Thanks to the CASE team (CASE = Centre for Apologetic Scholarship & Education) at New College, I’ve enjoyed receiving their quarterly journal for the past few years. Each one has a theme, and they’ve had some real winners in the last two years, including on:
- music and theology
- theology of work
- end of life ethical matters
- acts of God and natural disasters.
The latest CASE magazine thinks all about Christmas: its incarnational theology, its marketing, its use in literature and so on.
A couple of articles also bemoaned the lack of serious Australian poetry and song connecting Christ’s nativity with the Australian context.
I doubt I will ever make a contribution to solving that problem. But I was reminded of the brief friendship I made with Adrian Lane, who was tutor at Moore College for one year, when I was a very green young theological student, and before he went off to teach at Ridley.
He was very kind to me. More importantly, for the purposes of this blog, he is a published poet with his volume Southpaw. I hope he won’t mind me sharing his Australian Christmas contribution…
Southern Christmas
The season’s wrong, the reasons wrong
We only want to party
The light is long, the heat is high
Drought makes brown, wind makes dry:
No candle for a baby.
But the season’s right, the reasons right
We must indeed have party
For God has come to heal his home
So sail and swim and rest and feast:
It’s God who makes the party.
The flame’s been lit, the darkness gasps
Soon will the serpent’s head be crushed
This peasant king, this shepherd lamb
The others know and kneel before
Has made his home the undersphere
All for love’s sake has chosen poor:
He’s in our hands! –
Never will south be honoured more.
If you are into poetry, especially Aussie poetry by a Christian, you could order Adrian’s book from Ginninderra Press (scroll down, or search in this page for “Lane”).
