We have sung
our songs again,
songs of comfort,
songs of strength,
and we have told our tales
of yesterday,
but there is no comfort here…
Come, calls
the voice
on the wind…
come deeper
and I will
teach you
to sing….
But we have sung…
and our voices
cracked with pain
as the memories
of golden years
torment
our now diminished
state….
So, come, calls
the voice
on the wind…
come deeper
and I will
teach you
to sing….
What will you teach
us wild wind voice?
Where will you lead us?
Is there a long
forgotten song
for us to relearn?
… come, calls
the voice
on the wind…
come deeper
and I will
teach you
to sing….
I will teach you a
song
from a time of despair
when all seemed
lost
as now,
and I will teach you
to seek the hope
they sought…
only come
for this is your
true song
of faith…
…come sing of flame,
of wind,
and power,
of scattering
and miracles,
of beginnings,
and endings
only to begin again….
this is your
true song
this is your true
strength…
only come
leave your dreams
of comfort
look beyond yesterday
to tomorrow
... come…
I am still layed up at home with swine flu and have been using some of that time to think about who we are and where we are called to be as church. I have been re-visiting Michael Frosts "Exiles", and feel that until we as a church can truly own the fact that this is where we are then we are deluding ourselves, we are living in a familair yet strange land....
Frost quotes Hauerwas's "Community of Character" which looks at Richard Adam's book Watership Down, highlighting how the rabbits returned to the stories of El-ahrairah their forefather who was blessed with strength speed, wit and cunning. He speaks of how the rabbits whose instict is to burrow in the cool earth set out instead in a search for a new land and a new way of living...
Finding that new way of living mean setting out on an expedition across country where they will inevitably meet dangers and trials; to do so we need to return to songs not of our glory days but songs of Spirit and power.....
...and we need to tell our stories as exiles because that is what we are, we need to open our curtians onto this unfamiliar yet well known landscape, to open our their eyes to see it as, to accept and even to lament our state of exile, and then to sing a new yet ancient song...
