Blogs
Senses sharpened in the silence – Praise in time of Covid-19
Photo ©Andrew Pratt 2020
Senses sharpened in the silence,
gently, quietly, feel your breath,
know God’s love will never leave us,
now, or in our time of death.
In this time imagine bird song,
thunder of a mountain stream,
slap of waves along the shoreline,
things for which we hope or dream.
All the beauty of the starlight,
rainbow colours in the sky,
things that we can just imagine
feed our minds until we die,
fill our hearts with heightened wonder,
strain the sinews of our thought,
soon exhausting human language,
through the images we’ve caught.
Lifted up within the mystery,
now embodied in our praise,
mystic music moves our being,
sounding notes from phrase to phrase,
raising us beyond the present,
held in loving symphony;
God inspire our hearts with singing
in one cosmic harmony.
Andrew Pratt 19/4/2020
Words © 2020 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England, http://www.stainer.co.uk.
Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Tune: CALON LAN
It’s TREE-TIME!
Where is the care for the silent care-giver?
Where is the care for the silent care-giver,
drowning in tragedy, lost or alone?
Where is our God in such life and such living?
Here in our pain, or remote on some throne?
God, are you deaf to our crying, our pleading?
Why are you absent when we feel so lost?
Come to the centre of need and exhaustion,
help us feel valued, while sharing the cost.
Here in frustration, in folly, when kindness
seems to be hollow, not grasping the fact:
inside our hearts may be broken or dying.
God bring your mending to lives that have cracked.
Then for tomorrow may hope that is buried
push through our anger, our darkness and night,
opening our hearts to divine love and healing,
leading from hopelessness out into light.
Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Tune: STEWARDSHIP
Metre: 11 10 11 10
Words © 2014 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England, http://www.stainer.co.uk.
Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Tony Benn on Revolutionary Christianity
Later in his life, Benn would assert that he was a “Christian agnostic,” unsure of the existence of God, but someone who believed in “Jesus the prophet, not Christ the King,” the historical Jesus — “the carpenter of Nazareth” — who preached social justice and egalitarianism.
This is the main text of a lecture delivered in November 1980 at Mansfield College Chapel, Oxford in which Benn looks into the revolutionary history behind Christ’s message and its relationship to socialist thought.
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