SOUL SURMISE

OVER THE RHINE LIVE AT FITZROY, BELFAST 30.3.17... THIS IS PERSONAL

(photo: Lydia Sara Coates)

This review is personal. I have longed for this night for many, many years. There are other places on my blog where you can read about my 25 years of obsessive love for this band. Here they were, where I preach on a Sunday. Bruce Cockburn was one thing a few years ago but here, at last, were Linford and Karin - Over The Rhine! Thank you to promotor Nigel Martin for taking the risk!

And what a beautiful piece of heartache it all turned out to be! I have never basked so much in a sound. Linford’s piano playing carried us away and Karin’s voice gave us flight, the gentlest swoop of an eagle… or an angel. The harmonies washed like a soothing balm and from within lyrics redemption pushed into the veins of my soul.

In a conversation with Linford and Karin the evening before the concert I was sharing how their friend and producer Joe Henry had recently been in town with Billy Bragg. They shared the gorgeous little rumour that Henry might be currently working on new songs of his own. Linford added, “That man opens his mouth and literature pours out.”

“You do pretty well yourselves,” I responded. Their sound man Chad immediately shared his favourite Over The Rhine line and I suggested that “The last time I saw Jesus I was drinking bloody Mary’s in the south,” was the best line in rock music. I might have been exaggerating though it has gotten me thinking. Whatever, throwing out the opening line from Jesus In New Orleans got it in the concert set list. They blamed me if went wrong. Of course, it didn’t. 

Jesus In New Orleans is the song that for me best sums up the genius of Over The Rhine. There is the poetry and the social observation. Then there is the personal introspection:

“I know I'm not a martyr

I've never died for anyone but me

The last frontier is only

The stranger in the mirror that I see.”

But the song doesn’t just burrow into the personal soul. It looks out at the condition of our universal humanity:

“Oh, ain't it crazy

How we put to death the one's we need the most?”

Throughout there is a subtle theology. Jesus appears when you least expect it:

“Oh, ain't it crazy

What's revealed when you're not looking all that close?”

While you’re drinking Bloody Marys, Jesus can appear in a woman with Gospel singer Dorothy Moore on the jukebox singing out the clue.

Finally there is less subtle theology:

“But when I least expect it

Here and there I see my Saviour's face

He's still my favourite loser

Falling for the entire human race.”

And that is just one song. The entire set fills out the raison d’ etre. Literature pours out across these harmonies and Karin’s angelic voice. There’s seeking, catharsis and hopefulness. Linford, whose between songs patter is dry, humorous and insightful, says how good it is in days like this, referencing the current state of America, that we have songs to converse with.

The stunning crafted songs fill the fastest two hours of my life, where I simply want to stay in the moment and never have this sound in my ears cease. Highlight are too many to name - Drunkard’s Prayer with its water and wine perfectly placed at the front of Fitzroy Church and adding some whiskey; Meet Me To The Edge Of The World is like Wendell Berry with melody; I’d Want You an apocalyptic love song in Trump times; Born with its yearning to love without fear.

Best of all… Let It Fall, co written with Madonna’s sister Melanie, partner of aforementioned Joe Henry, with its spiritual giving over to grace; the beautiful poignancy of Poughkeepsie about suicide; and the closing All My Favourite People that says it all about this gathering, as a couple’s songs bring us into spiritual community under the roof of a Church.

My Church. Which makes it personal again. Over The Rhine have been in Belfast for two days but with a sickness that had cost them to cancel their last two gigs in the Netherlands they are doing no meet and greet after the show. I sneak them to the back door, give them a hug and they are off up the road to their hotel. 

I turn back and smile. That just happened. I have waited a long time. I dragged a lot of people out to hear it. Over The Rhine didn’t let me down. I go back into the most post concert satisfied bunch of my favourite people. I smile and start the dream to have them back!

AN OPEN LETTER TO OUR POLITICAL LEADERS... FROM.. FRUSTRATED.

(on March 30th... 6500 had read (rising by the minute)... 252 had shared... 700 had LIKED... some left messages at the bottom of this page...)

Dear Political Leaders,

We are very frustrated at the bottom of the hill. We voted for you and our taxes pay your wages. We are those you are working for.

We vote for you and pay for your leadership. We are hoping for leadership in health and in education, in business, in employment and infrastructure. Maybe above all that, or at least as a huge priority, we are looking for your leadership in reconciliation. 

We have come out of a dark time. Your predecessors, and indeed some of you, brought us out of a bloody and heinous conflict. We long that that would be consolidated and moved froward so that the next generations might not suffer what we had to for so long.

As we watch our news today and look up the hill in the hope that peace and prosperity would trickle down, we are frustrated, almost angry. We have been through two elections in ten months. We see everything stalled and our leaders seemingly playing a 6th Form Debate with each other. We feel that you are living up to our television comedy, “Don’t blame yourselves… blame each other.”

At the bottom of the hill, on the streets and across the fields, the people of this country are asking for more from you. We want progress. Dare we say it, we want compromise, so that peace and prosperity might flood down the hill.

Let me share something from the Bible. Some of us believe it to be true and live our lives by it. Even if you do not believe it to be true it has some very strong lessons for leadership, particularly in a conflict situation.

God has been betrayed by his own. They have caused enmity. They have hurt him, caused him deep pain. He has the power. He could annihilate them. It would be in some ways justice. 

God doesn’t. He becomes one of them, empathising with them. He loves them. He asks nothing from them in restoring the broken relationship. He serves them, his enemies. Instead of demanding that his enemies take the justice they deserve, he actually sacrifices his own life in order to deal with the injustices that were done to him.

It is a bit mad. The Bible calls it grace. It is a generous reaching out across enmity to the other. It is unconditional. With grace the one who was has been hurt moves first to restore the fractured relationship. This sparks change in those reached out to.

