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,
An awakening is beginning,
The half living now arise.
All those scales which they accepted
Are now falling from their eyes.
God wake us from illusion, rouse us from our dream,
Free us from believing that things are as they seem.
Though everything seems solid which we can see or clutch
The quantum space within them is something we can’t touch.
Let opposites all share a common space,
The inner and the outer be as one;
Each mind reflect life’s interweaving grace
And hearts all find God’s presence deep within.
O child within the Christmas scene
Come play with us today.
Melt all the ice within our hearts
And warm us as we play.
I have often said so-called “progressive Christianity” is a notion forever in search of its own elusive definition; and that’s as good a way of explaining it as we may be able to find. We live in a post-modern world that considers the age of Enlightenment to be a post-facto reality. As such, “progressive” thinking in an age of Reason has pushed the boundaries of nearly every facet of life, except one: those ‘traditional’ or ‘orthodox’ beliefs, based on certain creeds, doctrines and dogma that still dominate what it presumably means to be “Christian.” It hardly needs to be said that it is also why so many one-time believers have outgrown their one-time faith. Calling them merely “lapsed” is misleading. So much has elapsed in the world we have all come to know and take for granted, that the once-dominant Church — — despite all its denominational varieties — has fast become a post-modern relic. Yet any critical examination of how Christian scriptures developed and how the history of the tradition evolved will quickly demonstrate how it has always been in a constant state of flux. Or, if you like, “progression.” It was only when it stopped and got stuck that we traded in the tent for a temple, and snuffed the life out of a movement that is progressive by its very nature. What then would constitute an honest statement of belief for at least this “progressive Christian?”
read moreLook behind the festive scene
Both to factory and land;
Contemplate the labour force
Using both the mind and hand.
In nature as in Jesus,
All life is truly one,
But we divide Christ’s mantle
And drown Creation’s song,
The world within and world outside
Both rest within God’s caring.
When inner streams unite with seas
They herald total sharing.
Come, let us think like mountain rocks,
Come breathe the song of scented breeze;
Come join the atoms’ quantum dance,
Come weep with all the fallen trees.
Most Holy Presence, fount of all becoming,
in you we live and move and have our being.
Can bread and wine transform our minds
With all their complex modes?
Can sharing festive liturgies
Unlock empowering codes?
