SOUL SURMISE

BODIES: ROBBIE WILLIAMS AND JESUS DYING FOR HIM

So, I’m driving along in the car and before I have a chance to switch from my daughter’s favourite radio station to my Beatles’ Remastered CDs I am suddenly paying attention to a song about Jesus dying for me. I wondered if Delirious had made one final attempt at the top ten when I recognised the voice; Robbie is putting more Jesus per minute onto the radio than Nashville’s Christian industry ever attempted!

And of course we shouldn’t have been that surprised. It is not the first time Jesus has appeared in a Robbie song. On his I’ve Been Expecting You album he gave Christ some of his 100% humanity (alongside his 100% divinity in case there is a heresy trail on me!) in Jesus in a Camper Van:

“Jesus in a camper van he said sorry to leave you but I've done all I can
I suppose even the son of God gets it hard sometimes
Especially when he goes round
Saying I am the way.”

Wikipedia will tell you that Williams was sued over this chorus as it bore too much resemblance to a Loudon Wainwright III lyric, “Every son of God has a little hard luck sometime, especially when he goes around saying he's the way.” Williams claimed to have heard the line from someone else while in rehab and was unware of the Wainwright copyrighted version! Whatever, it means that in rehab Williams was thinking of spiritual stuff which might be a similar context to the Bodies song that we are coming to in a moment.

Before we get there, let us also remember the spiritual elements on Williams’ Intensive Care album. Sin, Sin, Sin that album’s fourth single mixes casual sex with religion and the video gave it the darker hue of being about the seduction of women by a religious guru. Robbie’s desire for holiness is pretty much captured in Pure from the same album quotes Augustine’s confessions:

“I got a ton of selfish genes and lazy bones
beneath this skin
Oh Lord, make me pure, but not yet...”

Fair play for his honesty but the bottom line seems to be excuses for staying the same rather than any desire for spiritual transformation. Here is a world famous wealthy young man wanting to enjoy his hedonism but knowing that he ultimately needs more and flirts with Jesus without wanting a deeper relationship because of the cost he knows it will mean.

Which has us right back, slap bang in the middle of Bodies. With a wee word play, in the title, no doubt on the hit Angels we have Robbie flirting with a whole lot more religious ideas than the one Jesus revealed with Robbie's “ley lines” and “bohdi trees.” Jesus, though still seems to be his choice of transcendence and he seems sure that he has died for him. Though, at the end there is a confusing turn about where he suggests, “Jesus didn’t die for you.” The truth is that this last “didn’t” seems to be aimed at those who don’t believe it as he concludes, “What are you on.” And the gospel choir are singing “Jesus really died for you” in response on the fade out. I am pretty sure there is a genuine declaration on the radio waves about the death of Jesus.

The song is another in a long line of “Help!” songs. Williams is a modern day John Lennon in that regard though Lennon, who had been through his confirmation classes as a teenager, never recognised God as the intended direction of his deep soul screams. Bodies is indeed the central theme of this particular prayerline song. Robbie is struggling with his reflection and his “All we've ever wanted/Is to look good naked” is close to the bone of this generation’s crisis, dilemmas, psychiatric sickness and eating disorders; it’s why this song is for a healthy soul. Once again Robbie Williams has been honest about his deep seated need, whether he will take his own advice and find hope in the Jesus whom he proclaims died for him only time perhaps will tell.

SOMETIMES IT'S MORE IMPORTANT TO LOVE...

Martyn Joseph’s song Kiss The World Beautiful is a beautifully crafted song about loving the world. As Bono later shouted “the future needs a big kiss.” It is about hope and change and good and right and a shalom-like balance to the way everything that is turns out. Though an overall success, some of the lines seem to find Joseph groping for the poetry, the direction to meet the huge ambition of the idea. There is for me one couplet that is a dog-at-my-heels line that touches the depths of my psyche and shapes my every day. After he has addressed the world and went for a chat with God, Joseph brings it all back down to loving the one he’s with. As he turns to that loved one and longs to kiss her lips he finds a truth that is explosive particularly in the religious world that Joseph and I have been weaned, damaged and healed in: -

“Sometimes it’s just more important to love

Than to always have it right...”

