Senses sharpened in the silence,
gently, quietly, feel your breath,
know God’s love will never leave us,
now, or in our time of death.
In this time imagine bird song,
thunder of a mountain stream,
slap of waves along the shoreline,
things for which we hope or dream.
All the beauty of the starlight,
rainbow colours in the sky,
things that we can just imagine
feed our minds until we die,
fill our hearts with heightened wonder,
strain the sinews of our thought,
soon exhausting human language,
through the images we’ve caught.
Lifted up within the mystery,
now embodied in our praise,
mystic music moves our being,
sounding notes from phrase to phrase,
raising us beyond the present,
held in loving symphony;
God inspire our hearts with singing
in one cosmic harmony.
Wrapped up in the silk that shines silver in moonlight,
the cycle of life will go on day by day.
The spider devours what is needed by nature;
for life to exist death must also hold sway.
The cancer that kills through an act of mutation,
the building of love, the destruction and strife;
the things labelled ‘evil’ are part of creation,
the earth’s moving surface is needful for life.
Our eyes are half open to vast constellations,
are blind to the particles light can’t resolve,
but in them and through them the mystery beyond us:
the one we name ‘God’ makes our wisdom dissolve;
for on through our living and final destruction,
beyond deep imagining, artists might hold,
this ‘God’, this enigma, the source of our being
will love through eternity, comfort, enfold.
At a Hymn Society Conference some years ago I was asked for a hymn in response to ‘All things bright and beautiful’ which took ‘bad’ things seriously, things like cancer. This exploration of creation of ‘bad things’, technically theodicy, followed.