SOUL SURMISE

DECEMBER 9th 1980 - LENNON'S DEAD & I AM DOING BOB DYLAN IN SCHOOL ASSEMBLY

It was a big day for me. One of the biggest at that stage of my life. I was speaking at our Ballymena Academy morning Assembly. The Christian Union in school were doing a week of mission. We had been given an opportunity to speak at Assembly and I had been designated. I was going to speak about Bob Dylan.

I arrived in school nervous and earlier than usual. As I walked through the doors and into the 6th form end of the locker bay a few boys were chatting. I walked past to head towards the Assembly Hall and Stephen Barr said, “End of an era, eh Steve?”

I stopped, wondering what he meant. “End of an era,” he repeated, “John Lennon dying.” “What?” I stammered. “John Lennon was shot dead last night. Did you not hear?” 

The next memory I have is sitting in the Assembly Hall’s sound room. I just sat. I loved The Beatles. I loved John Lennon. Dead. Murdered. I hadn’t experienced death close to me and this felt close. I sat on in the silence. I was a little shaken. 

Yet, I had to pull myself together. I was doing School Assembly. I said a prayer and prepared myself. I was playing a tape of two Bob Dylan songs - Blowing In the Wind and I Believe In You.

Bob Dylan had had a conversion experience around the same time as me. My idea was to play “the answer is blowing in the wind” and then ask if Dylan had found his answer in Jesus as expressed in “I believe in you…”  "Had Dylan found that answer?" I was asking. This might be the first time that I did a prototype of The Gospel According To…

It was not long until I was speaking. I cannot remember my exact script. I wish I still had it. I remember playing the music and receiving a wonderful listening from my peers.

Afterwards I walked off the stage with my headmaster, Denis Jagoe. He congratulated me and then said something that I would later, much later, remember as one of the wisest pieces of preaching advice I ever got. He said, “You didn’t insult their intelligence.” 

As well as advice for me I can only imagine now that Denis was critiquing the patronising tone that he had heard many preachers use. He was sharing an insight that I have used ever since. 

The rest of the day was about John Lennon. I drifted through school coming to terms with his death. Double Fantasy had just been released. He was back and we hoped he would come to do concerts in the UK. I couldn’t help but think of his five year old son, now bereft of his dad. I went home and watched the television all night long.

We remember John Lennon’s death as December 8th as he was killed in New York late that night. I look back on December 9th 1980 as one of the most memorable days of my life. The morning we all woke up to that senseless news. My biggest challenge yet in what would become my life’s work of preaching. As well as that I had stumbled into what would later be called Theo-musicology. I would write books on the subject and one would include a chapter on Bob Dylan. I also had my first and best teaching on preaching!

Every year I remember John Lennon… and that day in my own life!

AS WE JOURNEY TOWARDS BETHLEHEM

 

God, as we journey towards Christmas

Our world is at war

God, as we journey towards Christmas

There is electoral and sectarian tensions on our own Belfast streets

God, as we journey towards Christmas

There is still no peace in the very place of that first Christmas morning

Yet the angels sang

Peace on earth

God, "we're sick of sorrow

Sick of pain

Sick of hearing again and again

That there's gonna be peace on earth

So Jesus could you take the time

To throw a drowning man a line

Peace on earth." ***

 

God help us to see the world as you see it

With grace filled eyes

With a hopeful heart

With an imagination full of possibilities

This Christmas

As we stop outside that stable door

As we park for a day at that manger

May we not get distracted

By the tinsel and glitter of our streets

By the dressing and stuffing of our tables

By the anemic nativity plays of our churches

May we not miss the wonder of what is happening

This symbol of God's love towards us

This affirmation of how okay it is to be human

And this great truth

That He who was beyond our comprehension

Moved into the very midst of us

The holy... in the filth of animal dung

The Almighty... dependent on a young girl

The unapproachable... with shepherds at ease by His side

Emmanuel; God with us.

And God may we leave that day at the stable

May we leave that day at the manger

Inspired to be like that baby

To bring some peace on earth

In a world where words are no longer as important as experience

Where modernist objectivity is being replaced by postmodern subjectivity

May we see the secret of peace on earth

That in these days more than any other time for centuries

Actions need to speak louder than words

May Christ's birth that we remember

May Christ's life that we celebrate

May Christ's cross and resurrection that we will come to, in Lent

Empower actions that scream and shout

Across our world

Onto our streets

Into our polling stations

Deep down into our lives

May indeed the word become flesh

And live among us.

AMEN

*** quoted from U2's Peace On Earth available on All That You Can't
Leave Behind

TOM WAITS GODLESS? HE DOESN'T THINK SO... ME NEITHER!

As a result of his concentration on things dark and sinful, many have accused Tom Waits of being godless. Even Ireland’s Hot Press magazine that is not in any way keen to find Jesus in anything called Blood Money a “Jesusless” album. In that same interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air she mentions a song Down There By The Train that Waits wrote for Johnny Cash: 

 

FRESH AIR INTERVIEWER: - “It’s funny, when he sings it, it sounds like an unusual spiritual and usually you right about godlessness.