 

There can be little question that this is a cannonball aimed at the fundamentalism and arrogant Christianity that in a recent interview Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong said that all good Christians would be critical of. It is a line that Jesus might have used against the Pharisees. In the conservative Christian world that Martyn Joseph and I grew up in, there is an over emphasis on being right and an unloving damning dismissal and demonizing of those who don’t think exactly and correctly, as we do; the Pharisees were as much about conformity as legalism! It portrays an image of God that is far from a loving. Indeed I remember at college coming back from hearing one of the popular preachers of the day and someone saying with a condemning sneer, “I suppose it was all about love, love, love?!” I was young and a little naive and thus very confused!

Jesus seemed to be all about “love, love, love” from what I read in my Bible. When Jesus healed on the Sabbath they told him it wasn’t right; he thought it was more important to love the man with the withered hand. When they wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery and Jesus got them to drop the stones, they had the law on their side; but Jesus thought it more important to reach out in grace and forgive the woman. When he touched the leper it was not the right thing to do; but Jesus thought it important to show tangible love to the outcast. Loving God and your neighbour as yourself, never mind your enemies seemed more crucial to the soul of Christian spirituality than knowing all the theology of legal manoeuvres.

To bring it down to something personal, I am currently hearing very critical and nasty accusations on how I have acted towards someone. I understand the circumstances by which they come and that the person throwing out the malice has a condition that confuses their perspective and it is therefore not their fault. At the same time my soul’s sensitivity is bruised by hurtful lies. I want to defend myself and deny the rumours even though all those who know the truth, know the truth. Then this line of Kiss The World Beautiful, that I happen to wear on a t-shirt, stops me short. I don’t need to clear my name and prove that I am right. It is more important in this particular case where my accuser cannot help their actions to love and not always be right. In the choice of loving this person as Jesus does or vindicating my own character, by what I didn’t do and actually cataloguing all the care I gave, I need to forget my need to be proven right and simply go on loving. Lord help me to kiss this world beautiful!

 

MAN IN THE MIRROR - MICHAEL JACKSON - Song For A Healthy Soul

It was not very long after my short initial response to Michael Jackson’s passing that one of my students, Ross Cooper, spoke of the importance of Jackson to his musical and spiritual maturing and mentioned specifically Man In The Mirror. For me, I had immediately considered Beat It, Billie Jean and Thriller though the latter always seemed a better video than it was a song. My immediate acquirement of The Essential Michael Jackson allowed me to take a closer listen to this Man In The Mirror. And indeed it is a song worth consideration. The objective critique of poverty and injustice turned back on the subjective self in his complicity and need to change the world himself;

“If you want to make the world a better place

Then look at yourself and make a change.”

Challenging, inspirational, brilliant! Even the profits from the single’s sales went to charity.

In the reams written over the days following Jackson’s death I found the most profound and startling the reprint of Sylvie Simmons 1983 article for Creem magazine in The Observer’s Review Special Issue. In this interview Jackson is the wise God believing Jehovah Witness, keeping perspective and aware of the pitfalls. “I believe in God. We all do. We like to be straight, don’t go crazy or anything. Not to the point of losing our perspective on life, of what you are and who you are. A lot of entertainers, they make money and they spend the rest of their life celebrating that one goal they reached, and with that celebration comes the drugs and the liquor and the alcohol. And then they try to straighten up and they say, ‘Who am I? Where am I? What happened?’ And they lost themselves, and they’re broken. You have to be careful and have some kind of discipline.”

Though the one song on Bad not written by Jackson, this interview and many others reveals a man with the ambition of the song, Man In The Mirror. The Man in the Mirror was ironically Jackson’s greatest battle and the childhood he had, or didn’t have, and the madness of mega stardom brought all kinds of psychological challenges that prevented him winning the battle to be the man he wanted to be. In end he was unable to do what he wanted to do and ended up doing what he didn’t want to, as St. Paul suggested about himself and indeed all of us in his letter to the Romans.

But let us take our eyes off the sad demise of Michael Jackson and start with our own man or woman in the mirror. Jackson is pointing out the importance of the individual to make the change. He is eye balling our selfishness and seeing the need for a new perspective of the love in our souls. Andre Crouch and The Winans bring the Gospel effect which adds a black Gospel hopefulness to the entire thing and you realise that this is one of those altar call rock songs like Seeger’s We Shall Overcome, Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready, Springsteen’s Land Of Hope and Dreams, U2’s Yahweh or Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. You can hear the black preacher hit his crescendo, “Play the King of Pop one more time now... come on one more hand now... commit yourself to change now... One more time... ‘Oh to make a change for once in my life... I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways’... do I see one more hand there!” I’ll feebly raise mine and pray for fewer of the ghosts and demons that Jackson had to fight to be the change!

