IF YOU HAVE TICKETS YOU WON'T USE...

4CF Team 25

I know how it is.

You see a concert or event and you want to go. You book tickets immediately. You add a few tickets for friends that might want to come with you. 

Particularly when it is free, grab a few tickets quickly. 

As the event arrives however lots might have changed.

The friends you grabbed tickets for were not free when you told them.

Maybe your own circumstances have changed. You had forgotten about that work event, church meeting or that it was your best friend’s birthday.

They say that free events can expect a 30% drop off on tickets booked. We at the 4 Corners Festival have experienced the reality of that in the past. Events with empty chairs that shouldn’t have any.

The worst of it is that there are people who want in to the event but can’t because it is “sold out”. The seats don’t need to be empty. People are disappointed that they are not in them. 

So… if you are sitting on ANY tickets for 4 Corners Festival events that you know that you are not going to need please let us know. AND TELL US.. ASAP -  [email protected]

Thank you so much for your amazing support for the Festival. Sell out events is amazing. There are tickets left for some events.

 

BOOK TICKETS HERE


WHY I WON'T BE BLOGGING ON THE US INAUGURATION

Inauguration

People have been asking. Are you going to do a blog on the Inauguration?

No. I am not. 

I made a decision last April that I would turn the TV off every time he came on. My life has been so much less confused, stressed, frustrated and angry as a result. 

I got lucky with the election. I was in Rome without a TV in my room so I avoided the result with wonderful ease.

The inauguration has not been so easy but I distracted myself by concentrating on the fact that it was Martin Luther King Day. Ironic. A powerful comparison with the human being that America has just elected as their President. 

I concentrated on the Kingdom of God that Dr King attempted to bring. The fairness, justice and reconciliation at the heart of his prophetic ministry. The gentle and gracious way that he went about it.

I find nothing in the new President’s demeanour, attitudes, nothing in his past or present, nothing in his ambitions that I could be positive about. I find him offensive, self obsessed, more interested in wealth and power than in compassion and care for those who need help.

Of course, I could look ahead at all these years we now have to suffer him as US President. Again I am fortunate. I will actually retire in the last days of this Presidency and that momentous landmark seems to be rushing down the road like a freight train. So it won’t be long. It’ll fly in.

That’ll be the time to really make our judgements. Though I will continue to switch him off I am sure the implications of his actions will seep out. As they do it’s simple to see how God will respond, never mind me. Jesus made how he judges our lives very clear, near the end of his ministry:

‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ (Matthew 25:34-36)

Indeed if those are the kinds of people that this Presidency concentrates on and the things he acts upon, as Jesus demanded, then who knows I might have to stop turning him off. I’ll really start blogging then! 


CLARE SANDS AT 4 CORNERS FESTIVAL 2025

Clare Sands

I am imagining that a lot of you have not heard of Clare Sands. If you are a fan of Irish trad and the modern refreshing of it then let me lead you to her recordings and encourage you to come to the first Sunday night of 4 Corners Festival (February 2, 2025) where she will be performing a few songs.

I got tipped off about Clare through my friend Jonny Clark who had Clare sing at one of his Borderland evenings.

Clare is a 6th generational traditional musician who sings and plays a plethora of instruments and yes with a name like Sands she is a cousin of Tommy. 

When I ransacked Bandcamp to hear her songs I was blown away with her blend and blur of the two languages, Irish and English weaving through the same song. 

Musically she has been called fearless and again her blending and blurring of the contemporary and the traditional has her in the same conversation as Lankum or Trú. Her eponymous record was in the Top 5 Irish Times folk albums of 2022.

Two other things drew me deeper into her work. Her collaborations and her little projects. He has recorded with the Hothouse Flower Liam Ó Maonlaí, I Have A Tribe and Susan O’Neill as well as Tommy Sands to name but a few. 

She also loves wee interrelated journeys in her work. Her most recent EP Gormacha’, crosses Ireland on land and sea between the island’s four most extreme geographical points - Mizen, Malin, Dunmore and Wicklow Head.

On an evening when Lorna Gold will be talking about our common home, I thought there was no better human to take us into our piece of earth than Clare Sands. 

Prepare to be mesmerised. 

Clare Sands plays the 4 Corners Festival on Sunday February 2, 2025 @ Jennymount Methodist Church @ 7pm. FREE!

BOOK HERE


MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BOB DYLAN - For MLK Day

MLK 2

(this is a section from my book The Rock Cries Out. It seemed right to post it again on MLK Day, this particular year...)

