SOUL SURMISE

30 YEARS OF DERRYVOLGIE HALL - MY HAND IN IT!

(Derryvolgie Students in Cape Town in 2008, having planted a tree for a former student Lindsay Emerson who died too young...)

 

January 1995. It’s a world of East 17 and Boyzone. The Blur verses Oasis standoff was toe to toe. At the cinema Dumb and Dumber is all the rage. Blackburn Rovers were challenging Manchester United at the top of the Premier League. John Major was Prime minister. I was the new Dean of Residence at Derryvolgie Hall, part of the Presbyterian Chaplaincy at Queens University, opening the doors for the first time.

January is a strange time to open University Halls of Residence. I had moved back from Dublin after leaving my job as Youth Development Officer for PCI in the Republic Of Ireland in August hoping to begin moving students in by September. That was the plan. 

At the end of August the IRA had announced their Ceasefire but not before a bomb had damaged our shiny news Halls. A rocket attack from the car park across the road on Derryvolgie Avenue aimed at the British Army base behind the Halls had gone off prematurely and damaged the buildings. We were delayed.  

I was employed by The Social Witness Board of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in collaboration with the Education Board who had built a brand new Hall of Residence for students in Belfast. The building was funded by the War Memorial Hostel Trust. That had been the name of a residence on Brunswick Street from 1925 to the late 60s. Belfast city centre wasn’t a place for students to live at the start of The Troubles and so rooms were rented out and the accumulation of that money was invested in news halls on Derryvolgie Avenue. 

The original trust deeds stated that the rooms were for Presbyterian students and young workers and for as long as possible we kept to that. In the first couple of years, young teachers and accountants lived in flats beside students from Queens, UU, the Art College, Stranmillis and even at one stage a young woman from Kilkenny coming up to do a year at Victoria College. 

This delay cost us residents and we opened with 18 that increased to around 25. The next year we were way over subscribed and an extension was built for 30 more students which was opened in 1996. 

I emphasised community at the heart of the ministry. I am delighted to say that there are still little groups of friend who met in Derryvolgie who are still close and regularly meet up decades later. I am in touch with so many on social media.

When I arrived I was aware of a plethora of opportunities for young Christians at Queen’s. The CU had their Thursday teaching meeting and Departmental small groups. I didn’t want to repeat that so we went for a Sunday evening event that was more multi media. I was keen for faith to be connected to the world and prepare minds and vocations. So we had guests who were doctors, lawyers, artists. We had a month where we had the Moderator, a member of the House Of Lords and the Lord Mayor. How had they applied their faith in their jobs? 

There was also teaching and reflective times to pray and search the mind and soul. 

There was also a lot of music and even a play. Juno and the Paycock was performed to parents and friends. I was managing and encouraging a lot of singer songwriters at the time so Iain Archer, Brian Houston, Duke Special, Juliet Turners were regulars. Halcyon Days too. It gave the place quite the vibe and I still meet people who tel me that they were in Derryvolgie at events in those years.

When it came to the turn of the Millennium I began to think about an overseas trip. We had had some Habitat For Humanity staff stay with us that first year when we were not full so I asked about somewhere to go. Janice and I had been to Cape Town on honeymoon and we decided to go there. What was to be one trip lasted almost a decade. We went every two years and after only 14 on the first trip we had over 50 on the next four trips, the most being 68 in 2004. 

The Assistant Chaplain Lynn Ferguson and my family would stay in Cape Town for weeks bringing teams in and out. Three teams over almost two months in 2004 perhaps proved too much! We cut the next two to two teams over 5 weeks.

We created what I called a Bible Study on the field programme around building houses with HFH on the townships around Cape Town. As well as the house building in very impoverished areas we would check out the AIDS pandemic with JL Zwane church, how Fair Trade worked with help from Christian Aid and the Co-op as well as some peace study with Alex Boriane’s International Centre for Transitional Justice. We’d work all this out in evenings spent looking at the Sermon On The Mount. I think we worked on over 50 houses that families moved into at the end of our work. 

