SOUL SURMISE

TOMORROW IN FITZROY AND ON-LINE - 25.10.2020

Tomorrow in Fitzroy's on-line service we will be taking a close look at Martin Luther's favourite Psalm. Psalm 46 is perhaps the section of Scripture that I have used most in my ministry but I have never preached on it.

I am thrilled to get a close look at it tomorrow in both the main on-line service (from 11am) and then the Reflective Gathering in Fitzroy at 5pm (only those who booked can get in). 

Outside help from Martin Luther but also a little bit of Richard Rohr and Bono "Be still and know that I am God" and "Get Out Of Your Own Way". 

4 CORNERS FESTIVAL 2021 - 5 THINGS EXCITING ME

So, after many months of hibernation and imaginative incubation we are delighted to tell you that the 4 Corners Festival 2021 programme is almost in the can for 2021. No pandemic is going to stop us from attempting to bring Belfast together and contribute some goodness into the ether.

5 things I am excited about:

 

1. Our theme. Breathe… 

As the website says, “The Hebrew word Ruach means ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’ – the source of life. In our 2021 Festival, we seek to tap into that spirit and breathe hope into our city, fostering creativity and resilience as we respond to the challenges of the pandemic.”

 

2. Our logo…

Brian O’Neill has done a great job by taking the Breathe… theme and giving it a Belfast signature. You can tell that Brian has been blowing some bubbles with his young son Ronan because as soon as we told him the theme he had Nuala breathing out big imaginative bubbles all over the city.

 

3. Our platform… Virtual/Actual/Hybrid

We felt particularly blessed in 2020 that our Festival was one of the last in Belfast before the world went into lockdown. Coronavirus has threatened so many festivals but from our first planning meeting we were focused on having a 2021 Festival, no matter what.

The what is still uncertain but we have employed Alan Meban and Richard Lavery to help us deliver a festival that might have to be totally virtual but will hopefully have some audience. 

This has added to the challenge but has been another instigator of imagination. 4 Corners Festival 2021 will be unique as a result.

 

4. Our Keynote… John Paul Lederach

At last. We have been trying so hard to have John Paul Lederach as a key note speaker for so many years. One of the advantages of these “lockdown” days is that we can welcome him virtually from Indiana right into every corner of Belfast.

A world authority on peace and reconciliation with a working knowledge of Belfast there is also a fascinating chapter in his book when Blood and Bones Cry Out where he unpacks how Van Morrison’s catalogue healed him after a bad car accident. 

 

5. My In Conversation With Duke Special

I cannot lie but my 4 Corners Festival series interviewing some of my very favourite songwriters has been a personal thrill, not only of the Festival, but of my life. This year we follow an amazing series of Gary Lightbody, Brian Houston, Ricky Ross and Iain Archer with an evening with Duke Special.

I have known his Dukeness for twenty five years and am looking forward to talking to him about how Belfast has influenced his work not only on record nut in this theatre work and his PhD thesis. Expect some compelling chatter and even more compelling music. 

I will even enjoy the over indulgence in Duke Special’s work between now and then… Quiet Revolutionaries Vol 2 ordered already!

 

https://4cornersfestival.com

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - LETTER TO YOU

If we ever had the time again

Then I would make more time

In the meantime I’ll hear your whispering

In every Bruce Springsteen rhyme.

 

I wrote these words back in June when my friend Glenn Jordan died suddenly. It is still hard to take in. I attempted to capture Glenn in a poem that had me standing beside him, by his own secret gifting, watching Bruce Springsteen at the Kings Hall on a July afternoon in 2013. Glenn and our other mate Mark Houston were Bruce mega-fans. I wondered if I knew anything about Bruce at all when I was with them!

Not long after I wrote the words I heard there would be a new Springsteen album this year. I immediately considered what that would be like with out Glenn. As I listened to that record, as soon as it went on stream at midnight, I could hardly take in the extra poignancy.

 

The opening lines of the first song One Minute You’re Here:

 

Big black train comin' down the track

Blow your whistle long and long

One minute you're here

Next minute you're gone

 

The closing lines of the last song I’ll See You In My Dreams:

 

I'll see you in my dreams when all the summеrs have come to an end

I'll see you in my dreams, we'll meet again in another land

I'll see you in my dreams, yeah around the river bend

For death is not the end

And I'll see you in my dreams

 

Bless my soul. It wasn’t just that I was imagining Glenn’s thoughts about these songs. They almost became about him. If you’ve lost a fanatical Bruce fan in recent months this record is emotional, cathartic, and somehow with a little Springsteen genius, celebratory.

Bruce Springsteen has lost a lot of friends down the years. It is well known about the death’s of The E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici but it seems that it was the death of George Theiss from Springsteen’s first band The Castiles that inspired Letter To You.

Letter To You is as urgent a record as Springsteen has made in decades. It is loud and raw and rocks out with only that opening One Minute You’re Here showing any reflective quiet.

