SOUL SURMISE

STOCKI'S ST. PATRICK'S DAY PLAYLIST 2025

Stockman's 2025 St. Patrick's Day Playlist takes us all over Ireland in place names... The only exception is Snow Patrol's Take Me The City about Belfast... it had to be in there...)

 

County Down - Trú

(From No Fixed Abode)

 

N17 - The Sawdoctors

(From If The Is Rock N Roll., I want My Old Job Back)

 

The Galway Girl - Sharon Shannon (with Mundy)

(From Live At Dolans)

 

Fair Head’s Daughter - The Orphan Brigade

(From At The Edge Of The World)

 

Wild Atlantic Way - Blue Rose Code

(From With Healings Of The Deepest Kind)

 

Sailortown - Anthony Toner

(From Emperor)

 

Orangefield - Van Morrison

(From Live In Orangefield)

 

Crescent Nights - The 4 of Us

(From Crescent Nights)

 

Bangor Town - Foy Vance

(From The Wild Swan)

 

Star Of The County Down - Energy Orchard

(From Shinola)

 

Galway Girl - Ed Sheeran

(From + Deluxe)

 

Belfast - Burning Codes

(Single)

 

Take Back The City - Snow Patrol

(From Eyes Open)

 

Samson and Goliath - Dani Larkin

(From Between Worlds (with Ulster Orchestra))

 

Holywood Seapark - Iain Archer

(From Boy Boy Boy single)

 

Helen’s Bay - Dark Tropics

(From Ink)

 

The Ghosts Of The Bloomfield Road - Joshua Burnside

(From Teeth of Time)

 

The Stars Over Kinvara - Declan O’Rourke

(From Arrivals

 

Carrageen Moss - Cara Dillon

(From Coming Home)

 

Remembering Carrigskeewaun - Duke Special

(From Hallow)

 

Dun Laoghaire - David Gray

(From Skellig)

 

Wexford Strawberries - David Kitt

(From Idiot Check)

 

Salthill Prom - Clare Sands

(From Clare Sands)

 

Trawbreaga Bay - Oisin Leech

(From Cold Sea)

 

Carrickfergus - Brian Houston

(from Songs Of My Father)

 

The Hills Of Donegal - Paul Brady

(From Back To The Centre)

 

The Green Glens Of Antrim - Ben Glover

(From The Emigrant)

DINING WITH OUR ENEMIES

For years I have been drawn to that little phrase in Psalm 23 where David writes in verse 5:

You prepare a table before me
    in the presence of my enemies.

It might be suggested that this is when one's enemies are all gathered to watch what God is giving you. You get a chance to smirk at them. They didn't get their way. You won in the end.

I don't like this interpretation.

I am thinking that this is about the reconciliation that happens on our journey home to full redemption. In the latter days you will share a banquet with those who opposed you, those who hurt you. Grace will have its outworking. Forgiveness is not just a transaction, it is friendships restored and enjoying the fulness of God's great salvation history together. 

It reminds me too of the 13th century Rumi's poem, Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing. He writes,

 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there

 

My two friends Martyn Joseph and Martin Wroe used Rumi's idea in their song There Is A Field:

 

There is a field
I'll meet you there

Somewhere bеyond this
Just out of sight
All those we miss
Are hеld in some new light

Lie down in the deep grass
Lie down every soul
In a field where love welcomes you
In a place where we're made whole

 

I first came across this field in Colum McCann’s novel Apeirogon and then found out that it was an idea that the late Northern Irish and Nobel Peace laureate John Hume loved. For them it is a place of reconciliation.

It is where my imagination goes when I think of dining with our enemies. 

If you have been reading my blogs this Lent then you will know that I have been surmising and practicing the idea of praying for people we do not love. We are not long in to Lent but I have already had a moment when I have had almost a Psalm 23 moment. Oh, enemy is too strong a word but someone who has been the face of deep hurt crossed my path. I had been praying for them in Lent, which had softened painful barbs.

We then met. It was all very ordinary but for me very profound. It was a release of enmity. Through the encounter I am convinced that one of God's intentions in his work within us is restored relationships. God wants us to dine with our enemies. He longs for us to meet in that field beyond right and wrong. Shalom really does lie there.

STOCKMAN - MEDIA APPEARANCES IN MARCH AND APRIL 2025

For those who are interested, and I am always amazed and thankful that some of you are, I have a few media appearances coming up. A little clogged up as can often happen.

First up, I am in the middle of a wee once a week series of Pause For Thought on BBC Radio 2. This is with Owain Wyn Evans at 5,45am. Having said that I have already done two with Jason Mohammed who has been standing in for Owain.

