Blogs

Climate change song – Crises drive us from our comfort

Crises drive us from our comfort
to the edge of vital choice,
children speak the words we’ve hidden,
simple words we’ve failed to voice.
Will we listen to the judgment
warning us to change our ways,
change essential in this moment
making way for future days?

Cut the greed, this present moment
is a sacrament in time:
calls for change in our perspective,
hearing reason, mending rhyme.
Here we have just finite tenure,
stewards of this planet, earth,
handing each new generation
sacred space to come to birth.

Space and time are lent and trusted
into each receptive hand,
ours to tend, maintain and offer
clean, refreshed: each cherished land.
Yet our science says we’re wanting,
faulted in our craft and care.
May the future be forgiving
of the love we failed to share.

Andrew Pratt 8/12/2019
Inspired by Greta Thunberg

Words © 2019 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: THE CARNIVAL IS OVER

A topsy-turvy, upturned world – the time to make decisions – Magnificat for election time

A topsy-turvy, upturned world,
where values are distorted,
the first is last and last is first
with everything contorted.
The rich are begging at the door
while ones they were despising
are given charge of Godly wealth,
in stature they are rising.

Magnificat has come to stay,
the proud have been extinguished;
the humble poor are lifted high,
their poverty relinquished.
The reign of God has come to pass
rebutting our world’s choices,
each one that we would count as last
within this time rejoices.

And will we ever find a place
with pride and wealth rejected,
or will hypocrisy deny
our need to be accepted?
The choice is ours, the crisis dawns,
the time to make decisions,
to stand with God or walk alone
within this world’s divisions.

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
8 7 8 7 D Tune: CONSTANCE (Sullivan)
Words © 2015 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England, 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.

What is hell, if not the anguish – Advent 2

What is hell, if not the anguish
heaped on those whom humankind
treat with hatred and derision,
harsh disdain that we’ve refined?

Images of fire and torture
stalk among us while we live,
not in some dark, distant future,
but in love we fail to give.

So the cry of disaffected,
disregarded human souls,
indicate the dereliction
chosen through our human polls.

We are architects of anguish
when we seek to put aside,
love of those God calls our neighbour,
those ignored that we deride.

Andrew Pratt 4/12/2019
Words © 2019 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.

Matthew 3: 1-12
Psalm 88