Garry Harris' Becoming . . . (Poetry Reflecting Theology)

Harris, Garry. Becoming . . . (Poetry Reflecting Theology). Rose Park, South Australia:
Parish Print, 1995.

Becoming . . .

(poetry reflecting theology)

Garry Harris

1945 . . .

Dedication

This volume is dedicated to
the good people of the Dulwich Rose-Park United Parish
who suggested, encouraged and supported this project.

Acknowledgement

Some of these poems have previously appeared in The Australian Christian and elsewhere. They are published in this volume free of copyright infringement. Permission is given to use individual poems in Worship services, Church Bulletins and News-sheets.

Published and printed by Parish Print Inc, Cnr. Alexandra Avenue and Prescott Terrace, Rose Park, South Australia.

FOREWORD

The title of this volume "Becoming . . ." reflects the process nature of both theology and life. Each work is a small step in a journey and discloses something of the path I have taken.

These poems are not necessarily the product of protracted theological reflection. They are questions and cries from somewhere deep within demanding expression.

It seemed reasonable to begin this collection with reflections on Advent, the beginning of the Christian year. Lenten/Easter meditations are followed by the broader considerations of Faith, Heresy; Salvation; and Proclamation.

Some readers may wonder at the section entitled Heresy. Indeed, all our theological statements are heresy for we see in part, we understand in part, and we know only in part. I have used the term here to typify those times when we have clearly misunderstood God's intention and purpose.

Some of the works contained m this volume are challenging, some may be disturbing and confrontational. Hopefully, some will also be comforting and confirming.

These poems are submitted with the belief that at a fundamental level, life and theology are inextricably entwined. They are offered to you with the prayer that as you engage them they will speak to your life of the mystery that is God.

Dulwich, South Australia, 1995

CONTENTS


1. SONGS OF ADVENT/CHRISTMAS
Incarnation	1
Finitude	1
Trilogy	1
Magnificat	2
The "Have-Not" Christmas	2
The Surprise Party	2
The Shepherds	3
The Magi	3
The Presentation of Jesus	3
Christmas on the Dole	4

2. SONGS OF LENT/EASTER
The Unforgiven	5
The Temptation	5
Hosanna Etc.	6
Complicity	6
Holy Waste	6
Beyond Judiciary	7
View From the Hill	7
The Culpable	7
Friday's Battle	8
Double Exposure	8
Confession	8
The Colour of our Faith	9
Irrepressible	9
Chronologia	9
Post - Resurrection	10
The Land of Easter	10
Waiting	10

3. SONGS OF FAITH
Faith	11
A Sustaining Faith	11
Journey	11
The Journey	12
Knowing	12
Heartbeats	12
Introspection	13
Vision	13
Silence	13
Communion	14
The Desert	14
God's Moment	15
The Call to Discomfort	15
Spiritual Growth	16
Eternity's Child	16
Constant Companion	16
Invading Love	17
Quietude	17
Relationship	18
The Living Church	18
Common Life	18
The Meal	18
The Divine Transition	19
Cross-bearing	19
Internalized Law	19
Pentecostal Prayer	20
The Holy Now	20
The Final Judgement	20

4. SONGS OF HERESY
Heresy	21
Alas Eden	21
The Idol-makers	22
The Xenophobes	22
Pneumacide	22
Friend Death	23
Denial	23
the flight-quest	24
Identity Crisis	24
Prayer for the City-dwellers	25

5. SONGS OF SALVATION
Life Force	26
The Rhetoric of the Cross	26
Broken	27
The Sleep of Death	27
The Long Weekend	28
Sagacious Folly	28
Gardening	28
Divine Benevolence	29
The Christ Candle	29
The Blessed	29
Free	30
The Grammar of the Gospel	30

6. SONGS OF PROCLAMATION
Gadarene	31
Song of the Blind	31
Parable	32
The Empty Pulpit	32
The Preacher's Confessional	32
Recital Theology	33
The Mission	33
Sacramental Preaching	33
The Work of the Just	34
Responsibility	34

- 1 -

1. SONGS OF ADVENT/CHRISTMAS

Incarnation

The obscenity of dislocated dimensions,
When eternity invaded time.
The intrusiveness of Incarnation,
When God shattered our comfortable linear construct with the eternal moment.
The end of this outrageous conceptual collision,
Afforded the Eternal time to die.

