The darkness and the light shall be one,
The sorrow and the joy linked in wonder,
Life shall dance,
The song be sung
And the golden fire burn brightly
In the hearts of the children of the Earth.
Mary, Joseph, Jesus,
The characters remain.
Shepherds and the angels,
Truth travellers’ contain
Shaped in ancient story’s
Sweet mystical refrain.
When the child is at the center,
When the babe is in the stall,
When the adult nurtures wonder,
When the carols warm us all,
Then the fragments come together
And the vision shines as one
Taste and see how gracious the Christ is,
Taste and see the wonder of life;
Take the bread, the body of Jesus,
Break the bread, the flesh of the world;
Taste and see the wonder of life.
O golden cup of life,
A chalice full of love,
The space beyond all strife
You form our sacred home,
Your ways produce delight,
Your life becomes our own.
My spirit shall rejoice in God
Who breaks my chains of guilt and fear;
For God upholds each person’s worth
Throughout the ages of this Earth.
I support very much the call to ‘create new memories’ for Christmas and I believe the place to begin is with children. However, one of the best known children’s Christmas carols is ‘Away in the Manger’, and this much loved carol has many wrong messages imbedded in the words. The second verse of the traditional words speak of Jesus ‘looking down from the sky’ and the last verse has Jesus up in heaven and the singer requesting him to ‘fit us for heaven to live with you there’. I believe my third verse takes the dualism and the ‘away’ Jesus out and replaces it with the Biblical teaching of very last verse of Matthew – ‘And I will be with you always, to the end of the age’. This surely is the Gospel.
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When Christmas comes it brings great joy;
This story of a baby boy;
The birth of life – divine event
That tells us all of God’s intent
To be at one with human life,
In all its beauty, all its strife.
If cobwebs fill the corners
That lurk within our mind
Our faith can help us brush aside
Each clinging thought we find
Charge our hearts with wonder,
God of sheer delight,
As we sense your presence
Filling day and night.
If Heaven is more than simply a place,
If pictures of God evolve evermore,
If love is affirmed as life’s highest grace
The mystery remains, the sacred expands
To gift compassion’s transforming embrace.
When masks of God both age and die,
With intervening deities,
As doctrines lose their rigid hold
And freedoms grow like forest trees
Leave behind illusion’s ways
Culture plants within the mind,
Clothed in vestments of the faith
Masking truths we need to find,
No one can share my inner space;
There I am alone, yet not alone,
For you are there, O God,
Deeper than my thinking,
Introduction In my faith journey, I have struggled with the concept of the Trinity. Like many other followers of Jesus I suspect, I have lived for many years with questions, even misgivings, about this doctrine. The orthodox …
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An awakening is beginning,
The half living now arise.
All those scales which they accepted
Are now falling from their eyes.
