SOUL SURMISE

SOMEWHERE I HAVE NOT BEEN...

(This was my Thought For The Day on Good Morning Ulster on March 27, 2025) 

 

One of my favourite bands Deacon Blue have a new record out this week. I am loving it. 

A couple of weeks ago I was at a Presbyterian ministers’ Retirement Conference. It was all confidential so it would be great of you could keep that to yourself. Though retirement is not immediately imminent, it was an incredibly useful couple of days for Janice and I.

It certainly made the opening lines of the Deacon Blue record resonate:

 

Bus driver, won't you take me

To the furthest place from here

To somewhere I've not been before?

 

The song is about The Great Western Road that old highway out of Glasgow to Loch Lomond, The highlands and beyond. Full of possibilities.

It had me thinking instantly of CS Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles celebrating 75 years this year. In the first book chronologically, The Magicians Nephew, Digory and Polly get into Narnia not through a wardrobe but by magic rings that brings them up out of a stagnant pool, just like the one down the back drive in Campbell College.

Arriving there Digory says, “There's not much point in finding a magic ring that lets you into other worlds if you're afraid to look at them when you've got there.”

I am now on stepping stones from Deacon Blue to CS Lewis to Jesus who said that he had come into the world to bring us life and life in all its fulness. 

What would the point be of God coming to earth, dying on a cross and being resurrected back to life, to herald a new kingdom, if we were too fearful to look at it when we got there!

So, as thoughts of retirement distract me I am also very attracted to it as if getting on that Deacon Blue bus or picking up those Magic rings. I have no less excitement for the exploration of my 60s and 70s as I had for my 20s, 40’s and 50’s. 

I still want that bus driver to take me to the furthest place, somewhere I have never been. Further up and further in to life all its fulness.

MOTHERHOOD AT ITS BEST

(this was my Pause For Thought on Owain Wyn Evans, BBC Radio 2, on March 26th 2025... The theme for the week was Mothering Sunday)

 

It was our Church weekend away this past weekend and as with such gatherings, you get more time in conversation with some people that you might only catch once a week on Sunday.

Somehow one conversation got around to the fact that one evening in my wife’s family home, before we started going out together, there were 3 of my ex girlfriends and future wife in the house! 

Now, if this has set about some imaginings going in radio land that I must be some tall dark handsome hunk never mind a little over flirtatious, well at least the first bit of that could not be further from the truth. With looks like mine, the radio is a perfect platform!

Anyway, the reason for such a meeting of late teenagers and early twenties was the way that my future mother-in-law Anne had created an open house for us all.

The 60’s band The Byrds made a bit of the book of Ecclesiastes popular… “There is a season turn turn turn… A season for every purpose under heaven,” they sang.  

The Bible also speaks about gifts that God gives to human beings. One of them, far too often underrated is hospitality. Hospitality. Welcoming people in. Giving people time. Listening, I have heard it said, is as close to being loved as you can get. 

Janice’s mum made hospitality to young people her purpose for a season, when Janice was in her teens until going off to University. Janice’s friends were always in an out of her house. 

Indeed when I knew I was going to Janice’s for a 9 o’clock supper I didn’t eat anything after lunch. It was always an amazing spread. Sandwiches, Voulevants, Sausage Rolls, Cheesecake, Pavlova. A hospitality that I never experienced before or since. 

Anne’s funeral was full of people of our age. As they shared their condolences, with Janice and I, there were so many who told us that Janice’s mother and those open house evenings and Sunday afternoons shaped their lives. Some were ministers like me, some had committed their lives to work overseas, others were living lives honed by a welcoming lounge in Holywood, County Down. 

I doubt if Anne had planned all of this. I am not sure that she had any idea how profound her hospitality was. BUT as I look back, it was motherhood at its very best.

 

DEACON BLUE - THE GREAT WESTERN ROAD

 

“Bus driver, won't you take me

To the furthest place from here

To somewhere I've not been before?”

 

Deacon Blue’s eleventh studio record begins with the wide screen panoramic of an adventure to wherever. Where their catchiest lead off singles in some time, Late 88 and Turn Up The Radio! seemed to speak of a looking back, the strings bringing a soulful nostalgia and the lyrics about a band starting out, this record goes back and forward across The Curve Of The Line as another song puts it. 

As I’ve listened over a weekend, on the road and in my home, I am thinking is this as good a record as they have released apart from that one breaking through in late 88, Raintown. A year down the line will finally tell if these initial enthusiasms are correct but this feels like a very special collection of songs indeed. 

As I tried to take in each individual song, I kept asking which will infiltrate a set list when a large percentage of a Deacon Blue audience like the bangers from way back. Truthfully, it will be a disappointment whatever they leave out. 