Finitude

Lord of history, Lord of our days,
God of our moments and our heart-beats:
Austere transcendence was discarded
As you embraced enfleshment and assumed
human particularity.

Trilogy

The light that shone at Bethlehem could not be
extinguished by Calvary, and shone forth from the Tomb.
The cradle, the cross, and the empty sepulchre stand,
as a trilogy of witnesses to God's love.
And the first statement of this divine trilogy was
heard in a baby's cry at Christmas.

- 2 -

Magnificat

Mary's soul praised God;
As Christ, our older brother,
Slept helplessly in her womb.

The "Have-Not" Christmas

Christmas, a time of giving
Is also a time of need.
A time of "have-nots" not having:
A room at the inn; a place to lay their young.
Christmas is the time of the stable and the manger;
The homeless, struggling couple;
And the unsung compassion of an inn-keeper.

The Surprise Party

The first visitors were agog.
Not holy men,
But shepherds at a stable;
When God came down to earth,
And lay helpless in a feed-trough
Clutching at a straw.

- 3 -

The Shepherds

Faithful night-watch.
Heard heaven's word;
Sought the babe;
Carried the evangel.

The Magi

Asking directions
They heard deceit.
Discerning treachery
They went the long way home after the party.

The Presentation of Jesus

We sing with Simeon
For we have seen the Lord's Salvation.
Light to the Gentiles; Glory to Israel.
With dimpled chubby legs.

- 4 -

Christmas on the Dole

It's Christmas, Lord, and I am out of work.
It's not going to seem like Christmas this year.
There won't be much for the children --- a tree, some tinsel, that's it.
What a present to give them, the memory of Christmas on the dole.

It's not my fault Lord, but God, I feel like such a failure.
It's hard not to be depressed.
The carols and decorations make it worse;
They speak of celebration, but I have nothing to celebrate.
The commercials on television are unbearable.
I die a little inside at every station-break.
I cry in the shower for the cabbage-patch dolls and the tinker-toys
that will not be at our house this year.

Lord, I wonder how Joseph felt.
Inadequate perhaps?
Was he plagued by this same self-doubt?
Did he question his capability as a provider?
Did self-criticism tear at his provision of a stable to welcome your gift of love?
Did self-reproach batter him as his wife delivered her first-born in a stable amongst cattle?
Did his self-esteem plummet as he stooped to lay the Christ-child in a feed-trough?

Lord, I identify with Joseph.
I am sure he wanted to do better but circumstances prevented him.

Sometimes Christmas comes at the most awkward time,
And sometimes, in those most awkward times,
Christ comes to us.

- 5 -

2. SONGS OF LENT/EASTER

The Unforgiven

God could not forgive him,
And would not.
So he lived and died with no possibility of forgiveness
-------- this stable-child.

The Temptation

Desert obedience established your Sonship.
Commitment to the divine will was fortified by the word of God.

Temptation's broken power limped cross-ward,
As forty gruelling days surpassed Israel's forty years.
And manna became self-sacrificing living bread.
Tormented from the cross as scoffers mocked,
They goaded with the satanic "if",
And called you to relinquish grief for earthly grandeur,
While faithful Jewry flinched at the outrage of a suffering Messiah.

- 6 -

Hosanna Etc.

How many palm-trees make a cross
When disappointment turns to Roman nails?
How much indifference, a crown of thorns,
When dreams of glorious war dissolve in
talk of love and peace?

That was the week that was, that stands
between adoration and, defamation; praising and cursing,
Between cries for coronation and cries for crucifixion.

That was the week that fickle humanity bared
its hand --- And God bared His.

Complicity

Calvary was no solitary event;
The pain was His,
But the shame was ours.
The Cross was His,
But "Crucify" was humankind's collective cry.

Holy Waste

Young; gifted; compassionate;
Then came "Crucify!"
And we glimpse
The power in the paradox,
Of Holy Waste.

- 7 -

Beyond Judiciary

Justice miscarried
Achieved divine purpose,
As faithfulness triumphed,
And vinegar was dispensed.

View from the Hill

Trembling at the edge of darkness,
I peered into that terrible abyss,
And saw an empty void within the human soul.

Behind me, three scarecrows on a hill,
Danced in the afternoon breeze,
As carpenters packed their tools, and fishermen took flight.

The Culpable

insensitivity and callousness
were woven into a thorny crown.
Rejection, born of disappointment and hatred
drove nails through sinless flesh,
While respectability turned its head,
and justice washed its hands.

