malcolm Guite: And I would feel the same. I came eventually to a fuller and glad affirmation of Christianity in its fullness and in what's disclosed in the scripture and in the creeds, but what started was really through poetry. My imagination was baptized before I was and the rest of me just took a little longer to catch up you know?

George Mason: Well you needed a little water and it was in many ways provided by a chance encounter wasn't it? In that you bumped into an interesting person-

Malcolm Guite: Oh yeah that was-

George Mason: I love this story so.

Malcolm Guite: Well I was thinking ... so I was sort of, I had been an Atheist and then reading Keats made me an Agnostic. So I was a kind of Agnostic when I came up to Cambridge to study Medieval Literature but I became really interested in Medieval Literature so somebody said you should read St. Augustine as a background and I read the Confessions and I was thinking whoa, you know, no longer could I believe that Christianity was this little thing that we'd grown out of because you know Augustine's mind is a bit bigger than mine.

Malcolm Guite: Now, then I began to study Classical Philosophy and I read Plato and ... I was compelled by the Christian story but I was also interested in the classical world and one of the things that I couldn't get, I could see how Plato was saying we're all in the shadow lands and we need to get out of the world of time and into the world of eternity, but the more I looked at the Christian claim, it seemed to be saying that the one who is already in that bliss comes down to be with us and affirms the body. I just been like, how do you hold that together and I sort of I guess ... and I was thinking about this so hard I physically stopped in the street. I was a bit of a waif and strain.

George Mason: We can't imagine.

Malcolm Guite: In those days my hair was really long. So I was just thinking so hard I physically stopped and somebody bumped into me behind and I said, "Oh I'm sorry I was thinking." Instead of saying, I realized it was a you know, a young academic, one of the fellas, you know a student. So I said, "I'm sorry I was thinking." And instead of saying, "Well get out of my way," or you know, "Go and think someplace else," or whatever, this person looked straight in the eye and said, "What were you thinking about?"

Malcolm Guite: I said, "Well actually I was thinking about Plato and Christ, I was just thinking about," and I, you know said what I've just said to you and he said, "Have you ever," he said "Well have you looked at the St. Augustine?" And I said, "Well I'm wrestling with Augustine." He said, "Have you read the Greek fathers, I think Chrysostom, or maybe Origen," and I thought whoa, who's this. So I said, "Well I don't really know those people, how do I read them." He said, "Well maybe you'd like to talk about this," and gave me a little card and it said Rowan Williams.

George Mason: Rowan Williams.

Malcolm Guite: Yeah.

George Mason: Rowan Williams.

Malcolm Guite: He was teaching-

George Mason: Who had become the Archbishop of Kingsbury.

Malcolm Guite: Yeah but he was a young teacher in Cambridge and I had a conversation with him which was extremely helpful and then you know that was that. Then eventually, a little while after that the penny dropped and I did become a Christian and I felt I need to do something about this so I went to my college chaplain for confirmation classes and we did those for a while and then he said, "There's somebody I know I think you should really talk to," and the other confirmation candidate says, "Well in fact he's going to preach at the confirmation, he's a guy called Rowan Williams, and you can see him." So we all went back to him again and he preached at, this was back in February 1980 I was confirmed, you know he preached at my confirmation. Somewhere in the course of that I realized that he was a poet, I mean he's a really seriously good-

George Mason: Right he's a Welsh poet.

Malcolm Guite: He's a Welsh Bard is what he really is.

George Mason: He really is yes.

Malcolm Guite: So we occasionally corresponded about poetry as well and we've remained friends but he was, and I'm not the only person who could tell you, you know way off record and off camera that Rowan Williams has quietly stepped into somebody's life and just given them the key, seeds, and words. The Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis is another person whom I know, you know ... so he's got a bit of a gift for being in the right place at the right time with the right word I have to say.

George Mason: Well Malcolm you have the right words for many of us as we listen to your poetry. We're happy that you've given us this right time to do it.

Malcolm Guite: Thank you.

George Mason: Thank you for the conversation, thank you for being on Good God.

Malcolm Guite: It's a great pleasure thank you.

George Mason: You bet.

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