U2 - THE SAINTS ARE COMING - song for a healthy soul

U2 choose their cover versions carefully and it would seem that Edge was the instigator of this old Skids single when he looked around for a song to use for his campaign to help those made homeless, city-less, stateless after Hurricane Katrina. Hardly even a hit when released in the late seventies U2 with help from Green Day made it a number 1 across the world.

 

The Edge’s choosing of the song may have had a few threads. The New Orleans Saints is a Football team and the two collaborating bands would re-open their stadium with a live version of the song. At the time of it being recorded in Abbey Road studios there was already heavy publicity for the 200^th Anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery. The grouping of clergy and lay people who sparked the social reform of the eighteenth century were known as the Saints. They were the kind of political, religious and spiritual leaders that New Orleans needed after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city.

The Saints Are Coming was written by Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson about a friend of Jobson’s who went off to with the British Army to N. Ireland. While there his father died and the song in its original intention was a son trying to reach his father without any hope of succeeding. There was a cathartic message at the heart of the song.

It takes on another hue with the U2/Green Day version. U2 have used the phone illustration before as a metaphor for prayer. They have also made a lot of music in the tension of prayer prayed and being frustrated with the seeming silence coming back. The Psalmist knew this frustration as of course did Job.

With the video another theme kicks in. Between live shots of the band both in Abbey Road and in the New Orleans Dome there are news clips of the US army coming as saints to rescue the people of the flooded city. It is a heroic image, powerfully missional of mercy. The troops in Iraq are re-employed to save their own people rather than being distracted overseas. It reminds the discerning listener of an old Larry Norman song American Novel, from as far back as 1973 but sadly still relevant:

“You’re far across the ocean in a war that’s not your own

And while you’re winning there you’re going to lose the one at home”

 

The video demands a re-imagining. This is how the world could be like if people make different choices of re-imagining. As the video ends with the sign NOT AS SEEN ON TV. It is the dream of imaginative alternative. Powerful in the force of music and image, there is an adrenaline rush of inspiration to get out there and change the world.

LEONARD COHEN - HALLELUJAH

Christmas 2008 saw the two worlds of music as art and music as commerce mingling together in the UK number 1 single; Leonard’s Cohen covered by X Factor winner Alexandra Burke. For me, it was when Simon Cowell, who had already used the song effectively in American Pop Idol, decided that this would be the song that the winner would cover that I stopped voting for Northern Ireland own Eoghan Quigg; he was a lovely wee chap, but he’d have murdered it! The fuss around the song caused a campaign to have Jeff Buckley’s epic version beat Alexandra to number one and he nearly did. Even the septuagenarian Leonard himself touched the edge of the top 40! It was quite unbelievable stuff for a song and writer who have been round for a long, long neglected time.

I came late to my appreciation of Hallelujah even though I’d owned it since buying the Cohen album Various Positions way back in the eighties. I had thought it OK, enjoyed Bono’s rappy version and been particularly struck by the use of Buckley’s version at a reflective worship event at Calvin College’s Festival Of Faith and Music in 2005 but it wasn’t until the summer of 2008 that I finally got it. I was to lead the wedding of Richard and Anne Marie Gilpin and they had chosen two songs to be sung at the ceremony – When the Bridegroom Comes by Judee Sill and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. As with all weddings that I perform, I attempted to take the readings, hymns and songs that the couple chose and build sermon and prayers around them. I was forced to listen to Hallelujah with an intentionality that uncovered the vast treasures of Cohen’s genius. Is it one of the best songs ever written? Quite possibly.

The lazy description for Leonard Cohen’s music is “depressing.” I’ve used the idea in a poem myself:

"Think I’ll turn on Leonard Cohen

Then turn out the light

I’m not sure things could get much worse

But then again they might...”

It’s not just a lazy stereotype but also a very mistaken one and it betrays the vast panorama of human experience that inhabits Cohen’s poetry and songs. Indeed, perhaps all of that human experience is present right here in this one epic song.