- 8 -

Friday's Battle

Kings and Pawns, Jesters and Lords
Puppets and Potentates in the Cosmic Court.
Christ and Caesar each to their own,
Power and Omnipotence crossed that day,
While Heaven and Hell cast lots for the raiment of humanity,
And God outstretched upon the rack of grief
Saw time divide, and died to be victorious.

Double Exposure

The nakedness of crucifixion,
Tore the Temple veil asunder
Forever exposing God,
In the raw faith of a dying man;
While humanity hurled abuse.

Confession

The essence of our religion is shaped by our confession
about the man upon the cross.
From Day of Preparation to Day of Resurrection.
Dying in desolation, raised in glory.
The centurion's words on that dark Friday,
Gain credence in the light of Thomas' Easter confession.

- 9 -

The Colour of our Faith

Our new life is framed by the purple saying:
"Father forgive them."
And the white-clad words:
"Do not be afraid . . . He is risen."

Irrepressible

Spiritual lethargy succumbs to vitality,
Despair fades in the face of blatant hope,
Death yields to life that will not be denied,
As Easter invades the shadows.

Chronologia

Night of selling became
Day of trial;
Afternoon of dying;
Evening of repose,
Two days of silence.

Then came joyful morning.

Resurrection's victory bursting in on all
who henceforth would believe.

And Time, like the veil was rent in twain.

- 10 -

Post - Resurrection

God's cave-people,
Dwelling in the light that shattered time and tomb.
Children of the rolling stone,
Gathered from the far corners of existence.
Living now by faith; and nurtured by the empty sepulchre.

The Land of Easter

The terrain is sometimes rugged;
Picturesque, yet still forbidding.
The river behind us,
We march toward the certain destination
Of an ever-expanding horizon,
In the land of Easter.

Waiting

It's a long time from Easter to Pentecost,
Still days and uneventful.
Resurrection's glow fades dim
as longing spirits wait for the fresh
breath of Power.
Tarrying gives way to introspection
as tattered spirits look for Comfort.
The Divine schedule exacts its toll,
and worship becomes faithful waiting.

- 11 -

3. SONGS OF FAITH

Faith

Faith is an irreducible construct,
The reality by which we are defined.
As basic to our being as breathing,
The essence of our existence.
Defying dogmatic formulation,
This fluid entity ebbs and flows from shallows to fathomless depth;
Finding vitality in the paradox of believing where we cannot know.

A Sustaining Faith

Faith is not strong belief,
But simple recognition
Of what is so central to our being,
That to abandon it,
Is to deny ourselves.

Journey

We are called to the inward journey,
Not to a journey with compass or destination.
As venturesome pilgrims we walk in trust,
Growing in relationship, as we journey into Christ.

- 12 -

The Journey

Faith journey;
A road less travelled.
Indirect route;
Arduous, but not dispiriting.
Circuitous path;
Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and beyond.
Travelling light;
We focus on the hope.

Knowing

Understanding what we have long known,
We are strangely blessed with mystic precognition.
Reason now confirms our intuition,
As left and right spheres fuse to give us integrated faith.

Heartbeats

God who hears the beating of our hearts,
And the prayer we utter between the heartbeats,
Be in our heartbeats;
Be our heartbeats.
That this rhythmic core of life within,
May be a canticle to your creativity.

- 12 -

Introspection

Spread holy paste
Upon our insight,
That we might see.

Let the healing virtue of spittle and clay
Remedy our bent for half-intentions, and half-commitment.

Chasten us with that self-reproaching vision
Of our limited availability,
Till the meaning of our lives becomes apparent
In your holy inward glance.

Vision

God, awaken us to your "moments",
When the Divine invades the mundane,
Or rather, when we can see the Divine in the mundane.

Silence

Speaking to the silence within us
We hear Your word.
Help us to hear the word and the silence.

- 14 -

Communion

God, help us to experience prayerfulness
Rather than the busy-ness of prayers.
Help us to move beyond communication
To communion.

The Desert

Reduced to essence,
The desert reveals our core.
Stripping away our veneer of religion
Till we stand naked before God and ourselves,
And are forced to own our shadow
Whose existence we had previously denied.

Wilderness is a great teacher.
Moses; David; the Master; and we
Must eventually face its ravages,
Emerging from it different; whole; prepared;
To be God's people in the world.

