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I wake to a glorious absurdity.
'Risen from the dead' – what divine nonsense!
Death is death, and that's it;
there is no undiscovered country,
no other shore across a final sea.
Yet twenty centuries on, twenty disciples
and one dog,
climb the hill in the morning gloaming,
as...
Hiatus. Flowers
on the cross, the curtain torn,
the audience hushed
Evocative names - Gethsemane, Golgotha, Emmaus,
echoing in the streets of Guildford, Godalming, Esher –
exotic relics from a quaint and bygone culture,
or eternal stations of the cross?
A garden watered with tears of blood –
Gethsemane, where love and sorrow meet,
giving the lie to the...
He'd have had his feet washed sometime,
not with rich perfume or gushing tears,
but with water, by a hard-pressed servant,
slave almost, eyes cast down, and
shoulders sagging from a lifetime's toil.
And he'd have noticed. The servant
would have mattered, have counted to him.
And he'd...
God came down from his mighty throne, and said,
No longer will I sit above the clouds,
wrapped in mystery, frightening pious fools
with threats of fire and promises of bliss.
No long will I watch the world from far,
a grumbling cosmic granddad, sending plagues
and testing times to keep...
Not a light show, or a fashion parade,
Nor an ad for the latest washing powder;
Not a psychic encounter with ghosts from the past –
But a sign that our world, with its foolish folk,
Its mountains of garbage and rivers of blood
Can take on the colour of God.
A response to Brian McLaren's comment that conservative Christians often find themselves on the wrong side of truth.
The billy-goats gruff had to move,
And oh! how they feared that troll.
But when you're on the wrong side of that wooden bridge,
Get a move on: you could lose it all...
'Mind and brain are the results of neurons - and nothing else.' (Times Leader, 9.5.94)
'Awareness is merely a feature of the complexity of an algorithm.' (view cited, though not agreed with, by Roger Penrose in 'The Emperor's New Mind')
They say the human mind is nothing more
than...
Busy Professor Science with darting eyes
Explores and explains all creatures great and small;
Outgrown conceptual garb discarded lies
As he strides on, not minding me at all.
Once, long ago, he merely looked and named,
But quickly learned to cut, probe, poke about;
Looked closer, deeper...
In past times proud King God sat on his throne,
Fearsome, holy, high, feasting on praise;
Foreseeing all, beyond the end of days,
And meting justice out to sinful man.
For each meek subject he ordained a plan,
A single, narrow pathway through life's maze.
The sole way out for wilful...
A farmer snores, and his tired wife,
brushes the day's last dust from her door,
glances up at the bright new star, and
shuts it out, her mind on tomorrow.
Two lovers steal to a secret bank, where
locked in each other's limbs and eyes,
they miss the nearby birth of Love
as they rush for...
Three lifetimes devoted to astrological lore. Why?
For what far-off famine gather these stores of wisdom,
for what great battle shape and sharpen these swords?
No miserly hoards of mental treasure here,
no galleries to put the mind's fine art on proud display;
for these old masters of...
I brought them the kingdom, invited them in;
And some came along, and some chose to stay.
I preached and I healed and I freed them from sin,
But now it is time that I go on my way.
I must set my face for Jerusalem,
Though they still don't know who I really am.
O Peter: I called...