Long before Dylan joined the Vineyard Church’s Bible Study that was so widely publicised during his Christian conversion period of 1979 and 1980, he was working with a Church leader to bring about the justice that the Bible says so much about. Sadly, the white Church was not in tow. Indeed the Church was instigators of segregation.  The grotesque and unbelievable hypocrisy is put well by Dave Magee in his Masters of Philosophy dissertation, “The Southern Baptist Convention, an all-white body, sent millions of dollars to Africa for mission, yet barred Africans living in America with membership.” 

Martin Luther King had been disappointed with the Church’s support of his campaigning. Indeed while he thought they should be his strongest allies most were in direct opposition. For King this was a crux issue for the credibility of the Church’s place in the society of this day.  He would be strong enough to warn “that if the Church does not stop uttering its ‘pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities,’ then it will, ‘be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.’ 

How many times and in how many places has the church taken the road of status quo, a pastoring of the way things are rather than a prophetic voice of how things ought to and can be. As Northern Ireland became in the seventies and eighties, so the deep southern states of America were in the fifties and sixties. Here were places where the cross and resurrection of Jesus could be proven to the doubters and the cynics by the those who truly believed in what his the first Easter. If they had taken the power of Christ’s passion and then lived out the words that he taught about loving enemies and peacemaking they could have been a shop window for the validity Christianity around the world. Instead they maintained the divided societies that allowed the world to ignore Christianity as just another contributing factor to divided societies carrying out the most horrific of injustices. 

The Bible has constant warnings to the Church about its role in society and the danger of spiritualising the faith into a religious and pious ghetto. In the Old Testament prophecy of Amos God would in no uncertain terms highlight what his priorities for the community of faith are: 

“I hate, I despise your religious feasts;

I cannot stand your assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt offerings

And grain offerings

I will not accept them.

Though you bring me choice offerings

I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs!

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

Yet, the church seems to ignore such clear Biblical mandates and spends resources and all its efforts in religious events and conferences rather than seeking that justice and righteousness in the world around them. Many times passages like these are wished away by spiritualising the meaning and somehow ignoring the reality of Amos’s context of very clear social inequalities. Particularly in evangelical circles the vast crusades of Billy Graham were held in reverential awe at the same time when Martin Luther King’s non violent campaign to bring justice were deemed at least liberal and at worst something near demonic. A look in the mirror of the Scriptures of Amos might have at the very least redressed the balance in what we perceived to have been the most Biblical of the different campaign of Graham and King in the late fifties and sixties. In 1958 when King had urged Graham not to allow himself to be used by Governor Price Daniels, a segregationist, the Governor of Texas in his re-election bid. Graham’s right hand man would write to King and say that Billy Graham never gets involved in politics. Thirty years after King’s murder Graham would speak of King as “the most eloquent spokesperson of the civil rights movement, a champion of justice for all people…” Sad that he could not have stood with someone he so admired!

As King’s brothers in Christ kept him at arms length Bob Dylan filled the gap – the (rock)folkies cries out! He sang Blowing In The Wind and Only A Pawn In Their Game at the Washington Rally in August 1963 when King made his legendary I Have A Dream speech. Others to perform included Dylan’s lover at that moment, Joan Baez, Peter Paul And Mary, who had brought him to the wider audience with their version of Blowing In The Wind, and the legendary Mahalia Jackson. It had been Jackson who inspired King’s iconoclastic speech by shouting as if to a black preacher “Tell us your dream Martin!” King had indeed begun his speech by alerting the listener to the significance of the day that he said, “will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”  

Indeed Andy Gill would go as far as to say that King was one of the connections in Dylan that drew him to understand the power of the Bible. He writes, “He has always been keenly aware of biblical discourse as a useful storehouse of mythopoeic folk imagery, littering his songs with references to parables and prophets; and as he got involved with the civil rights movement, Dylan surely recognised the commitment of church leaders like Martin Luther King, and the strength King’s followers drew from their faith. Indeed, many of his songs from this period suggest his acknowledgement that protest anthems are, in effect secular hymns, and his delivery frequently takes on a sermonizing cast.” 


STEVE AND FR. MARTIN ON RTE TV - SUNDAY MORNING WORSHIP

Stocki and FR M RTE TV

It is the Week of Prayer For Christian Unity and on Sunday morning Fr Martin Magill and myself led a service of worship on RTE TV to mark the occasion. Worship was led by a small band blended from Fitzroy and St. John's Parish. If I say so myself they were fantastic. Prayers and reading also.

The small congregation was made up of some friends of mine from the time I lived in Dublin back in the early 90s (Thank you all for turning up) and some folk from Focolare, Dublin. 

Fr Martin and I were keen to do the service because this year we mark the 1700th Anniversary of the Nicene Creed, a Creed that both our denominations still read and believe. We both share a little about the history and theology of the Creed before a lengthier piece on what the Creed means for us.

 

WATCH THE SERVICE on the RTE PLAYER - HERE