In July 1994, I invited my father to hear someone who I considered to be one of Australia’s greatest theologians and preachers, Geoffrey Bingham. My father is someone who is always seeking redemption via the ‘new’ (like every human being, my father is ‘a believer’; he attends faithfully to the altars of the Enlightenment), and in 1994 the panacea of the day was hydrogen peroxide – the blessed H2O2! My father, with all of the enthusiasm of a new convert, shared this alternative ‘good news’ with Geoffrey who then went away and wrote this delightful little poem for him:

‘Oxygenate or perish!’ was his cry,
And I who heard it didn’t care to die;
I listened to his song of therapy
And thought, ‘Maybe he sings this all for me.’

We huff, we puff, we make intake
Of breath – our lungs enlarge to make
Sufficient air or wind or breeze
To give full life to arteries.

‘Alas!’ he said, ‘that air is not enough
To depollute the toxic stuff
That lies along our various veins
Infecting flesh and heart and brains.

‘You need to oxify the lot
To purify each tittle, and each jot
And all the flowing bright red stream
Until it’s fresh and new and clean.’

‘Enough!’ I cried, ‘Dear expert tell
How I can save me from this hell
Of inner sludge and darkest stains
And thus renew my hopeless veins

‘And purify my flesh and mind
Until my blood perfection find,
And I can breathe the wholesome air
When blood is pure and life is fair?’

‘Aitch two double O,’ he said,
‘Will like as raise you from the dead,
Its name is easy – “per-ox-ide”
That cleanses all your blood inside.

‘You put it in your drinks or food,
Or take in tablets – they are good –
Whatever means you use you gain
Fresh flow in artery or vein,

‘So oxygen will purify
And you will live until you die
And folk will cry ‘Until he died
His life was wholly per-ox-ide.’

Ah, blessed gas! Ah glorious mix
Of elements that quickly fix
The sluggish flow and give a wealth
Of glorious life and glowing health,
That we who might so soon have died
Live on through packaged per-ox-ide!

My father, who has a good sense of humour, seemed to appreciate the poem at the time. I hope he still does.

Thou requirest truth
In the inward parts:
Not merely on the lips,
Where man may mutter anything,
And seal his subterfuge,
Making it truth for him
And those who hear.

Thou requirest truth
When man is truly man:
Down in the depths beneath,
Where You alone may see:
Man senses but he does not know
That truth is the truth
That You require.

I, David, was a man of joy,
Of pleasant power,
Of daily purity.
True, I too was tempted,
But should I fall
Would know I fell
And cry to You for help.

When then I fell
And said I did not fall,
When kept within
The hellish sin I did
And made it joy, not sin,
The fires began
That ran into my soul.

At nights they burned,
By day they flamed,
Hot coals that dried
Or sweated me
Until the power had gone,
That once I knew
In doubtless joy.

When Nathan came
His piercing eyes
Looked to the depths
(His eyes were Yours);
The holy flame
Burned even more.
I was undone.

The mercy cried
Was mercy come,
The lava fled
Its burning core,
And I was freed—
The flame was gone
By mercy’s love.

The truth required
In inward parts,
The purity
Within the heart
Have come again.
No greater gift
Was ever given.

Here then I weep
For grace and sin,
The wasted hour,
The splendid grace:
Both show me truth
Is what I need,
With wisdom.

Teach me, then, Lord,
Of sin’s deceit,
The sludge of sin
That full defiles.
Give me the love
Of purity,
The only truth.

Now sings my heart,
The heart so pure
The miracle of love
Has made again.
The man destroyed
Is made anew
For purity.

I know, dear Lord,
The cost is Yours.
Sin’s suffering
Is mine alone,
But Yours the pain
Messiah takes
Unto the death.

Broken I go,
Though healed.
Wisdom I know,
Though foolish.
You have unmasked
The sin that binds,
And set me free.

Freedom thus bought
Is freedom prized
And holiness
Is gift most high.
Man breathes eternity
In holiness
And knows You true.

This is the wisdom required:
This is the gift of God
Set in the inward parts,
True purity in peace
And holiness in joy.

– Geoffrey C. Bingham, The Spirit of All Things (Blackwood: Troubadour Press, 1992), 72–4.

Geoffrey Bingham – a man who I’ve often referred to as ‘my grandfather in the faith’ – has died. Geoff was one of Australia’s ablest theologians and gifted teachers. He was also a prolific writer of books, (long) hymns and poetry. Thanks be to God for such an inspiring and encouraging servant.

