Blogs

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.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/04/tony-benn-on-revolutionary-christianity?sfns=mo&fbclid=IwAR2hk-79Vu_9MdeCc7_7yXS27MTh0__ZAUnPMfDhDL0SHTKMH1GARHoG3xE

Each hour marks a mighty resurrection

Each hour marks a mighty resurrection,
a time of overcoming fate and fear,
the dawning of a common understanding
in which the grace of God is drawing near.

Each morning brings a sense of new creation.
New life, new love, encompasses the earth.
New time, new light illuminates the distance,
as though the world is coming, fresh, to birth.

Each evening brings a stunning revelation,
as stars and planets hove into our view,
beyond imagination and reflection,
these scattered bangles flung against the blue.

Each season brings a sense of co-existence,
relatedness of  heartbeat, rhythm, rhyme;
and every year the cycle goes on spinning,
affirming faith and love through endless time.

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Tune: HIGHWOOD
Words copyright © 2017 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.