Certainly there is a range of spiritual experiences from temptation to failure to doubt to confusion but in every aspect of the song and life Cohen recognises and resigns himself to the Divine. In a world where the Church is constantly triumphalist this is a timely antidote. Whether Cohen was aware of the victory marches of the evangelical charismatic Church at the time he wrote the song is surely doubtful but Hallelujah certainly gives another spin on the spiritual life. This is one for the pilgrim, stumbling, tumbling along and caught between doubt and brokenness but affirming with all the faith that can be mustered, Hallelujah!

It has been described as a secular hymn. It would not seem, however, that it was ever the intention of Cohen at this period of his career for the song to be anything more than sacred. Indeed it could be argued with a much stronger case that the song dissolves the barrier that some having mistakenly erected to divide some of life from its sacredness. Like other Cohen songs there is an earthiness, sensuality that often lies alongside the spiritual like water and oil in writers other than Cohen. Without doubt the line that would make Christian queasy would be the Holy Spirit’s involvement in the act of love in the song. This again exposes the uneasy relationship between Christianity and sex when it seems clear from Scripture that it is part of God’s design and that he has used the consummation of the bride and the groom as an image that brings the world to a climactic fulfilment. That God is somehow prudishly turning his back on two young lovers in the marital act of making love seems absurd.

Hallelujah is a carrier of story. Cohen’s Jewishness can be felt in the Psalm like prayer of the piece but the oral tradition of the Old Testament is alive and well here too. David is central to his story. Like Bono, Cohen would have obvious sense of empathy with the Psalm writer. Many of David’s Psalms were as melancholic as Cohen’s writings and he starts and ends Hallelujah with song. Verse one sees the secret chord that David played to please God and the final verse has no way to please God but relying on a frail grace filled Hallelujah. David’s story also gets mention in his temptation over the beauty of Bathsheeba but it would seem that the verse gets mixed up with Samson who is the one whose hair was cut by Delilah.

From this angle I see the song as a list of proverb like wisdom, a song strewn through with the sacred, a carrier of Old Testament story, theological insight and spiritual strength. As Cohen put it so wonderfully himself:

“Regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.’ And you can’t reconcile it any other way except in that position of total surrender, total affirmation.”

WITH BRUCE COCKBURN ON TIANANMEN SQUARE

There are moments when you make good choices over the song to play. Way back in August 1990 I pressed the play button on the old walkman (remember them) and Bruce Cockburn’s Waiting For A Miracle started throwing images around my head that mingled perfectly and disturbingly with the bombardment of images around me.

Like the ones who've cried
Like the ones who've died
Trying to set the angel in us free
While they're waiting for a miracle.

With my ears and my eyes in harmony to the disharmony, my soul attempted to make sense of my context. I was on Tiananmen Square. It was 16 months since June 4 1989 and the place was haunted by what happened there on that day. I wrote in my journal: -

“Tiananmen Square? All my thoughts on China, before and after I came here, ricocheted around the vast emptiness of this square. I will never forget this hour of my life and I’ll never be able to write down all that I thought in that too short a time.

It seemed so calm, so still, so peaceful and yet I am asking what happened here and what are the few people scattered around me thinking. I can see all these signs of history, the Monument to the People’s Heroes and Mao Mausoleum among them. But what about signs for the future? I watched people sitting, almost reverentially where the students sat the previous year and wondered what they were thinking. Did a loved one come here with a vision of a future and die for that future? The Chinese can so easily in their friendly and gentle disposition hide from us the truth of their hopes and fears.”

I have said it before and will say it again that Cockburn’s travelogue songs are so full of his lyrical genius that you just wish he was with you everywhere you go. Add places of political injustice and even more so. Waiting For A Miracle was written about Nicaragua but it fitted here. Never have I had such a detailed soundtrack to what I was seeing around me. Cockburn’s words could have been written as I attempted to write down my own thoughts: -

“Somewhere out there is a place that's cool
Where peace and balance are the rule
Working toward a future like some kind of mystic jewel
And waiting for a miracle.”