Geoff had a ministry throughout six States of Australia and in a number of countries overseas. An Anglican minister trained at Moore Theological College, he had pastored one church before going to Pakistan with his family under the aegis of the Church Missionary Society. There he was the Founder-Principal of the Pakistan Bible Training Institute at Hyderabad Sindh. He saw revival break out along with his ministry and had a wide coverage on the Indian sub-continent and beyond.

In 1966, he and the family returned to Australia and in 1967 he began as the Principal of the Adelaide Bible Institute (ABI, now Bible College of South Australia, BCSA). He left the college in 1973. Shortly after, New Creation Teaching Ministry was formed.

In 2005, he was honoured by being made a Member of the Order of Australia ‘for service to the community through Christian ministry, encouraging cross-cultural theological education and as an author’ (The Advertiser, January 26, 2005, 10).

Here’s one of Geoff’s poems, entitled ‘Beyond Despair’s Beyond’:

I have been born
Into a world
Strong with despair,
Tensing with fear,
Alert to the evil and calamity,
Straining and pawing at the birth,
With the tensed mother
Waiting the articulate cry
Of the new indignant,
Or protesting, flesh.

Out of the cover
Of the dark cavernous womb,
Into a larger womb,
The still confining world,
The wider prison
Of the engulfing cosmos.

Listening I hear the sounds,
The murmured opposition,
The muttered protest,
The first ripples of indignation
That will grow to the anger
Bursting in a surfing roar,
The battering protest
That first invades, then crashes
On the unassailable shore.

Of what am I speaking?
What is my astoundment about
But the inherent, the innate
Rise to the justified anger
Of the beleaguered humanity
Beleaguering the vindictive world,
The harsh weight
Of the unavoidable circumstances,
The poor jokes on the holy venom
Of the indestructible God.
This the understood Fate,
Inexorable and not comprehensible,
Fearful and vengeful,
Implanting the guilt faculty
That the imagination may twist
The knife of failure, the sharp edge
Of intolerable finitude
And human helplessness.

I am a man, one such
Of whom I speak,
I too have scanned and felt
The inexorable God and His fate,
The unpassioned, the uncanny action
Of His devastating wars, the destructible,
The shattering spears of pain
Piercing, evoking the inner stress,
Causing the fear of dreaded doom.
With other men—the other angry—
I am the warrior of despair,
The vagrant marine of anguish,
The flighting airman of the cavernous skies,
The doomed terrestrial of the Holy bloodiness,
Clenching my fist at the Uncaring,
The calloused and unfeeling One
Indifferent to His earthlings,
Of the flesh that knows beauty,
And the heart that hates
When confined concepting
And intense intellecting
Breaks into the wider sphere
And ranges round its God,
Raging and raging, scaling,
Eagling the higher realm,
Unmantling the supernal Majesty,
Unmasking the Ineffable,
Unclothing and revealing
The Eternal Failure,
The incompetent Deity.

I have lived where men and women
Crouch in the cabins of despair,
Freighted with the contemporary burden,
The massive accumulation
Of the unending sorrow, the suffering
Of the unending race, the timeless
And the angry passing on
Of the caravans of their past,
Weighted with bewilderment
And loaded with the bric-a-brac
Of useless anguish. I have lived
Where the hot and hasty anger
Compounded itself;
Shrieking at the Inexorable,
Little wonder that the puny fists
Beat in their hatred, hammered in wrath
And unmagnificent despair
On the stolid gates, the impassive
And pillared doors, silent as sentinels
Of the heedless Eternal.

Not for all time can man thus live,
Pitting his wits, securing his weak wisdom
Against the silent Celestial.
He must act. He must hate.
He must rage until the inner fires
Commit their own holocaust,
The self-destructing of the savage soul
Until it withers down
To muttering inanity, mouthing
The incomprehensible gloom
Of his dark nether regions.
Not for long, not for ever
Can the galled spirit sustain itself;
The rushing and receding tides
Of its stimulating but suddenly
Sterile adrenalin. The Object must enlarge,
Expanding into the Gloomy and the Vengeful,
Old Inexorable with His relentless grasping
Of the poor prideful flesh, the befuddled
He once initiated and now
Sustains for its self-wrought orgies
Of justful pride and bloody indignation.

Give us the heights to soar, discovering;
The depthful depths to plummet,
Uncovering the dimensions that we did not know—
If they be there (they must be there)—
Or wholly annihilate, compress
Into ultimate nothing the wounded
And the angry, or else
Make us the creatures who can comprehend
The fool futility, and know
Despair’s dimensions are but tragedy,
That justful anger is but baneful pride,
Hubris above the true Celestial,
Idiocy of the self-appointed judge,
The earthly fleshling soaring high
Beyond his rightful realm.
Show us the guilt is but the good,
The gift of God, communicating,
The prodding of the conscience,
The awakening power
Of the new sensitivity.

