View from the Big Hills

  I don't normally react deeply or positively to Methodist hymns. As my favourite Gospel singer, the late Larry Norman, sang in the early 1970's, " I don't like none of  those funeral marches, I ain't dead yet!" As a child, Methodists always came across as being even nicer than Anglicans. More a case of "cake and more cake" rather than Eddie Izzard's "cake or death." However, recently, when I heard Irish songstress Joanne Hogg sing the first two verses of an Iona song, "Empyrean Dawn," my heart melted and my spirit soared: "How wonderful this world A fragment of a fiery sun How lovely and how small The smallest seed in secret grows Thrusting upward and so soon The bidding of the Light The bud unfurls into a rose The wings within the white cocoon Are perfected for flight The migrant bird in winter fled Shall come again with spring And build, in this same shady tree" Beautiful imager...