Jason, who of course hosts a lot of football shows, and I had a great time on Wednesday talking about my childhood mate Steven Penney who Jason remembered having in his 1986 World Cup stickers book! What the nation doesn't know is that I did this one live from an ensuite in a Newcastle Hotel where I was at a Conference!

Anyway I am on Radio 2 on:

Wednesday March 19th and 26th at 5.45am

 

I am also about to start a new series of Thought For The Day on Good Morning Ulster which now airs at around 7.20am. I will be doing 4 Thursdays on March 20th, 27th and April 3^rd and 10th.

 

Maybe more exciting of all is that Fr Martin Magill and I will be appearing with others on  Sunday Morning Live on BBC 1 TV on March 16th. . 

This is a little slot about the recent 4 Corners Festival and concentrates on the Peace Loom that we had in 2 Royal Avenue. Of course it will also be available on the iPlayer. 

(If an interview on the show goes on too long we might be cut and kept for another day BUT as we know it we are on, on Sunday)

 

BUFFALO SOLDIER AND A BOY ON A CAPE FLATS TOWNSHIP

(I wrote this for Pause For Thought on BBC Radio 2 and then we didn't use it... The theme was Walking In Someone Else's Shoes)

 

I have learned not to judge people until I have at least imagined walking in their shoes. This morning I am thinking of one young fella that I met who had no shoes on at all.

It was 2008 and I was driving around Mfuleni, a township on the Cape Flats, near Cape Town. 

I was a Chaplain at Queens University, Belfast and was leading a bunch of students, helping to build houses for those who never had one. We did the labour while black South African builders did the building. That in itself was beautifully subversive.

It was our first day in Mfuleni and as I turned my minibus around a corner a young boy, maybe 10 years old, cycled up a long side, singing Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley. There’s a lot of Marley on those townships! The window on my van was down so I sang back.

The song started a friendship. Every time my wee mate appeared we’d both burst into Buffalo Soldier. Over the week, we’d sit and chat. One afternoon I gave him a few Rand to fix his dilapidated bike. He brought back cream buns bought with the change. 

I cannot remember his real name but I think of him often. He’d be in his mid 20’s now. I wonder where he is? What he is doing? He was a clever wee lad but the shoes, or no shoes, that he was given by accident of birth limited his possibilities. 

Today I fear that my wee Buffalo Solider singer could easily have been drawn into crime. When opportunities are limited it must be easy in shoeless feet to resort to any means to survive. As yet another township boy, later anti apartheid leader Steve Biko said, “Don’t blame the person who steals the bike, blame the circumstances that caused him to steal the bike”. 

Having walked for a few days here and a few weeks there with gifted children wearing very poor quality shoes, or going barefoot, I have committed to living the life the Old Testament prophets demanded, that the opportunities and justice of the poor should not be eroded by wealth wasted on big houses or, for that matter, expensive shoes.

WALKING IN SOMEONE ELSE'S SHOES

(My Pause For Thought on BBC Radio 2 with Jason Mohammed on March 12, 2025... The theme was Walking In Someone Else's Shoes...) 

 

Walking in someone else’s shoes Jason, I’d love to have walked in Kevin De Bruyne’s football boots.

But let me tell you about the boys who played their football with no boots or shoes at all.

I spent an afternoon with Levixone and Trinity on the Kosovo township in Kampala.

The boys showed me where they grew up. They pointed out the pool table that they slept under as ten year olds. The locals feared them as little drug urchins.

Then one day a football match at the local primary school just across the road from the pool table. The Kosovo school kids were playing a visiting group. The head master knew that Levixone could play so he brought him into the team. The head master told me that he had no clothes, just a towel over his middle and certainly no shoes or boots.

He was good though. Someone spotted him and asked what class he was in. He didn’t go to school so this person said he would find the funds. Both Levixone and his friend Trinity started school.

Today, Levixone is the almost perpetual annual winner of the East African Gospel Singer of the Year, holding crowds of 20,000 in the palm of his hand.

The first time that they put Trinity on a computer they realised he was a genius. He now has a large business creating websites for big companies across the entire world. A couple years ago, Forbes magazine recognised him as one of the top young entrepreneur in the world.

Both could have moved out to the Kampala suburbs but both still live in Kosova, though not under a pool table. Their following of Jesus has told them to give back to the kids without shoes that they once were. Trinity employs hundreds of people in the township.

Trinity said at an event I heard him speak at, “Brilliance is equally distributed. Opportunity is not.” 

When we imagine walking in other people’s shoes we often think we know who they are, what we will find and learn. After I had spent time with these two young men who once were barefoot but were more able than those who wear the most expensive shoes, I learned to get rid of my caricatures, stereotypes and prejudices… and to help create opportunities.