There is of course too much to say. Janice and I got married while in Derryvolgie. Residents made up the choir. We had our reception in the Art N Soul Room with the residents as our waiters and waitresses. We had our two children Caitlin in 1998 and Jasmine in 2000. Two small children meant Janice couldn’t be as involved as much as she could have been but she still added a pastoral role. 

We lived with 88 students. Nothing was private. Yet, when in 1999 the committee decided we needed to build a bigger house I preferred to extend where we are rather than buy us a house somewhere else. Living on site gave me access to students and them to me that we unique and so wonderful.

I had students at my door telling me they were doubting their faith, they weren’t sure about their degree, they wanted help with an essay, their relationship had just broken up, or they had just started going out with someone, or they’d been asked to join Duke Special’s band!

In it all, it allowed me into the lives of so many students at a formative time. Still today, I meet with many of them who tell me the influence of those days, how it helped them shape their faith or know what God want of them.

Two stories. The first time students broke the no alcohol rule they foolishly threw the beer cans out their window. Evidence in the back garden. The young man whose room I found so easily was the first to be voted an elder! 

I have also gotten to do so many of their weddings. The first? Well the first happened to be the daughter of the co-chair of the committee that decided to build the Halls. As I said at the wedding - a million pounds well spent to get your daughter a husband. That couple and their children are valued members of Fitzroy today. 

I am always thrilled when I ponder the return on investment. Oh there are church planters, ministers, leaders in NGOs but I also see artists, doctors, teachers, nurses, lawyers, dentists, architects, researchers, engineers and more being particles of Jesus light across Belfast, N, Ireland and indeed to the ends of the world. I remember lives transformed by their few years in the community of DV.

Glorious times. God taught me so much. We were blessed. Thanks to Janice and my girls, Lynn Guiney my assistant Chaplain and my administrators Andrew Kyle, Lorna Dunlop and Carol McMahon and all those students who gave us the privilege of opening their lives to us.

By 2009 I was tiring and knew that I wasn’t giving it what I had that first month in 1995. It was time to move on. In November Fitzroy came calling and opened an amazing next chapter. I have to say that I was surprised after 3 years when my congregation didn’t graduate and move on! 

DAVID GRAY - DEAR LIFE

David Gray was my man in the 1990s. Century’s End, Flesh and Sell Sell Sell. I couldn’t get enough of them. I was thrilled that White Ladder eventually gave him an audience, even if it was my least favourite of the four albums at that point.

As the new millennium kicked in, I lost him but his last record Skellig had me listening again. Dear Life even more. I'm enjoying these songs.

Slow burn is a term that could have been created for David Gray. It took four albums for the world to take David Gray to their hearts and that fourth album, White Ladder, took a long time to make any impression too. It did however send Gray into the stratosphere. 

Dear Life is another slow burn. Oh on first spin you’ll hear all the goodness of David Gray, the acoustic momentum, the drum beats, that voice and the wordiness but I reckon it takes three or four listens before the ear worm melodies reach in.

What I particularly love about Dear Life is that wordiness. This is a record is driven by the words. At his best, as he is here, Gray has all that poetic lyricism of Jackson Browne and content wise this could sit between Browne’s Late For The Sky and The Pretender.

The opening After The Harvest sets the scene with succinct social observation: 

 

I know that love is bigger

Than this dumb day to day

I see its shining figure

Fighting for scraps out in the melee

 

At times this collection is more than just observation and sounds more like prophetic judgement. On The Only Ones:

 

Scarecrows pulling at their stuffing

Seeing something where there's nothing

Court arise

Try to throw it, it ain't sticking

Nerves are frying up like chicken

Put the wool back over our eyes

 

These songs that peer with intent across the societal temperature are not objective, this is an album about where David Gray sits in its influence. This is more introspection. So, love of the heart on I Saw Love:

 