Do not flee these torments.
Welcome them as life's great tutorial,
Integrating light and darkness; virtue and vanity; good and evil;
That we may present ourselves in all our propensity
To the Eternal One, who is still the God of the mountain;
the valley; and the desert.

- 15 -

God's Moment

The table is set,
We are hushed and still.
In this mystic tension we sense your presence,
For here you meet us:
At this point, between retrospect and prospect;
In this present, between past and future;
In this now, between was and will be;
In this moment, plucked from eternity.

The Call to Discomfort

The call to worship is a call to radical life,
To stand at the very outer-edge of ourselves
And grow beyond who and where we are.

It is a call to robust self-confrontation.
To re-define ourselves in terms of who we are, and what we are not.
To acknowledge ourselves as God's created people,
and to confess our secret longing to be gods.

It is a call to be whole.
To realize the terrifying joy of being one breath removed from extinction,
And to own the frailty of finitude with gusto.
Then with the abandon of the spiritually inept,
blunder into the presence of the ineffable.

- 16 -

Spiritual Growth

Silently, ceaselessly, the spirit expands
Into fertile corners of the unknown psyche.
Nurtured by the luxury of a considered life,
Reflection is the toil of a curious soul,
And partial insight its glad reward.

Eternity's Child

Teetering on the precipice,
We stumble over death,
And fall headlong into the abyss of God.
Embraced by this holy chasm we are held secure,
And see that life and death are but reference points
On the Birth-Eternity continuum.

Constant Companion

The God-filled space we occupy,
The God-filled air we breathe,
The in us, of us, through us intimacy
makes denial absurd, ignoring impossible.
We are because You Are.
We acknowledge your inescapable presence;
We embrace your constant communion.

- 17 -

Invading Love

The awkward omnipresence of the hound of heaven,
Love's inescapable pursuer
Nowhere, is not.

Outrageous persistence.
Scandalous constancy.

Infiltrating the recesses of convoluted imagination
for intimate access to the soul's inscape.

Quietude

The tyranny of silence,
As deafening word
Shrieks tacit accusation.

Empty silence is not empty,
Conscientious accusers inhabit noiselessness,
And silent sentinels like ruthless terrorists
Show no mercy.

But Christic quietness is not absence of noise,
It is the presence of the inaudible Word in our chaosmos.

- 18 -

Relationship

Never friendless, we know his constant companionship,
The Galilean traveller walks with us on our journey.
Sharing our time, he is eternally present,
And our lives are fused with his.

The Living Church

Called into relationship,
We are growing in union with God.
Changed, we are becoming what we shall be:
Functioning parts of Christ's Body.

Common Life

Between anonymity and notoriety,
Wearing princely robes and prophet's rags,
Somewhere in the glorious common stuff that is life;
We will find you Lord.

The Meal

In this meal the bread and wine
transcend their earth-bound origin.
Wheat-field and vineyard assume cosmic proportion.
Grain and grape, betoken body and blood,
And for a moment in time, we experience the Eternal.

- 19 -

The Divine Transition

Not death but fellowship,
Not sacrifice but friendship,
Not blood but praise.
Lord, you have banished the altar
and replaced it with a table.

Cross-bearing

The pseudo-crosses of eager martyrs
Trivialize crucifixion.
Crucifixion is a way of death.
It was the way of Christ.
Cross-bearing is a solemn and decisive act of will,
Which may cost you everything.

Internalized Law

Actions to attitudes;
Deeds to motives,
Outward behaviour to innermost secrets.
The integration of God's righteousness,
As the eternal spirit dwells within.

- 20 -

Pentecostal Prayer

Breathe on us God with the breath that made
Adam live.
Enliven us with your vitality, that we may be
changed from clay to living spirit.

The Holy Now

"Is" becomes "was" while we focus on "will be",
Missing the moment, our lives become anticipation of an unrealized future.
Present slides into past while we dream of time to come,
And squander the sacred gift of "now" by dwelling in a distant dimension.

The Final Judgment

In the equation of cosmic justice,
The all-sufficiency of grace,
Is paramount.

- 21 -

4. SONGS OF HERESY

Heresy

Despondent, that right does not always triumph,
good, prosper;
justice, prevail,
We abandoned Hope.
Disappointed by Divine inactivity,
Faith shrank unaware
That the misbegotten deity that we
projected skyward and called "God",
was made in our own fantastic image.

