The earth pleads for justice, the harvest is wanting - While Matthew 9: 37 speaks of a harvest of people, perhaps it is also pertinent today if we think of a harvest of the earth and its care?
The earth pleads for justice, the harvest is wanting,
in fire, flood or tempest our crops are destroyed;
the Spring, once predicted, is desolate, silent,
excuses are hollow, we’ve done all we can?
The mountains have echoed, or is that God’s whisper,
the quiet consternation of one in distress?
A prompting, a question that answers our calling,
is that your defence, that you’ve done all you can?
While continents crumble and ice caps are melting,
you sit on your hands, you do nothing at all.
Wake up to the danger still growing around you,
and do all you can till your passage is through.
And now in the present let’s work for the future,
still others will follow, they wait in the wings:
this planet, its future, its people our neighbours,
join hands, sing our anthem: ‘We’ll do All We Can!’
Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Words © 2021 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@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
Metre: 12 11 12 11
Tunes: LAREDO; ST CATHERINES COURT
Created by HymnQuest.com
Tag: global warming
And is this earth…? iPad art Andrew Pratt 2025
And is this earth…?
The Song of the Sea – a hymn related to Global Warming – reposting
The Song of the Sea – a hymn related to Global Warming
I usually post a hymn on a Monday or Tuesday each week. On Monday morning 11th August, the Today Programme on radio 4 announced that The UK's seas have had their warmest start to the year since records began, helping to drive some dramatic changes in marine life and for its fishing communities. Read more…
In 2021 Dr Tim Gordon Marine Biologist, Exeter University spoke to Bramhall Methodist Church about the death of coral reefs around Australia. Again, today there are reports of the deterioration of the Great Barrier Reef. During his seminar, in response, I wrote these words…
The song of the sea, once melodious, is dying,
that song is essential, the calling of home;
Great God, we lament, yet the sound of our crying
is quieter than breakers, the wash of the foam.
What work must we do to restore what is broken,
how can we encourage the choir of the sea?
The spirit is moving, the waters are wounded,
the oceans are anguished for life to be free.
You enter our suffering and love in our grieving,
you join us in weakness, when frailty is near,
God holds us, enfold us when hell overcomes us,
stand near to the tomb of our folly and fear.
You promise a covenant, both gift and promise.
Creation is groaning, still coming to birth.
Bring newness, renewal, a hope that is living,
from suffering bring joy for the whole of the earth.
We treasure the symphony, yet we are grieving,
we long for the chorus, the song of the sea,
bring light in the darkness and sound in the silence,
Great God, co-creator, let all life be free.
Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Words © 2021 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@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
Metre: 12 11 12 11
Tune: STREETS OF LAREDO
You can read more about this at Tim Gordon
Hear this sung by Gareth Moore here
The Future?
iPad art – Copyright Andrew Pratt 2025
Climate change…theology…iPad art… adapted from ArtServe Magazine Issue 33 Summer 2022
I was reflecting on creation and climate change, global warming. Tablet art enabled me to produce fiery images.
This would not be impossible with watercolour but here I was able to swirl colour together. If anything went wrong I had the facility to erase and correct. With watercolour this is more difficult. In the first image I went to Genesis 1 for inspiration the image of the earth ‘without form and void’. Science, cosmology, art and the Bible enabled me to envisage creation as a conflagration, a ‘big bang’, with interrelated matter and energy being brought into being. But then, on reflection, planets condense to spherical, or near spherical, form and so the first image is that swirling orb, formless but seeking an equilibrium and at the centre of the void will be Earth…or…
Without form and void…
As scripture unfolds, epiphanies, revelations of the divine, ‘the Other’, are described. They take many forms. One such narrative again brings together matter and energy in an enigmatic spectacle with no matter being consumed within an evanescent fiery, burning bush. ‘The Other’ has no name, utters no words, yet converts, forms and inspires humanity to action.
The colour palette of the creation image was retained for a burning bush. The flaming fire was ‘painted first’. Different tools allow the colours to merge in a variety of ways. The merge can be smooth, watery, bubbled or perhaps rough edged. The bush was then lined in over the fire and the ground finished last.
Beyond the life of Christ, through incarnation and resurrection there is further revelation of the nature of God. Pentecost offers that image of fire again, with its contradictory character of energy, warmth and destruction, yet power and inspiration.
The fire was, again, painted first. The black, square blocks were formed using a template like a page frame but then filled using a fill tool that you may be familiar with in photo-editing software. The sky was similarly filled in, as it had been in the burning bush image. Subconsciously the colour I had chosen for this was very much reminiscent of some of David Hockney’s choice of pigments.
In the same way that scriptural and human inspiration interact in forming the images, paradoxically for humanity, that same divine presence of fire in creation and revelation offers humanity the capacity for self-destruction as global warming engulfs what might have been the ‘City of God’.
And is this the anticipated end of humanity? ‘Ashes to Ashes’? And is this the end, not just of each of us individually, but of all creation? Humanity’s knowledge, grasping the divine gift obliterates humanity itself while creation collapses back into the void from whence it came…
For the final image I used a copy tool to take the first image. I then used a sandpaper tool to scuff and scrape at the ‘surface’ of the image. I darkened it, mixing and merging colour to suggest, not just our planet, but creation returning to void and chaotic darkness.
Ashes to ashes…
Text and images © Andrew Pratt 2022 adapted from ArtServe Magazine Issue 33 Summer 2022
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