I mean those two singles are certified arena thumpers, add to that the the preach of People Come First, the popped up Wait On Me, the drive of Up Hope and the buzzing positivity of Ashore. Leave them out at your peril.

Then there’s Jim Prime’s piano like a deep melodic trail through the adventure. Surely the title track has to be an understated statement as a concert opening. Prime is also all over How We Remember It that has little melodic shifts that make me gasp and Curve Of The Line which is written just too late for a cover from Kris Kristofferson or Johnny Cash! It’s Ricky Ross himself though on piano on the wee gem of a closer If I Lived On My Own. 

Fifteen years in to this particular band's conglomeration, everyone is playing out of their skin and into all their musical experience and the comfort being with one another. Take Underneath The Stars, maybe one of Ricky Ross’s best honed songs. Gregor Philp’s lazy grace notes precision guitar, Prime’s hammond and Dougie Vipond and Lewis Gordon giving the whole thing whatever strength of platform needed. Lorraine McIntosh’s voice seems more wondrous than ever. What 35 years of marriage does to your harmonies! I wanna hear it all!

All, taken in and scanned across we are still steeped in Deacon Blue values, human connection, a better world and always hope. Hope for the huddled masses. Hope for the companion who waits for us. Hope for body, heart, mind and soul. Hope for wherever that bus driver takes us down whatever our own Great Western Road looks like. 

 

A wee tip is that there is a deluxe version available on mp3 from the Deacon Blue website and if you'd already purchased the album you pay just a much smaller fee for the six tracks, three out takes from the album and three songs from their enthralling recent BBC Piano Lounge performance. Great move to not make us pay for the record again. Good work Cooking Vinyl. Bruce Springsteen take note!

STORIES ARE LIKE EUCHARIST (Gannaway - March 2025)

 

“Stories are like eucharist,” 

Said Damian Gorman, poet and playwright,

“You break them up, to feed each other.” 

 

How true

And especially true of this weekend away

By sea, sky and stars

The breeze blowing the bonfire like ticker tape

Showering particles of light

All gathering in a bright hopeful flame of joy.

 

Some of us have publicly broken up 

Our broken stories

With nerves and anxiety

With honesty and vulnerability

With fears and tears

That got carried in empathy

Releasing other people’s stories

In ones and twos

And we are fed in the fragility of trust

In brittle hearts caressing 

With the kiss of community

As close to family 

As can be, without the same blood.

Abiding.

 

Abiding in a bigger story

Over 200 years of the Fitzroy story

Over 2000 years of the Son's story

Over 2000 before that of the Father's great big universe filling love story

Delivered now by the Spirit in tears and warming souls.

 

At the core of all of this

Bread and wine

The body and flesh of Jesus

Broken and poured out

For healing and wholeness

Life in all its fulness

10:10.

 

Stories are like eucharist

Thank you.

 

- Fitzroy Church Weekend - Gannaway, March 2025

WHAT I WEAR!!! INTENTIONAL T-SHIRTS AND HUMILITY & FORGIVENESS

(My Thought For The Day on Good Morning Ulster on March 20, 2025...)

 

Sartorial and Steve Stockman don’t really go together. My late father was maybe the neat and tidiest human I ever met but his son… Scruff has been a nick name at various times. 

I was at a Conference last week and the dress was to be smart casual but someone said, “Never worry sure Steve’s coming”. Jeans and a rock band t-shirt is my every day attire. 

But don’t think it is careless. Oh no I am careful to look as careless as I can and many of my t-shirts are chosen for the day that’s in it. Going to the A Complete Unknown the Dylan film. Will it’s a Dylan shirt… St. Patrick’s Day it was my green Rory Gallagher. Ever Intentional.

What we wear scruffy or tidy can have an impact.

At that Conference I was at, Rev Robert Bell shared about intentional clothes. He was speaking from St.Paul’s letter to the Colossians where Paul tells the church to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another… Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

I was struck by it because it had been almost the same thought that Pope Francis (who we keep in our prayers) shared with us when we met him in his private library a couple of year’s back. He said, “Read the Gospels until you wear the Jesus you are reading about”.

Now some might dismiss this as nice and inane. My teachers always hated us using the word nice. Yet, I have come to see these words as brave and revolutionary. 

To be humble in a society where every seems to need to be the winner. Brave! Compassion on someone can get you social media abuse and forgiving others that others don’t think you should forgive. Think of the courage of Gordon Wilson. 

I’d love to live in a city or neighbourhood or home where people wore intentionally compassion, kindness, humility. Imagine that kinda world. 

So, for the next few weeks in Lent, and then on after, I am going to wear those Jesus values with the same intention as I wear my jeans and t-shirt. Every morning as I reach for that shirt, I’ll reach for who I might forgive and live in my community, wearing Jesus.