SOUL SURMISE

WHAT IS BRIAN HOUSTON DOING DURING CORONAVIRUS?

The Coronavirus has hit us all in different ways.

As a music fan I have been wondering and concerned about how it has hit many of my friends in the music industry. So I decided to get in touch and ask. 

My first port of call was Belfast songwriter Brian Houston. Brian has made a living at music for thirty years, gigging here, touring Britain and America. He even spent a year or two living in North Carolina. He has blended and blurred his songwriting with worship music, bringing soul to the former and everyday realism to the latter. 

How is how he is dealing with these strange times?

 

What were you working on before the lock down?

I was completing a singer songwriter album.  I have about 20 to 30 songs I need to choose from. 

 

At what stage did you start thinking about how it would impinge on your work?

The weekend everyone started contacting me to say they felt they should cancel the gigs I had booked. 

 

What are the way that this all impacts your life as well as work?  

Well my income stopped immediately and the prospects of releasing new material suddenly seemed redundant as everyone’s attention was on much more important things. 

 

What ways are you using the down time?  

I moved my equipment home from the studio and set it up in a bedroom. Then I started busking on line and asking folks to contribute.  I am also trying to help my wife with her Bristle And Bird Aromatherapy product business. I have also been applying for jobs. 

 

How easy is it for you to create in these unfamiliar, maybe anxious times?  

Well in some ways this is how I’ve always lived. No idea what’s coming next or how I’ll pay my bills next month. It’s always been a faith journey. So the creativity isn’t really affected too much as there’s always been a certain amount of duress 

 

What can we all do to help?

Watch my busking videos and send money via www.paypal.me/BrianHoustonBelfast 

 

What plans have you for when we get out of this? New record?  

Yeah. Same plan as I had before it. But who knows when that will be. 

 

Give us three albums that influenced you that we should all investigate as we wait the Coronavirus to pass?

 

Bob Dylan - Blood on the tracks 

Brittany Howard - Jaime. 

The White Stripes - The White Stripes

JESUS BEST REFRAIN - BELFAST TELEGRAPH ARTICLE 28.3.2020

( a new weekly series in the Belfast Telegraph, alternating with Fr Martin Magill... this one was published on March 28, 2020... the photo they used is VERY old!)

 

“Love your neighbour”. Jesus best refrain. Sadly though it seems to me that these words have become quite sentimental and soft. They have ended up almost the epitome of nice!

Jesus never meant these words to be nice. They were never intended for a quote on a nice photograph of a sunrise on a Church Hall wall.

“Love your neighbour” is a revolutionary statement. A call to a sacrificial life. This is not just a call to help your elderly neighbour across the road. This is a call to deny yourself and take up your cross for the welfare of others.

Jesus talked about it in a plethora of ways. He talked about the love of a father to a rebellious son. He talked about loving not only your neighbour but your enemy too. He talked about loving the hungry, thirsty, stranger the naked, sick and imprisoned.

This call has been lost in a diluted view of Jesus that somewhere down the years has lost his radical edge. Reading the Gospels, it is hard to imagine how!

The original tough call of “Love your neighbour” comes in to its own in a world of Coronavirus. There has never been a time when it was more urgent to set aside our own whims and selfish desires for the good of neighbour and indeed the entire community.

This is a time in our history when “Love your neighbour” actually means DO NOT KILL YOUR NEIGHBOUR. 

This is not so much about protecting yourself from the virus - though that is absolutely necessary. This is about making sure that we do not carry the virus into the presence of the most vulnerable. It is about all of us working together to contain the spread of the virus so that the health service has the capabilities to care for those of us who get it. 

However, “Love your neighbour” is not just about the passive. “Love your neighbour” is an active force looking after the other. Let us make that phone call to someone who might be isolated. When we are at the store let us buy a few things for the elderly person next door. Let us be creative in ways that we can be a presence to people without being present. Let us volunteer at food banks. Let us donate to homeless charities. Let us be full of grace and imagination.

I have heard our political leaders talk a lot about altruism. That is good. Yet, I prefer Jesus’ “love your neighbour”. I prefer it because it has a communal relational heart. I prefer it because it because the guy who said it actually walked the walk. I am not sure I have watched too many of our political leaders giving up self for others! Quite the reverse.

Jesus on the other hand is ALL about reaching out to the other, giving to the other and, most sacrificially, dying for the other, even when the other was his enemy. Jesus didn’t just talk about love, he demonstrated it to us. Our most iconic image of him is at the very heart of human suffering, giving himself for the world. Now that is an example! That is love your neighbour.

Let’s do it!

