Norfolk Island -- the Convicts

The lash of time, the grinding seas

Have beaten on this lonely rock

Where the wild seabirds wheel and turn,

Alone amidst their seeming flock.

Here history has shed her tears

On bitter, dark brutality:

The monstrous sadism of man

Destroying human dignity.

Here many, many men were crushed

For the dull crimes of humankind;

And Hope was buried in the dust

And Pity was made deaf and blind.

And Justice turned away her head

And cunning wrought new paths to pain,

Men’s souls were to a treadmill fixed

To limp through hell again, again.

And down the way, in finer homes,

Sat genteel ladies taking tea

Their eyes averted from the things

It was not suitable to see.

And now the stones are crumbled down

And the sweet grass grows green and free

But still a sorrow soaks this place

Where men once moved in misery.

May we in prayer be thoughtful here

Lest careless hearts be turned to stone

And history on her treadmill still

Brings us to do as they had done.

My Hair

My hairdresser calls it curly,
My mother still thinks it's straight;
I say it has a mind of its own
And that seems to be my fate.

It isn't the sort that's exciting,
But at least it covers my head.
But i just had a disturbing thought:
Will it still grow after I'm dead?

The Day we Changed

We were not afraid. That was the thing that surprised us the most. We had been afraid, so afraid for … well, it felt like forever. Even seeing the Risen Lord, while it had set our hearts dancing, had not eliminated our fear. We had a new confidence, we were certainly praying differently, but we still lived in the old habits of fear, just as we had so often when He walked among us in flesh and blood. We were human, and all human beings come into this world with some degree of fear, and most of us carry it so habitually that we do not even name it when we shrink away from the terrors of life and the risks of love. I can still hear His voice, the very tone of it, so tender and yet so challenging, as, over and over He said to us, “Oh you of little faith …”

But now it had all changed, and, when we had time for reflection, we only knew and named our fear for the first time by its absence. And to think that it was only fifty days after the greatest terror most of us had ever known! Some, mainly the women, had dared to stand there and watch Him die; the rest of us had already fled in terror, and the news they brought us only broke our hearts further. There is no darkness like the night when you believe that even God has failed you.

Then He rose from the dead, and our understanding was turned inside out, and our hearts were reborn. He came, He went, and we could not reason His comings or His goings, but we drank from His presence, for we knew then, with a universe re-shaping certainty, that we were more privileged even than Moses or Elijah, for we saw the face of God in the Man, Jesus Christ, even while we yet walked upon the earth.

And then he left us, hidden by a cloud as he returned to a glory we cannot yet comprehend.  We mourned His going, we who had been privileged above all those who had lived before us, and we returned to huddle prayerfully in the upper room, while we waited for the fulfilment of a promise we did not understand. But we knew that the One who promised had conquered death and returned to the glory of the Father, and we were learning to believe Him.

Then, on the morning of the feast of Pentecost, our world was changed forever. For as we prayed, God came down among us. He came with the sound of a mighty rushing wind, and a visible sign of tongues of flame, and more than one of us recalled the story of how he had come down to our people on Mount Sinai, so very many years ago. Those were the outward signs, the things that we could name. But deeper, of course, was the experience we could not name, the experience of the transformative power of God, the unshakeable glory of His love, taking up residence in our hearts. For one moment a corner of the curtain that separates the mortal from the eternal was twitched aside. We saw, we felt, we knew just a fragment of the truly holy, and we were changed forever. We stepped out into the world to tell them of the wonder of Jesus, in tongues we never knew.

And we were not afraid.

The Suffering God (after g A studdert Kennedy)

Spun through this wound of darkness

Faith is no empty sound

For the truth that pierces like a sword

Can bind the whole world round.

And the word that rends the silence

Where the heart’s blood finds its voice

Is torn from the breath of our deepest dream

Making its dreadful choice.

And He walks in all our stumbling,

Weaves music from our cries,

And love shall lift all into beauty

Where degradation lies.

For He stands in no aloofness

From our agonised despair.

Where man destroy the life of man

The Son of Man is there.

Through mud and muck and horror

And nightmare’s deepest fear;

In the shattering of our heart’s last hope

The Son of Man is here.

And we are not utterly alone

When all things crash to nought

For the nails, the spear, the crown of thorns –

He knew, He owned, He sought.

For faith is never just a word

Here in our hells he stands

Bearing the lash of our wildest grief

With nail scars in His hands.