Exiles on The Glory Road
For Phillip and Wendy (Last Name withheld by request)
Dateline (Location withheld by request)
Words and Music Pat Drummond

She was a sixteen-year old Baptist girl
Devout and constant; sheltered from the world
She came into his life to care for the children
and his wife and came to care for him as well

She sensed in him the despair
that broken fallen soul displays
He sensed in her an affair
that would set his heart and soul ablaze
and in that conflagration
they sensed their destination
Exiles on The Glory Road

Chorus: Aged men in in ancient halls
Stare at them from their lounge room walls
Aged men judge us all
When will we realise our churches
with their Gospels of restraint
are for the healing of the sinner,
They are not for the
self righteousness of saints

The scandal raged and ran
like a grass fire wild through The Riverland
She was sent away to Adelaide;
He was pilloried and damned
Amidst Theology there was no sympathy
for the Woman or the Man
His family, elders in the church
for seven generations
they watched him write to her
with an air of shock and consternation
Then they came to them
with a writ of excommunication
Exiles on The Glory Road

Chorus

You churchmen armed with lawyer's hearts
and writs of high exemption
Against your 'Law of Love'
you cast them out beyond redemption
You do not enter in yourselves,
nor do not let them enter in
Which, of these do you
believe to be the greater sin?
All those who've loved outside the law
left hopeless and unshriven
By those whose task it was
to leave your hearts, whole and forgiven
Forgive these fools
for I will tell you in the courts of heaven
the heart that has forgiven much
may yet find itself forgiven.

Their circumstance unchangeable
still held the need for grace
nothing in their heritage prepared them for this place
A place in life where sin
can never ever be undone
And she a wife to him now with a baby son

"Is there no back at all
for each of us?" I heard them cry
"Love requires witnesses
and will not forever be denied"
Seven years of marriage now
and still their hearts unrecognised
Exiles on The Glory Road

Chorus

 

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