Every other song sees The E Street Band let loose, tight as ever and playing to the very edge of full tilt. Letter To You is a bang bang bang of boom boom rock songs. There’s no let up and no desire to even get up to turn the vinyl over. It is as gripping from start to finish as any Bruce Springsteen album has ever been.

Now that doesn’t mean that it is the best Springsteen album though with an artist like Springsteen that is a futile venture. You can’t set 50 year’s of a catalogue side by side never mind the different genres and reasons to make albums that Springsteen has dabbled in.

Letter To You is not full of hit singles or songs crafted to a sheen. If ever a record needed listened to all the way through this is it. It sounds like a band becoming aware of their mortality and deciding to get together and have a big blow out before they get blown out. The fun of playing with mates is all over this record. There is an urgency in the joy of it in the midst of the grieving around them.

If it had come out 40 years ago who knows how many of these songs would still be in the set list but if this band can get out the other end of Coronavirus intact then these songs will fly off the stage on the next band tour. Letter To You, Last Man Standing, Land Of A Thousand Guitars, Ghosts and even Power Of Prayer are songs full of the joy of bands and music. Live? It’ll be something!

Of course I am now considering that if I should ever see this live in Belfast my friend Glenn will not be there to stand beside me and enjoy it. I hope though that as Bruce rejoices about life and celebrates the love of lost friends on the stage that we will all be part of that emotion in the crowd. Bruce has broken that barrier yet again. He has spoken for us and yes Glenn I hear you whispering… 

 

Ghosts runnin' through the night

Our spirits filled with light

I need, need you by my side

Your love and I'm alive.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND - GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA

"In your old life you had nothing to live for. Now you do. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Go clear the land for a new culture...If you are not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day."

Do those words not make you want to rush out the door and go change the world? Could we not do with rethinking the nature of things? Should we not be about boiling the carcass of the old order? 

These are words of rebuke, in that I feel as I read them that indeed I have been wasting my day. Yet the rebuke comes with a motivating sense of invitation to just go and stop wasting anymore time. If there is still a reason for that Sunday morning ritual of climbing pulpit steps and preaching down to a congregation then these are the words what should be preached. 

I long to sit beneath that pulpit and hear these words fill me with energy and to head home to Sunday dinner with enough strength to be part of their revolutionary implications.

Yet these words did not come from the houses of God but from the pages of a modern novel. Douglas Coupland was go to novelist in the lat 90s and early noughties. Introduced to his work by my good friend David Dark, Generation X, Life After God and Hey Nostradamus had quotations scattered all over my Chaplaincy sermons when I worked at Queens University. My former students in Derryvolgie Hall will be yawning at this! 

Coupland grew up with no hint of religion in his home or his North Vancouver neighbourhood. He later resented his parents attempts to keep him away from such pursuits, claiming he ended up having to piece together his own religious worldview. Doing that in his writing, Girlfriend In a Coma (a nod to his fandom of The Smiths) leads him to the very edge of Christianity itself with the echoes of all kinds of theological ideas strewn through it. 

The novel is about the ills of modern society, the healing and redeeming of such and the saving of souls. Briefly Karen falls into a coma in her high school year. Before doing so she has an apocalyptic vision of the future. She tells her boyfriend, "It was just us, with our meaningless lives. Then I looked up close...and you all seemed normal, but your eyes were without souls". Karen becomes the girlfriend in the coma and misses seventeen years of her life before. 

Though the book deals with the changes from the world she fell asleep in, in 1981, to the world she wakened up again in in 1998 (she misses out on Princess Diana entirely), it is about the lives of her friends and the fulfilment of Karen's vision, when they become the only people left on planet earth. 

Another old friend who died in his early teens, Jared, appears as a friendly ghost, who reveals to them their "deep down inside" ills and redeems them. It is then he says that they can get the world back but only if they decide too. "You're going to have to lead another life soon; a different life. You can get the world back yet.” 

So to the climactic words at the top of this article which are worth repeating. They have been a dog at my heel for over twenty years., provoking my spiritual life. Now that is a novel with impact. 

If you are not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day."

HEALING IN AUTUMN WONDER

photo: Janice Gordon-Stockman

 

The air is heavy in the atmosphere of Covid-19. 

One of the disciplines I have found helpful as I seek some resilience to help me make it through the challenge is to take time to take in the wonder of the world. A walk with Janice and Jed. Looking harder for goodness and blessing. 

Chestnuts. No great usefulness. Not even in the playground anymore. Yet, their beauty. The colour. The shine. You cannot leave them on the ground…

 

Sunny October Sunday

Underneath Manchester City skies

If Lucy walked among these trees

She’d sing of all the gold drip dyes

My mind falls through to old Grange Road

Scrunching home in crunching leaves

Churning up our childhood innocence 

In stories while a dear friend grieves

I take a breath of God fresh air

In an atmosphere fret and fateful

A little healing in autumn wonder

Gathering chestnuts of my grateful.