Questions of science
Science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart
I apologise if it makes you feel bad,
seeing me so tense, no self-confidence
but, you see, the winner takes it all.
Put the music on
put the music on
put the music on
they all wanna dance....
And you do it with love!
I searched out my companions
who were lost in crystal canyons,
when the aimless blade of science
slashed the pearly gates.
It was then that I knew I'd had enough
burned my credit card for fuel;
headed-out to where the pavement turns to sand.
With a one-way ticket to the land of truth
and my suitcase in my hand
how I lost my friends
I still don't understand.
They had the best selection;
they were poisoned with protection.
There was nothing that they needed,
nothing left to find.
They were lost in rock formations
or became park bench mutations;
on the sidewalks and in the stations
they were waiting, waiting.
So I got bored and left them there;
they were just dead weight to me.
Bbetter down the road
without that load.
And when the thrasher comes
I'll be stuck in the sun,
like the dinosaurs in shrines.
But I'll know the time has come
to give what's mine.
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
"I supose you are Real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."
In my own view probably no theologian has understood the deep humanity of the Lord Jesus better than Calvin, and it seems to me that is often the measure not only of a man's mind, but also of his heart.
Temptation's not an easy thing,
Adam given the devil rein;
cos he sinned I got no choice,
it run in my veins...
but 'm pressing on.
We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
'Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.
"Gospel story" is a verbal way of accounting for reality that, like the incarnation that is its subject, is simultaneously divine and human. It reveals, that is, it shows us something we could never come up with on our own by observation, experiment or guess; and at the same time it engages, brings us into the action as recipients and participants, but without dumping the responsibility on us for making it turn out right.
This has enormous implications for the way we live, for the form itself protects us against two of the major ways in which we go off the rails: becoming frivolous spectators who clamour for new and exotic entertainment out of heaven; or becoming anxious moralists who put our shoulders to the wheel and take on the burdens of the world. The very form of the text shapes responses in us that make it hard to become a mere spectator or a mere moralist. This is not a text that we master, it is one that we are mastered by.