Alas Eden

Pity us Lord,
we have lost our innocence.
A tree has fallen in Paradise
And nothing is now forbidden.
So we fear because we are capable of anything,
Even the unthinkable. Especially the unthinkable.

Now we will kill our brother
Not because he is evil,
But because he is other.
Because he is not me.

- 22 -

The Idol-makers

Sophisticated; we subtly transcend golden calves,
Shaping our deity with tribal needs and clannish expectations.
Righteously conforming the Eternal to our ideology,
We are blinded to the I AM of the mountain and the bush.

The Xenophobes

Victims of our pitiful self-imprisonment,
We refuse to hear the "good news" word of liberty.
Clinging to our hallowed prejudices,
We sanctify them with virtuous wrath,
To mask our terror of otherness.

Pneumacide

Inch by inch, they killed him
With caustic word; critical glare.
Disapproval and rejection are odious companions.

Little by little, they buried him
In a grave of self-reproach.
Until, without even a death-scream,
His spirit fell silent.
Victim of the lethal armoury of acceptable murder.

- 23 -

Friend Death

The mad-man hunter
Sharpening his scythe, readies for the chase.
Hounding his prey;
in overtaking, is overcome.

Obliteration - Liberation
Time-maligned fusion of dust and destiny.
Life's Coronation is fond celebrity.

Natural comrade, unnatural foe
Despair and expectation --- ancient anomaly,
Whose truth is seen in timeless paradox:
Fulfilment of Life's Meaning
and
Ultimate Absurdity.

Denial

The condemned and the dead;
the half-dead and the living dead ---- incapable of emotion
or strong belief,
Crowding their piteous lives with Frenetic activity
as if
to deny
death
And repel its advances with a sham display of vitality.

- 24 -

the flight-quest

running from
running to
the race is on.

fear drives
hope calls
each naming its own name.

demons dog
angels beckon
------- curious poles.

The push and pull of the inner universe
dictate - motivate
-------tenuous freedom.

Identity Crisis

In becoming, I diminished.

At journey's end, I was not.

I and me, estranged.
te
My being, Dis-in gra
ted

- 25 -

Prayer for the City-dwellers

Theirs is the city,
The derelict with storefront-doorway homes.
Newspaper blankets on cold nights,
Give little comfort, like yesterday's news.

A wave of city workers,
We come and go routinely, foreigners invading their turf.
But the city is theirs; they stay.
It belongs to them.

Traffic-jams melt as afternoon becomes evening,
Familiar sounds of peak-hour fade as people slowly vaporize.
The monotonous clatter of street-cars die as workers lurch homeward,
And wizened faces emerge to repossess their nocturnal habitat.

At nightfall, soup-kitchen comrades become wine-bottle confidants.
Brown-papered sherry spills across grey-whiskers,
As the mournful rehearsal of personal tragedy sobs through the darkness.

The cold familiar asphalt, now desolate,
Echoes the empty shuffle of vagrant footsteps evading law.
Bristling street-sweepers bathe concrete corridors with nauseous fumes,
As rain-drenched overcoats queue for midnight coffee at Salvation-kiosk.

Thine is the kingdom;
Thine is the glory
but theirs is the city.

- 26 -

5. SONGS OF SALVATION

Life Force

Light invades gloom,
At the word of the Lord.
Death recedes,
At the power of God personified.
Weeping sisters cease their lamentation,
And Lazarus, entombed four days,
revives at heaven's command.
It was a kingdom day, that day in Bethany,
When decay succumbed to the affirmation of life.

The Rhetoric of the Cross

Between statement and suggestion,
Between proclamation and implication,
Between forthright pronouncement and oblique allusion,
We discover the meaning in your death.

Here upon the Cross,
Between Earth and Sky,
Heaven and Hell,
Life and Death,
We see your giving, your bleeding, your loving;
And we understand the reason in your sacrifice,

- 27 -

Broken

Help us Lord to understand the nature of your brokenness,
And to perceive that beyond the breaking of
tendon and tissue, was severance from your Father.

May we applaud that break which shook Heaven's structure;
As love and justice stood in unflinching confrontation.
May we applaud your brokenness, endured to rescue us to wholeness;
And from a broken-world of separation.

The Sleep of Death

Forlorn Saturday, sad Sabbath, gloomy day of rest;
When Jesus entered into that all too final respite
From which there is no waking.

