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Long before the morning stars sang together I started my journey.
A million times have I been born, yet never was I born free.
Citizenship of one form or another bound me to its law,
And now love binds me before the steps to my Beloved’s door.
Bondage is the natural state of man, only as Truth are we free;
There is far too much loose talk about freedom which is and will be.
The past weighs us down, the thought of the future fills us with fear—
So we stick to mill-treading and back-slapping and a glassy tear.
Each one of us was with Jesus in his Is-ness
Before Abraham the father of nations was.
The trouble is that travel darkens the mind, and so we have forgotten
That each one of us is the dearly loved son, the only begotten.
You, dear heart, may accept this or not: in my own case I had to start out
Long before the stars sang in order to join the sons of God in their shout.
A loving revealing of what he really is and what we really are, done in a typical calm Francis no nonsense manner.
Citizenship is the network of relationships and bondage to species, social imperatives and instincts. We are bound, in nature, until we realise we are Truth.
No emotional striving to convince us here, just plain statement of his own realization.
The cliché saying is that travel broadens the mind. But his and our immense journey through time and space has made us forget the light which is us.
The great shout of the stars as sons of light is so much better an expression than the ‘big bang’.
‘Glassy tear’ suggests emotion out of a bottle as well as superficiality. We are all scared and so stick to herd behaviour, unable to realise the enormous assurance the poem gives.
Francis is quoting Jesus’ own words, “Verily, verily I say unto you, before Abraham was I am.”(John 8:58) In the last stanza there is an echo of Jesus reference to “the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” (John 17:5) This is Jesus as the eternal logos, the one always within us.