“Peace and balance” is a very Chinese concept. Working for a future and as the next verse suggests, “How come history takes such a long, long time/When you're waiting for a miracle.” A miracle? As I sat on my own, wondering and pondering and writing, Cockburn’s song was as Tolstoy suggested art should be, “Intercourse between human and human.” Cockburn and I were in conversation but more it became a resource for me to be in spiritual intercourse with God also. And my prayer was that these people, particularly the children who all smiled for a photograph and then moved their heads right on my click, that an interruption of God’s grace would bring a peaceful and balanced future and see the speed of history quicken. Twenty years on... and I remember that hour as vividly as when I was there and Cockburn still converses with me. Still I pray!

HUMAN - THE KILLERS

HUMAN – THE KILLERS

When Human, the lead single to The Killers third album was released, it caused, more discussion about a pop song lyric than for many a long year. “Are we human or are we dancer” was so grammatically askew that it drew some to conclude that for “dancer” it actually should read “denser.” That most believed it to be “dancer” led to discussion list damnation. It seems ironic that perhaps the most provocative and deep lyric to have stuttered from a rock singer in years should be so maligned. In the debate about the grammar, it could be argued that poetic licence is all about such convenient shifts from plural to singular. Anyone who knew anything about this thoughtful Las Vegas band from their previous albums, that have catapulted them onto the coat-tails of U2 and into the stratosphere of stadium-rock-with-meaning, should have known that if there was something out of kilter in singer and songwriter Brandon Flowers chorus it should be pondered a little longer; this serious young man with a Mormon world view must have had some reasoning going on.

"It's taken from a quote by [author Hunter S.] Thompson. ... 'We're raising a generation of dancers,' and I took it and ran,” Flowers would explain, “I guess it bothers people that it's not grammatically correct, but I think I'm allowed to do whatever I want. 'Denser'? I hadn't heard that one. I don't like 'denser.' " The obvious follow up question was whether Flowers agreed with Thompson’s assessment? "I think that I do, and I don't want to be too much of a preacher," he said. "I say that it's a mild social statement, and that's all I'm gonna say. We're still trying to write the best pop songs we can write." It seems to be a similar strategy to the one Jesus took when he dropped spiritual explosives into the hearts as well as ears of his hearers. The explosive does not need spelling out; that might diminish its potency. “Those with ears to hear...”

No doubt Thompson meant a lot of things when he described a generation of dancers. What Flowers does is bring it back to one overriding need; to restore our humanity. The world has a long history of de-humanising. One of the most powerful means of healing is to re-humanise. To give people back their dignity; whether nations or individuals. That Flowers declares that he is on his knees looking for an answer is sure to indicate that for him the answer to his question is in the human soul and its connection with the Divine. Racism, war, materialism, image and sadly many times religion has de-humanising effects. The Killers Human is a song of prophetic stimulus because it is attempting to re-humanise, those whose humanity has been stolen by a culture that de-humanizes.

TAKE BACK THE CITY - SNOW PATROL

Gary Lightbody’s lyric writing has always been romance based, mostly on the broken hearted side. Though he has squeezed some universal profundity into such melancholy, Take Back The City is a new departure. In the most recent Q magazine Lightbody explains that the song is about his home city of Belfast which he has learned to fall in love with again. When Lightbody left for University in Dundee at the beginning of the nineties Belfast was a besieged city. There were a couple of years when every road into the city had police checks and people were being shot almost daily. By the time Lightbody returned, three years ago, the city had had a decade without bombs and bullets; it was a place revived with new shopping centres, city centre bars and clubs and music venues big enough for Snow Patrol’s success. Just like the returning sons Belfast is thriving!

Though the negative side of Northern Ireland’s conflict haunts Take Back The City it is a song about loving the city, enjoying the city and reshaping the city. Lightbody sings about the broken record of entrenched political sectarianism and about the futility of picking sides in a historical fight he doesn’t understand. The main thrust of Lightbody ode to home though is about sucking the marrow out of the city, sometimes admitting to partying too much. Where I have personally been inspired is in the verse:

“God knows you put your life into its hands
And it's both cradled you and crushed
But now it's time to make your own demands.”

I am sure Lightbody does not have the same missional take on this that I do but this is a very interesting take on our relationship with our home cities, towns or villages. The city shapes us, cradles and crushes us into the adults we become but after that we are the shapers of the city. Vocationally my task is to vocationally shape and direct students to take their place in the real world as World Formative Christians. This verse will be quoted over and over again. The city that they live in that is the very subject of this song has made them who they are... now to make it what they believe it should look like when “God’s kingdom comes and His will is done on earth as it is in heaven.” Take back the city!