Night by night we participate in that little rehearsal,
And gently enter that shadowy interlude which stretches unending before us.
But morning's light calls us from that netherworld between life and death,
To recreate the awakening that was His,
And stride into life renewed, assured of the victory that awaits us.

- 28 -

The Long Weekend

We live by the conflation of Friday and Sunday,
Products of the fusion of the act and the event.
Born of the life-sapping action that was Calvary,
And quickened by the life-giving event of the Empty Sepulchre.

Sagacious Folly

The bankrupt wisdom of an inverted world,
Reproaches sacrifice.
But the logic of the cross transcends sophistry,
To function on a deeper plane,
Where sacred folly is profound
And holy weakness strong.

Gardening

Golgotha's tree once grew in Eden,
The vine that saw salvation-history has long roots.
The branch once broken did not wither, but brought forth sacred foliage;
And we are grafted into that redemptive plant.

- 29 -

Divine Benevolence

God's pre-emptive gesture of love,
Has effected its redemptive purpose.
Transformed by that singular expression of grace,
We enjoy divine acceptance.

The Christ Candle

Burning too bright
To burn too long,
He lit our path
Forever.

Casting a shadow beyond his years,
He crossed our lives
With crucial intersections,
To challenge the comfortable anonymity
Of our preferred darkness.

The Blessed

With that profound wisdom of the naive,
We yield what we cannot keep
To gain what we cannot lose.
Choosing to die in order to live,
We reflect the power of Christ's self-giving
And applaud his crime of forgiveness.

- 30 -

Free

Deliverance is God's "specialty business"
The Ark;
Passover;
the Tree.
A grand monopoly in liberation,
Rebuking the shabby market-place
of our acquired bondage.

The Grammar of the Gospel*

Not "if - then",
But "because - therefore".
Not "if"; but "because",
Not "then", but "therefore",
Not "if", - Me,
But "because"; - God
Not "then"; - Law,
But "therefore", - Grace.
"Because I live, therefore you
shall live also."

* Reflections upon reading the article "The Irony and Grammar of the Gospel," by Morris J. Niedenthal.

- 31 -

6. SONGS OF PROCLAMATION

Gadarene

We are the Gadarenes,
Living amongst the tombs
in a city of death.
My comrades and I are many,
without hope,
Till we hear the Word.

Song of the Blind

The function of the seer is to see,
Then speaking with ordered precision
Transform vision into life.

But prophets seldom comfort,
And disquieting perception disturbs
So we keep our stones at hand.

The discordant voice silenced,
We insulate ourselves with pejorative
And return to muted shades of banality.

- 32 -

Parable

The telling and the hearing are folly;
Till Kingdom wisdom dawns,
And story becomes message.

The Empty Pulpit

Thunderous voice proclaims,
But words hide meaning.
Clarification becomes mystification,
Vision pales in semantic fog,
Credibility absconds at every breath
When saying precedes seeing.

The Preacher's Confessional

We who would be wise deceive the people,
Having learned - we do not know,
Not knowing - we teach.
Claiming simplicity, we proclaim the Truth,
But Truth is not so simple
Or knowledge so easily acquired.
Let the wise be silent until they learn of folly,
Then from folly let them preach to both destruction and salvation.

- 33 -

Recital Theology

Story unfolds.,
In the recounting,
Of the saving acts of God.

The Mission

We have been called to collude with God.
To draw from the Word a message for our age.
Mercy and justice, the fabric of God's dealings with humankind
Are brushed in various hues through different times.
So we struggle to find an authentic expression for this generation,
While being faithful to the double-edged nature of the Eternal.

Sacramental Preaching

The Word becomes incarnate through words;
Verbal ambassadors dispensing God's grace.
Faithful stewards of God's story
Communicate divine will, convey holy meaning.
Embraced with commissioned intent,
God's word is heard in human proclamation
And utterance becomes sacrament.

- 34 -

The Work of the Just

We who have heard God's acquitting word in Christ,
Embrace this mystic transformation.
Once strangers to God, we are now a holy people.
Justified, we now hunger for justice for others.

Responsibility

We are learner-teachers of the way;
Expounding the open-secrets of God.
Hearing, we tell;
Seeing, we declare;
Discovering, we proclaim:
Redemption-wisdom that springs from the tree.

Electronic text provided by Colvil Smith. HTML rendering by Ernie Stefanik. 6 August 1999.
This online edition of Becoming . . . published with the kind permission of the author.
Copyright © 1995, 1999 by Garry Harris.

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