“The Preacher’s Mistake”

A Redemptorist reader, Fr. John McKenna, sent this along, and it’s too good not to share.

It’s credited to William Croswell Doane, the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Albany, who served in that capacity from 1869 until his death in 1913.

“The Preacher’s Mistake” 

The parish priest
Of austerity,
Climbed up in a high church steeple
To be nearer God
So that he might hand
His word down to His people.

When the sun was high
When the sun was low,
The good man sat unheeding
Sublunary things,
From transcendency
Was he forever reading
And now and again
When he heart the creak
Of the weather vain a-turning
He closed his eyes
And said, of a truth
From God I now am learning.”

And in sermon script
He daily wrote
What he thought was sent from heaven,
And he dropped this down
On people’s heads
Two times one day in seven.

In his age God said,
“Come down and die!”
And he cried out from the steeple,
“Where art thou, Lord?”
And the Lord replied
Down here among my people

***