original: John Newton (1725-1807)
revised: danny bloom (1949-2032)
SUNG TO THE OLD TUNE OF ''AMAZING GRACE''
Amazing Race
-- new lyrics for an old song --
Amazing race, how cool we are
A long-lived family tree.
We are one on Earth unbound
Once born, we breathe, we see.
O human race there's naught to fear
life's one sweet journey true
How precious is each day we live
You! and you! and you!
Though many dangers, toils and snares
Lurk behind the doors of fear
Yes, we ARE one amazing race
and science brings us nearer.
There is no God and that's okay
We just must stand up tall
And fight injustice where'er it lies.
We're connected, one and all
But when our flesh and hearts do fail,
As mortal life does end,
The human race goes on and on
and love wil last, my friend.
We've been here tens of millions of years
And more, till the end of time.
So wipe away those silly tears
Be strong, be good, be kind.
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4 comments:
Amazing Grace and
the Trail of Tears
By Eric Shackle
http://bdb.co.za/shackle/articles/amazing_grace.htm
Amazing Grace, "almost certainly the most spiritually moving melody ever created," was written by John Newton, an Englishman who had been in turn a slave and a slave-trader. Seventy years later, across the Atlantic, thousands of displaced Cherokees sang the hymn as they were herded along the tragic Trail of Tears.
After a checkered and violent career as a boy and young man, Newton "saw the light," and ended his days as a respected clergyman in the English village of Olney, whose other claim to fame is its annual Pancake Day race (described here last month).
"Amazing Grace might very well be the most easily recognizable hymn ever written," says the Newton Library website. "It's been recorded by popular singers, performed on TV, used in commercials and it was even played in it's entirety during the broadcast of the women's gymnastic competition of the 1996 Olympics. Many people who never stepped foot in a church could recite the first few lines and maybe even the whole first verse..."
In her book, Amazing Grace, The Story of the Hymn, Linda Granfield wrote "Newton was a man of paradoxes: for many years he earned his living from the slave trade, and yet he was for a short while a slave himself, planting lime trees in Sierra Leone. A horrific storm at sea in 1748 led Newton to his new life as a minister and anti-slavery activist. He recollected both his deliverance from the storm, and his life without God, in his most famous creation."
Al Rogers, a librarian with the General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin. wrote a detailed biography of Newton in the July-August 1996 issue of Away Here in Texas. Here's an extract, copied with his permission:
"
"Newton was born in London July 24, 1725, the son of a commander of a merchant ship which sailed the Mediterranean. When John was eleven, he went to sea with his father and made six voyages with him before the elder Newton retired. In 1744 John was impressed into service on a man-of-war, the H. M. S. Harwich. Finding conditions on board intolerable, he deserted but was soon recaptured and publicly flogged and demoted from midshipman to common seaman.
"Finally at his own request he was exchanged into service on a slave ship, which took him to the coast of Sierra Leone. He then became the servant of a slave trader and was brutally abused. Early in 1748 he was rescued by a sea captain who had known John's father. John Newton ultimately became captain of his own ship, one which plied the slave trade.
"Although he had had some early religious instruction from his mother, who had died when he was a child, he had long since given up any religious convictions. However, on a homeward voyage, while he was attempting to steer the ship through a violent storm, he experienced what he was to refer to later as his 'great deliverance.'
"He recorded in his journal that when all seemed lost and the ship would surely sink, he exclaimed, 'Lord, have mercy upon us.' Later in his cabin he reflected on what he had said and began to believe that God had addressed him through the storm and that grace had begun to work for him..."
[Safely back in England, Newton married, and taught himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew.]
by ERIC SHACKLE, above/below
syd goldmith says
''Good! Stick around until 2050. Make more time = more good.'' -- Syd
EMAIL
''Hi Danny. Congratulations for the words of ''Amazing Race''.
Can you get someone to sing the song and turn it into a video?
Cheers, Eric Shackle,''
92 years old, Australia journalist
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