 

BBLE READINGS

Some Bible readings to think through Jesus example of Love your neighbour.

MARK 12: 28-31

Jesus gives the greatest commandment...

 

PHILIPPIANS 2: 5-8

Jesus example of self sacrifice

 

LUKE 6: 27-36

The extent of Jesus love exceeds our intuitive limits

 

MATTHEW 25: 31-46

The kind of people that are in God's radar for us to love

 

HEBREWS 4: 14-16

Jesus self sacrifice gives us access to the throne of God's grace - now!

WE ARE NOT THE SAME

When I am with a family who are grieving I usually try to speak a pastoral word to them about the fact that they will all grieve differently. To know this will help them when some of them show more emotion than others, when some go quiet and others want to talk, when the speed of the process is quicker for some than the rest.

I encourage them to be patient with these differences. To graciously understand. To be alongside each other in the differences.

I think this advice has something to say into our Coronavirus Times. 

I have shared before that I quite enjoy the new dispensation. Though I can hold a crowd of a few hundred every Sunday, I am an introvert by nature. I am an only child who enjoys his own company and finds constant socialising to be hard work. That part of this lock down I am dealing with well.

However, I have friends, like Jim in the photo with me, who are not dealing with the isolation well. They buzz around other people. They need that socialising to feel good. For these friends isolation can be a mental health issue.

Indeed, even within our own homes mental health is being stretched in all kinds of different directions. Some of the family are anxious while others are calm. We might be needing different levels of interaction or aloneness. We might be seeking different activities to make it through. That can pull at the seams of family relationships. We need to allow for each other.

Some of you might know where I am going. I didn’t intend to. Yet, it is obvious. U2’s song One. When different melodies played over one another to harmonise, Bono started to sing:

 

“We're one, 

but we're not the same

We get to carry each other”

 

It is a good song for Coronavirus Times. In our homes let us play One and then as the apostle Paul exhorts us, in Philippians 2 verses 3 and 4:

 

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

 

Let us be mindful. We will not all deal with Coronavirus the same. Let us carry each other. 

PAUL IN TEN - Teaching Series by GARY BURNETT

For the next ten weeks Fitzroy TV will be following a series of Ten 10 minute teaching sessions on the apostle Paul. The series will go out at 7pm every Sunday evening but will be available from than on.

What was life like when Paul was preaching and teaching, in the First Century. Few people have been able to take me onto the streets and into the houses and prisons of the First Century world like Gary Burnett. Gary has this ability to bring it alive and then open the Scriptural texts into the vivid context.

The first in this series will prove my point. Gary quickly paints a picture of poverty, slavery, early death rate, violence and opposition to any who would go against the gods of the day.

Into this we find Paul learning in himself, and then teaching the early Christians, to not be anxious but to be content.

Paul in Ten offers encouragement and inspiration as we all try to cope in the current moment.

Gary is an author, blogger, theological reviewer and teacher in the New Testament with particular expertise in Paul.

We invite you to use up some of the extra lock down time by doing us for Paul in Ten. 

 

 

WHEN MYSTERY SHIMMERS

I was glancing through my poems and thought that this one was appropriate for the Coronavirus Times. These are days of mystery. We will tend to ask God questions and some prayers might not find the answers we hope for.

This poem was written from a pastor's perspective, watching members of Fitzroy watch loved ones in difficult times.

The last verse is Philip Yancey's take on Isaiah 40:31:

They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint.

Yancey points out that this is in reverse. Flying, running and finally walking. He suggests that the spiritual life starts with us believing we can fly. Everything is possible. Then we land we a thud when some prayer is not answered as we think it should have been. We are still running but soon life's tragedies have us down to a walk. 

Yancey concludes that the mature among us are not the flyers but the realists. Even strong faith in the midst of life's tough times can be a trudge and a crawl. Perhaps we need to reassess why in that verse we always concentrate on the first not the third stage?!

Mystery is an awkward little dancer.

 

When a loved one’s tossed in turbulence

You watch them smashed whichever way

And God never seems to bring the calm

No matter how hard you pray

May unseen threads of mercy

Weave in, the unravelling doubt

May God grab you by the finger

Before life’s hurting drags you out

 

Knowledge loves the questions

Cos it has a seamless answer

But mystery shimmies all around

She’s an awkward little dancer

And when she dances out of sight

Leaving the soul that lonely ache

May God send a holy comforter

Before you crack up in the heart break

 

Lord, we flew on wings like eagles

Then landed with reality’s thud

We ran but soon were walking

Now crawl through this tear soaked mud

We mature in a world that’s broken

Confessing what our part is

We sing these songs to temper grief

And hope in their catharsis.