My fate is in the hands of a total stranger

Whose only map is a blank sheet of paper

 

There’s our mortality. The Only Ones again…

 

I traded in my disbelief

Stood with multitudes

And broke the bread of grief

Rode the thermals, swam the reef

 

… and the certainty of death too, can I stretch my Jackson Browne comparison and propose That Day Must Surely Come as Gray’s  version of The Dancer:

 

I can still feel the shock

When as a child

For the first time

Saw the great void unlocked

And understood then

It would be mine

 

No trumpet blast

No champagne glass

No roll on the drum

No, but that day must surely come

 

I like to think of it all as more cathartic than miserable though melancholic it most definitely is. Maybe my favourite track, at this stage of my familiarity, suggests a hopefulness that I believe Gray is warning us towards. It is probably not Gray’s intention but on Sunlight On Water I hear the echos of the Psalmist’s waiting for redemption of the soul:

 

We're the ones that waited all winter

Can't even begin to

Explain the way that felt

Yeah, we're the ones that waited all winter

Collided right into

Our own true selves.

MY TRIBUTE TO MICHAEL LONGLEY (1939-2025)

 

I was walking along the Lagan this afternoon, at Ormeau Bridge, when I glanced down and noticed a social media message that Michael Longley had passed away. Within me, my heart cried "Nooooo". Immediately I thought that Belfast was less than it had been yesterday. Michael's imagination and literary flair gone. What a loss.

I only spoke to him a couple of times but when I did I sensed the gentle genius of him. His voice when he read his work had a sense of compassion and grace. A deep humanity. 

One of the highlights of my life was when Michael joined us at the 2019 4 Corners Festival and read Ceasefire. I sensed one of those most privileged moments of my life. Someone of magnitude was at our wee Festival and reading maybe his greatest poems. Soul tingling. 

We were in the well bombed Europa Hotel for a rehearsed reading of Seamus Heaney’ The Cure at Troy under the direction of Trevor Gill of The Bright Umbrella Theatre Co. We had a plethora of political names actually acting it out - Naomi Long, Claire Hanna and Mairtin Muilleoir,  Sammy Douglas, Glenn Bradley and Paul Gallagher among them. 

To then have Michael Longley read Ceasefire. Oh my. The Festival's theme that year was Scandalous Forgiveness. It was almost Biblical.

I am not a great poetry reader, much as I am obsessed with the more poetic lyrics in music. So, it would be no surprise that when Duke Special put Longley's poems into songs I was in love with it.

That record Hallow, in my opinion. is one of the most important records made in our wee country. Michael's work suits Duke Special perfectly.  It is lyrical, it is full of images and asks some metaphysical questions. The opening Another Wren seeks “whatever the key in which God exists’ and on A Questionnaire For Walter Mitty my favourite lines:

 

“And Walter Mitty how would you define

The water walker who made the water wine
Was it Christ the God

Was it Christ the man?”

 

As well at the spiritual questioning and probing, there are the characters, brothers, granddaughters and the aforementioned Lena Hardy.

Very best of all, and most moving, is The Ice-Cream Man about John Larmour who was looking after his brother’s ice cream shop, Barnum’s on the Lisburn Road, when he was shot dead. On this track, Michael actually reads the poem himself and then talks about getting a letter from the Ice Cream Man’s mother and how it was one of his most treasured possessions. the power of the poem and the appreciation of the poet when he captures it is all in there in a cathartic poem about our Northern Irish Troubles.

I will remember Michael Longley as a man with a most gracious demeanour.

Then, I will recognise him as a great poet when our wee place shared him with Seamus Heaney. Think about that. Our wee place!

Then, I will appreciate how he used his gift to help us all through very violent and traumatic times.

And finally I will always be so grateful that he stood up at the 4 Corners Festival and read:

 

I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.

 

Wow! The theme that year was Scandalous Forgiveness. All summed up in two poetic lines by a genius. As I said, we are lesser. 

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

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

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!