More on Richard Wurmbrand

Richard Wurmbrand
by Stewart Henderson

i only met him once
his long body
curved and delicate
like a well sucked wishbone

and behind his eyes
the memories of countless nights

manacled to the nightmares of Satan
his ears besieged by devilish anthems

declaring that his Christ was dead

And now every movement
magnifying the taut weariness

of a prisoner of war
a walking twig
a victim of the fight
between heaven and hell

his body like the Messiah's

so gladly given to torture

for the sake of strange mystical things

like resurrection and kneeling with angels

to sing the joyous symphonies of paradise

I only met him once

and I walked away and wept

from http://www.releaseinternational.org/ reg.charity 280577 PO Box 54,Orpington BR5 9RT

01689 823491

'My dear brothers and sisters in the West,
I, in my solitary cell, in the grip of tuberculosis which
invaded my whole body, sit with the angels as in a theatre and watch everything that is happening, that has happened, and is yet to happen.
God abides in me. If He abides in me, He brings with Him all His responsibilities. They become mine... If God lives in me and you, it depends on us whether beauty will conquer, or whether mankind will deteriorate more
and more.
If God the Father and Jesus Christ abide in a Christian, it becomes his task to change the perverted, the immoral, the obsessed, the ambitious, the robbers; to transform a neurotic world into a world full of serenity.
...Jesus said that the second commandment, to love your neighbour, is like the first, to love God. If you love us, the oppressed Christians in the Red camp, you love God, because God is within us, in cell eleven, and twelve, and thirteen, and in the cell with the rats and in the cell reserved for tortures.
I cannot tell you what to do for us... Our Bibles have been confiscated. Our families eat garbage. I don't know how you can reach them. But you are the abode of the almighty and omniscient God. He must know.

Wurmbrand

by Chris Welch

The fifty or so carrion Christians

hunched round Baptist arcs and curves

one expectant evening Sunday meeting

tucked compulsorily 100 Conformist metres or so

from the main London Oxford thoroughfare,

a stone's throw from what would be THE Crown,

The Four weddings and a Funeral pub.

Carrion Christians,

gathered then

for rich Communist pickings of

suffering, endurance,

as Red atheist twisted ideology grasps

for life like an outstretched arm

from its own self-burial of heartless dogma,

grasping yes at the last vestiges of sainted resurrection

to be sucked from innocent lives,

Christians,writers,artists,daring outspoken reformers....

He stood there, this Wurmbrand,

already tall, now towering in the Baptist pulpit.

Silent. But then fixing us with his eyes.......

******
We knew evangelically

evangelistically

that you asked Jesus in. You sang songs.You heard sermons.

About a future time, after death.

A firm resounding symphonic hope exploding in

organ firework splendour of hymns sung so heartily..

muffling deeper questions of what now? what here?

what in my family, what in my town?.........

Have you ever seen lightning strike?

Have you watched

time cease to be?
Have you seen life fork violently left from

a determined expected course?

********

Richard Wurmbrand straightened,

then beamed with a light I have seen only a handful of times.

A light that divides all that you ever believed or knew or thought you knew.

A light that shipwrecks self-determinism. For in this light was

what you would call now a "burning wormhole" straight through

to what had almost been glorious theory, but now was actual and visible -

the THRONE of a LIVING GOD.

A KINGDOM more than hoped for,

but here, now,

a safe 100 metre distance from the high street where Tesco now stands.

God has said I am no more to talk about Communist prisons, he smiled...

I am here to tell you about Romans 8 !

Carrion,

startled now, with softer frame,

ingest perhaps the first real food of their lives,

their first real chance of an eagle life of their own,

gazing through a fiery wormhole,

a Wurmbrand.