The spring has come

The spring has come. Shirley Erena Murray* (1931-2020). Written on a Spring morning in August 1990, this text grew from a prayer phrase, ‘God is at the heart of it’, and summons the Church to be part of springtime: ‘new people are the heart of it’. The author notes that the phrase ‘the springtime of the church’ was associated in her mind with the Taizé* community, but subconscious sources for this exuberant text may include the well-known American nursery rhyme, ‘The spring is sprung, the grass is riz,/ I wonder where the boidies is’ as well as Revelation 21: 5. It was first published in Murray’s American collection, In Every Corner, Sing: The Hymns of Shirley Erena Murray (1992) and has...

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