Category: Hymns

Is all prayer communication – https://bramhallmethodists.org.uk/scienceandprayer/

Is all prayer communication
formed in silence or through speech?
Might we hear as well as speaking,
learn the truths you need to teach.

Sometimes it might seem to others
that we’re wasting precious time,
yet in prayer we join our spirits
to God’s singing, dancing rhyme.

God can shape our disposition,
helping us to calm our minds,
joining us in quiet communion,
aiding all the spirit finds.
Andrew Pratt 2/11/2019
Written in response to Professor Peter Howdle’s Seminar on Healthy intercessions
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: SERVANT SONG (Gillard)
Metre: 8.7.8.7

We rise and look around us – https://bramhallmethodists.org.uk/scienceandprayer/

We rise and look around us:
all life that breathes or lives,
has shared a common construct
its composition gives.
A careful, complex coding
embodies what we see,
but how we treat each other
defines what we might be.

The cosmos seethes with sadness,
lament infuses prayer,
we cry with one another,
and strength is grounded there.
Yet we are still confounded,
by things we cannot grasp,
for we are only human:
our ignorance will last.

All life is short and finite,
we sometimes live a lie,
that we are born immortal,
yet love will never die.
Beyond this time of living,
through what we see as death
God’s coded love is spanning
our last, our final breath.

Written in response to Professor Peter Howdle’s Seminar on Healthy intercessions
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: ELLACOMBE (StF 311)
Metre: 7.6.7.6 D

Hymn books or projectors and screens?

Worth a reading – noted by the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada and the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/18/churches-should-ditch-projector-screens-bring-back-hymnals/?fbclid=IwAR0YIzvlJnY9o1nAm6k3JCDecSgldplR138Ra0ZMvqFZ8JCEIZ9_TbjJZv8

Minds matter when we come to pray – https://bramhallmethodists.org.uk/scienceandprayer/

Minds matter when we come to pray
as we are held within God’s play.
We call for things we want or need,
or simply rest: a dormant seed.

A spirit moves within each prayer,
intention draws through silent air
direct to God, to other’s needs,
or mystically, beyond our creeds

We feel detached, yet not adrift.
Sometimes our self-awareness shifts,
we seek forgiveness, need a balm,
or find, detached, a sense of calm.

No sacred place, yet words demand,
an explanation of this strand,
a shore where waves will shift and drift,
some spirit that will change and lift.

Caught up, uplifted by a light
within a dark and dim lit night,
and in this place of calm there rests,
a sense of love, ecstatic, blessed.
Andrew Pratt 19/10/2019

Tune: O WALY WALY
Metre: LM
Written in response to Rev’d Canon Dr Joanna Collicutt seminar on The Psychology of Neuroscience and Prayer
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.