WAITS:  Godlessness?  Really? Oh!

FA: Wouldn’t you say

WAITS: I don’t know about that

FA The absence of God

TW. I don’t know. Do you think so?

FA Well some of the songs. Well one explicitly God’s Away On Business

TW – Oh  Ok. Well he’s away. He’s not gone. He’s just away. You have to understand he was on business. A guy like him has got top be busy, looking after a lot of things.

 

It is sadly difficult to actually describe the surprise and consternation in Waits voice that his music should be labelled such. The impression is certainly that it has never crossed his mind. There are many little glimpses of grace and Jesus in Wait’s work. It is not predominant by any means and if you are not looking as obviously Terry wasn’t then you could miss it, just like life really! But just like life He is there to be found and to give another hue to the black underbelly of the human experience. That song given to Johnny Cash for his fantastic American Recording series oozes a confident hope in redemption; “There’s room for the forsaken/If you’re there on time/You’ll be washed of all your sins/And of all your crime.” What will wash the sin; the blood of the lamb! 

The Cash song is not just an isolated incident. The Blind Boys Of Alabama with their sixty year old fermented brew of Gospel and blues recast two of Waits songs on their 2001 album Spirit Of The Century. Jesus Gonna Be Here Soon is taken out of the scariest of all Waits albums Bone Machine and the despairing characters of Waits population and given a hopeful expectant celebratory Gospel feel. There is still the confession of a drink habit that God knows about and seems to be aware that he is made of dust and allow for the frailty. Way Down In The Hole seems a likely location for all characters Waitsian  but it is the devil that we trying to keep down here in a song that begins in the garden just as mankind did but the warning Waits gives in watching your back is just the entire length of history too late.

The most epic mercy drenched Gospel song in Waits’ work is an amazing album called Jesus Blood Has Never Failed Me Yet. Classical composer Gavin Bryers has found a cassette tape of a tramp singing the traditional old hymn. It was ragged, frail and you could almost feel the freezing cold of the street and touch the texture of the cardboard shelter and the newspaper blanket. Very Waits! Just as vivid is the truth of the words of the hymn. Here is a man with nothing finding transcendent hope and comfort. There is no quick fix solution. He is not looking for one. Spiritual reality for the tramp is not some miraculous turn around of circumstances that would led him into a comfortable semi detached house on the stockbroker belt of London where he would find himself leading an Alpha group in a lively Church Of England fellowship and a member of the golf club. Those things had nothing to do with the deal that God gives. This tramp has never known the blood of Christ to fail him. It finds him where he is and sustains him in his lack of material sustenance. 

That Tom Waits should get involved in such a project is perfect. The depth of emotion that this ad lib song caused led Bryers to compose a piece of music around it. Tom Waits added his voice to that of the tramp. These are the people he loves. These are the people he brings dignity too. In spite of the wretchedness of a world where you could easily believe God’s Away on Business there is belief and that belief changes things. Here on the street, his most beloved habitat Waits gets to sing a duet in a near intimate fellowship with a fellow soul who wants to sing praise. 

 

(this blog is taken from my book THE ROCK CRIES OUT; FINDING ETERNAL TRUTH IN UNLIKELY MUSIC)

TOM WAITS - A LITTLE LIKE JESUS?

I stepped out over the prostitutes and headed towards the headquarters of my church denomination. The house I was about to move into had been damaged in one of the last bombs of the recent Irish troubles (and no I was not living there at the time and no it was not an everyday occurrence!!!) and I had been relocated to Belfast city centre. Without a television my then girl friend, now wife, and I would sit on the window ledge and watch Belfast give us a live performance on a Saturday night. It was more exciting. A drugs drop there and all kinds of goings on over there and you use that telephone kiosk at your own risk! So, I got used to the prostitutes congregated at the door of the flats. As I walked away from them this particular morning I felt a deep desire to connect, say hello, give them a little bit of dignity that society and this morning me in my actions withholds from them. 

Yet, was this not a good Christian upbringing. Prostitutes are no kind of women for a good Christian boy to be making connections with. Of course it was the exact opposite. As I walked away I realised that Jesus would have been so comfortable chatting to prostitutes that he would probably have sat down on the steps beside them and forgot about all the so-called business he had to do at Church House. Befriending prostitutes would have been a higher priority. So as I gazed across all the books I had read and conferences I had attended and sermons I had heard, and even preached, about following Jesus I began to ask why I had not been taught how to just pass the time of day with the people Jesus seemed to hang out with.

