At The Birthing of This Year
Cosmic Mystery Series
New Year
AT THE BIRTHING OF THIS YEAR
Tune:
ST. EDMUND77.77.D.
G. Steggall 1826-1905
- In this cosmic story’s thread
Humans play a tiny part
Yet some portions of this tale
Still live on in brain and heart.
Patterns that the atoms showed
Go right back to starting time
And the ladder of our genes
Forms a great repeating climb.
- Jesus hanging on that Cross
With forgiveness could proclaim
God’s great loving will endure
And will never ever wane.
Suffering is the holy path
To compassion’s sacred flame.
- We can view our story’s march
As a great and magic tale
Without evil in each part
Where the just always prevail.
But that’s not how all things are ,
Good and evil are all mixed;
Even Church was not exempt
With some errors still unfixed.
- Why, oh why, do we forget
Wisdom which we left to rot
As we reinvent the wheel
And we lose the wider plot.
So let’s learn from all the past
Sad results of human greed;
As the love of wealth and pow’r
Birth their most destructive seed.
- All the time that our life shares
With this planet we call Earth
Gives us chances for new growth
In our loving and self-worth.
Anger then will be reshaped
Through a heart that feels secure,
As we share with other lives
God’s great love that shall endure.
Text © William Livingstone Wallace
Click Here for Sheet Music – St Edmund
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Click Here for Full Index to William L. Wallace’s Series
Hymns “Cosmic Mystery”
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William (Bill) Livingstone Wallace is a retired New Zealand Methodist Minister and one of our most prolific contributors. Bill says that his work springs from communicating with the fire in his gut and his observation of both the internal and external aspects of the Cosmos. Since an early age, he has been both sympathetic to and critical of the church, announcing at the age of 13 his belief in evolution. In his youth, he struggled with the disconnection between art and spirituality in his own and other denominations and with the way in which all of the liturgies prior to the sermon were regarded as preliminaries and longer sermons were viewed as superior to more concise ones.
He holds a B.A. in philosophy and a Dip. Ed. and is the author of nine published collections of his hymns as well as other resources on our website. His aim is to help people be empowered by the divine within them and the Cosmos and to work to overthrow the forces of personal and institutional greed which destroy both the ecosystem and human society.
Click Here for a Full Biography of William L. Wallace
Click here for a complete list of his work on ProgressiveChristianity.org