hymnsandbooks

Simply love in all its glory – new hymn for Christmas

Simply love in all its glory,
simply love with all its pain,
we retell the age-old story
masked in myth to take the strain:
strain of human understanding,
God with us, Immanuel named,
cosmic Christ with angels standing
round a crib: creation tamed.

Look with eyes not masked by history,
not constrained by things we’ve heard,
not obscured by fact or mystery,
so remote to seem absurd:
Jesus born a human being,
living love and hope and grace,
no more veiled, but clearly seeing,
meeting us in every face.

Andrew Pratt 10/12/2018

Tune: CALON LAN

Words © 2018 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.

Persephone – winter solstice – turn of the year

Persephone, they said, delved deep through winter’s scold.
The leaves of autumn fell, condemned to mould,
a burial deep, seemed permanent and cold.

And so it was till snow had fallen,
frosted soil had hardened into stone,
a frozen, hurtful bed,
where all seemed dark and dead.

Incomprehensibly, some life still lurked within this frigid earth,
and, hidden still, green shoots would come to birth.

And so, they said, reflecting, Persephone would rise,
beneath the early skies of lengthening days.
Experience led this hope,
but other days would sound a different song.

Divine interpretation sees, in nature, re-creation,
an annual resurrection,
a seasonal response to winter’s dereliction.

And as the seasons turn a spirit still may burn,
and breath may move and breathe,
a song may ring where cold and void and chaos rules,
to usher in God’s Spring.
© Andrew Pratt 2/6/2017

Christmas – The God of cosmic question – quasars, quarks, pulsars

The God of cosmic question
Surprises by a birth,
Not in some new dimension
But on this ravaged earth!

In quasars, quarks and pulsars
We seek the cosmic truth:
The ground of our existence
That set creation loose,

And human senses lead us,
Through all they analyse,
From arrogance to wonder,
To spiritual surprise.

But senses have their limits:
Unanswered still there lies
The single, deepest question
Our intellect supplies.

Yet history proffers insight:
The Christ of time and space
Speaks of a God incarnate
Born in a squalid place.

Alive within our compass,
Upon this ravaged earth,
The God of cosmic question
Surprises us in birth!

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948) (amended 2019 by author)
© 1991 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.

Bleakness

This clerical obsession

Must this clerical obsession
ultimately break us,
we who minister
within constraints of creed
which hobble intellect
and cripple reason?
We no longer seek
or probe
but vainly,
blindly,
follow sightless guides
gone before.
© Andrew Pratt 17/12/2018