Tom Waits has spent his career raising the profile of the people that Jesus hung out with and the Church usually has no time for. Waits most famous prostitute song is Christmas Card From a Hooker In Minneapolis. In the form of a note in the seasonal greeting the story is a happy one. Here is a woman whose world is turning around. She is off the drugs and quit the drink and found a man who will love the baby she is carrying even though it is not his. Sadly in the last verse she throws off all pretence and admits there is no man and she needs money to pay a lawyer to get her out of jail. Waits added even more poignancy and sadness to the tale live by adding Silent Night to the beginning. It adds to the possibility of hope but brings reality crashing even more cruelly in the absence of a happy ending. 

Waits’ work has been founded on the freaks, the outcasts, the most intriguing of the marginalized. Prostitutes, strippers, fugitives, hoodlums, criminals, tramps, sewer dwellers, soldiers mostly war veterans, murderers, arsonists and the widest variety of drunks imaginable. Where many writers write about themselves or their peers, Waits has a pastor’s care for people he sees, writing songs to empathise, in many ways with the hope of exorcising their demons. Demons seem to over populate Waits’ albums and the devil himself hangs out but so does Jesus in maybe not equal measure but certainly with equal power. Singing about these characters, bringing them alive in songs and no doubt exaggerating them for poetic effect may be one of his ways to “Keep the devil down in the hole.” Another similarity to Jesus and niggling little jibe at the Church is how Waits loves them no matter what. The grace and the dignity he puts into their lives along with the dime or quarter he drops into their hand is never dependent on “successful” conclusions to their tragedy.

The religious leaders of his day could never quite understand why Jesus would hang out with Tom Waitsian characters. He would often say that the doctor does not come for the well but the sick and he would also set a new rule of thumb for our social connections; the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Tom Waits was a last shall be first man. There is a marvellous story to illustrate the point that Jay S Jacob recounts in his biography Wild Years though he is unable to confirm if it is true or exaggerated. Whether it is true or like Jesus story of the Prodigal Son which though not true is most definitely true, who cares! 

Apparently near the Main Point venue in Philadelphia there was a restaurant and bar called H.A Winstons. Taking pride in their classy joint they would have a lot of the Main Point performers drop by. They wanted Waits though and he would never come. Classy was not his thing. In most cities he would reside and eat in the wrong side of town either feeling more comfortable there or always researching his songs or both. One night Waits turns up at Winstons and there is great excitement but Waits walks past the classiness and finds Artie the dishwasher who he hangs with for an hour washing dishes, ignoring those who were deserving of his company. Artie had played somewhere with Waits and he thought he would hear his story. The dishwasher was the last in the pecking order and Artie was not liked much but he who was first connected at his level to bring him grace and dignity. Jesus did the same for a guy named Zaccheus in Jericho one day. As a tax collector this little man was reviled in his day as a drug pusher might be in the neighbourhood today. Hated and the last person who deserved time with the days pop star storyteller, it was he who Jesus sought out and had dinner with. Wonder if they did the dishes together! 

 

(this blog is taken from my book THE ROCK CRIES OUT: DISCOVERING ETERNAL TRUTH IN UNLIKELY MUSIC)

A BIG DECISION? AN OPEN DOOR? CUT THE CORD!

“And sometimes I get nervous
When I see an open door
Close your eyes
Clear your heart
Cut the cord...”

-      From Human by The Killers

Ten years ago, this was the lyric that I carried all the way through the process of leaving a job I loved in Queen’s University Chaplaincy to go back into parish ministry at Fitzroy Presbyterian Church.

For me, the invitation to consider becoming the minister at Fitzroy was a huge honour and I had to think about it but I had never considered going back into Church life. Fitzroy’s potential excited me but I was nervous every time I caught sight of that open door.

Being a Presbyterian process, it took eight months between the initial phone call to think about it and to actually being installed as minister. Throughout that wait I sang over and over again this spiritual wisdom of Brandon Flowers.

I had to close my eyes and seek God in ways I had never done. Prayer, connecting with God, was vital. If I was going to take the risk that this would be for me and my family, I needed to find time to talk it over with God and to listen. I would need to be sure that the fit was right and that I was taking the next step in my following of Jesus.

Next up I had to clear my heart in readiness for a spiritual change, the way we cleared our house for the physical move. I needed to take all the selfish ideas of my own which might have been the selfishness for safety or the selfishness of being flattered that Fitzroy were interested and what a prestigious thing to be their minister. The heart needed cleared of me, to be given the holy space that might allow God to fill that heart with what was good.

In the end, after all was weighed up and without any doubt in my heart and mind that God was calling us to go... we had to cut the cord!

This last step is the trickiest of all. It takes courage. It means leaving where all is safe and comfortable and jumping with faith and trust into the new world that beckons. To move on means not looking back. It is done and I am thankful to these words as the soundtrack to the entire process. Like Paul in Philippians, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Perhaps you are in one of life's tricky spots. A big decision. An open door beckons but... I think The Killers are suggesting we take a deep breath, then gather up all of the courage we can muster and then... a step of faith... cut the cord!