Not in the ultimate is despair;
Not in the outcome is the fear;
And not the terror is the true telos:
But in the gentle spirit, meek in face,
Of the Inexplicable. Knowing is there
For the finally humbled,
The consummated simple one
Who no longer batters at
The serene Celestial.
His is no bitter wrath. Not one is justified
Who has not hung on the same Tree
As that of the Authentic Sufferer.
None has entered into the true anguish,
The embracing love, the universal agape
That answers only the proliferating query,
That brings the ignorant questionnaire
To its own and obvious end.
Nerveless hands cease their trembling,
The baffled spirit its eternal questing,
And the angry muttering
Dies to a painful silence
Where the constant steady dripping
Of love’s clotted gouts
Strike answers on the desolate rocks
And the dry and dreary stones
Of more desolate Golgotha.

Not in the brilliant concepting,
Nor in the peerless logic
Of immaculate man—the justified one—
Lies the answer. Not in the burning quest
For cosmic and anthropothic justice
Lies the healing, the final peace
Of the embattled and embattling
Humanity. Justice brings nought
Of itself. No peace ineffable,
Or serenity ensconced; not
Until the love itself
Justifies the unjust, the prideful,
In the vast and swirling vortex,
The incredible complex
Of the Ineffable, suffering.

Down there in the dark maelstrom,
The inexplicable anguish, the strong tides
Of the simple suffering lies the complete.
There alone is the living solution,
The unknowable revelation made known,
The outworking actuation of the love
That dooms death to death,
Tails dread mortality and its evoked anger
To its inevitable extinction.
Incomprehensible is love’s comprehensible
Until the astounded spirit grasps the hem
Of the Celestial suffering.

The dark tides of the self-compounded anger
Still rage in the multifarious madness
Of the enraged humanity. The crazed surf
Still breaks with its booming
On the barriers of seeming fate.
The roar, however, is the lie
And the sneering sophistication
Of the unwise, the smooth, superficial
And blasé creature, cynical and joyless,
The ungrateful man, unknowing yet knowing
He must cast the Eternal love in gloomed garments
Of the Inexorable, the ruthless, relentless
And painfully pitiless, the darkly Inexplicable;
Else would his own unempathy
Be unmasked, and his fierce tides
Protesting in hypocrisy his own primal purity
Appear as the sewage of the heart,
The pathetic litter of his own wayside
Strewn from eternity to eternity;
The graffiti of his own mind
Inscribed in furtive secrecy
Against the kindly Eternal
Who gave him birth in love.

Beyond the despair lies No-despair;
Beyond the gloom, the doom, and justful rage
Of the unjust imagination
Lies the serenity, the peaceful persistence
Of the generative love. Think not then
The high indignation upthrust from authentic truth,
The true purpose, the living telos:
Know, rather, that its rebel pride
Rears back from the true submission,
The functional fullness
Of the primal creation. Lordship is lost
When the prideful spirit reaches to take
And grasp the Celestial initiative
And its high prerogatives.

Believe not the brilliant artistry,
The cunning sophistry, the conniving,
Portraying the stark, deifying despair,
Giving grandeur to its indignation
At massed cruelty, divine ruthlessness,
And feeding the impassioned spirit
With fuel for its indignation.
Come, dethrone the judge within;
Let him stand under judgement,
Bowed in the dock of God, accepting the verdict
And the Divine execution, the true edict
Of the holy Judge; then let him say
If ever he saw such vindication,
Such fiat of acquittal, such liberation
Of the darkful doomed humanity,
Such glory of liberty imposed
By holy Love, in the empathic motions
Of the eternal crucible, the Cross
Crucial to man and God, the pitted hate
The Ineffable endured in the paling flesh
Of his ceaseless suffering. Anger not only dies
But with it the despair and the doom;
The gloom dissolves in the brilliant blaze
Of the Sun of righteousness
Who breaks on the ebullient day,
Emancipating the purified spirit,
Delivering it to its true destiny,
Thrusting it forward resistlessly
To the Divine delights, the endless banquet
Of the eternal Love. Pleasures are prodigal
At His right hand, everlastingly.

Here, where the new humanity
Breaks into transforming truth,
The lie is doomed to die, the light to flow
And the new un-anger and un-rage
To gladly justify the God who justifies,
And for ever to explore
The stately and stretching dimensions
Of the authentic, the promised peace
And the eternal serenity.

– Geoffrey C. Bingham, ‘Beyond Despair’s Beyond’, in The Spirit of All Things (Blackwood: Troubadour Press, 1991), 65–72.