444 - Thoughts In a Plane

Thoughts In a Plane
Over Hongkong, Easter Morning, 1959*
By John R. Fleming

"There are refugees . . . lying on the pavements or squatting on the housetops in Hong Kong" (from The Holy Tryst, Church of Scotland Prayer Union, Ninth Day).

He is not here. He is risen.
Why seek the living among the dead?
This is the song that goes up today
In all corners of the earth:
While the Church is born once more
To sing His word,
The Word of Truth and Life.

Down there is the world of the dead among the living.
The world for which He died
That it might live;
The world of huddled creatures on the pavements and the roof tops,
The world of vaunting boasts, embattled words,
The world of emptiness and vanity and suffering.
God, yes, how much of suffering is there-
The homeless and the dispossessed,
The victims of man's lust and greed,
His itch to get, and have, and spend.

The cardboard shacks now sheltering
Rags and bones from the chill bite of dawn,
Once new and crisp and clean
With packaged riches from another world,
A world of vitamins and whole-meal flour and powdered milk,
Now mock the struggle for the breath of life itself.

*Reprinted from The South East Asia Journal of Theology, Vol. 1, No. 1, July, 1959, pp. 27 f.

445 - Thoughts In a Plane

How shall these dead ones live?
Why seek the living among the dead?
And yet the word was spoken
To become a shout through all the world:
He is not here, but risen from the dead, and so the dead shall live.
How shall it be heard again, amid
The clamor of such poverty and need,
Save as that same love of God in Christ
Is incarnate once more?

No stuff of dreams, but dream of God come true,
And men in Christ make real to men in need
The suffering and triumphant love
That died between two thieves
And is alive for evermore.