This is brave and courageous stuff. It is not easy. However, it is our only hope. It is the recipe for an extraordinary leadership perhaps best illustrated, in human terms in our recent history, by Nelson Mandela. 

The idea at the centre of this, that we would urge you to bring into play, is the “common good”. We know that you are frightened of losing your vote, your seat, your piece of the power. Leadership that will be remembered has to climb outside that self obsession and ask what needs to be done for the common good of the entire population whether they voted for you or not, whether they are perceived as your neighbour or your enemy.

So, go on, make history. Be leaders that this country will talk about for centuries to come and not just argue about on some morning radio programme. 

We are beginning to wonder if you have the vision or the courage. Show us you do. Do the business. NOW!

Grace to you all,

 

The Frustrated at the bottom of the hill.

PAUL MCCARTNEY - FLOWERS IN THE DIRT... THE CLASSIC RECORD THAT GOT AWAY

Next in his Remastered Series Flowers In The Dirt is a revelation of the very great album slipped through Paul McCartney’s hands!

Flowers In The Dirt was seen as a return to form for Paul McCartney after the failure of Pipes Of Peace to follow the strength of Tug Of War and then Press whose experimental eccentricities was a major disappointment or at least misunderstood. Add the flop that the film Give My Regards To Broad Street and the thumbs up Beatle needed a… well… a thumbs up!

The lead off single My Brave Face, co-written with Elvis Costello, was the strongest McCartney showing for many a year. There was a sense of old Beatles, a crisper rockier sound. McCartney toured this record, the first time he had done so since he broke up Wings a decade earlier and with Beatles’ covers mixing in more freely since his first band broke up, this was all hailed as a new fresh start.

The extra Cd with this deluxe edition has nine song demos of McCartney’s work with Elvis Costello. I have had a bootleg of these for many years (smacks wrist for being so naughty) and it is wonderful to at last have pristine sound quality to this treasure trove of co-writes. 

Costello was a perfect foil for a poppy Paul McCartney, the half of the greatest songwriting partnership in the world that could on more than a few occasions sound a little light and soft. John Lennon had, like sand paper, roughed the smooth off McCartney’s Beatles’ days. Think Paul’s “It’s getting better all the time” to John’s response, “It couldn’t get much worse.”

Costello could have done that for McCartney again. Indeed he did. My Brave Face and You Want Her Too are the best songs on Flowers In The Dirt, with that caustic Costello voice and lyrical twist; more Lennon than Lennon himself.

The rest of the record lost a little from Costello’s departure from the project. It seems that there were artistic differences. Other songs like This One and Put It There are fine but a little light and fluffy alongside his co-writes. The extra CD with this release tells us what we missed. So Like Candy for instance, is so good! 

Nine of the songs they wrote, some that ended up on Costello albums, some on McCartneys, are here on the extra disc. The recordings are rough, yes, but oh so worthwhile. What if they had followed the whole thing through? Adding the other songs that appeared on Costello records - Veronica, Shallow Grave and Pads Paws and Claws among them. 

Having said all of that, Flowers In The Dirt is a stellar lump of McCartney.  Producers like Froom and Horn gave it the smooth pop accessibility that made it deserving of its commercial success. It deserved the response and it was a good launch pad back into touring again. 

The Costello project might not have been the McCartney comeback that he wanted. BUT… if he had held his nerve… McCartney was on the very cusp of something utterly extraordinary in the Costello partnership. Had he not let Elvis leave the building he might have had one of the great post Beatles’ solo records, maybe even up there with Band On the Run. 

BOB GELDOF'S IMPACT ON MY SPIRITUAL LIFE - The Boomtown Rats Live in the Mandela Hall 24.3.17

It was a throwaway Facebook thread. Barra said The Boomtown Rats were coming and we should go. Aye, I said. Here it was. Mandela Hall. Tiny. Crammed with the coolest bunch of fifty somethings the Students Union has ever seen! Once there I realised that my mate Barra was a fan. A big fan!

For me it was nostalgia. I am a fan of Geldof who gave us The Boomtown Rats, the fed the world through Live Aid and made my scruffiness a little more acceptable. As I left the house I shouted out a few songs for my family. Rat Trap. She’s So Modern. Someone’s Looking At You. I Don’t Like Mondays… Goodness, they had even more hits than I thought.

I had seen Geldof at Greenbelt in 1992 and he put on a great show. So I thought I would enjoy but I had no get expectations.

Well, the music was immense. Intense. Dramatic. Tight. Thumping. Magnificent.

Geldof was simply in your face. Charismatic. Show man. All Mick Jagger swagger. Full on rock star, snake skin suit and all. He is hard to take your eyes off. 

The hits were all there. Brilliant. Yet the playing was different. This wasn’t punk. Not even new wave pop. Now in their sixties the Rats are revealing what they really were, a rhythm and blues band. It was all there on the debut album but Geldof knew how to tweak the sound to meet the commercial force of the times and that new wave pop was an avenue to a few number ones. Today they are back to bluesy riffs and rock out elongated improvisation.

Then when I was not waiting; the revelation. They were a wee bit into Looking After Number 1 and I was thinking how this was their first single and how I’d bought it near the end of the summer of 1977. I was nearly 16. I loved it.

Eight years later at the height of Live Aid I found this verse fascinating…

“Don't give me love thy neighbour

Don't give me charity

Don't give me peace and love or the good lord above

You get in the way with your stupid ideas.”

He who didn’t want love your neighbour or charity, fed the world. Geldof acknowledged the contradiction in his biography Is That It? when he said that God looked down and asked who was least likely to feed the world and knocked his door. I would acknowledge that it was Geldof’s actions in 1984 and 1985 that sent me back to the Bible and found its call to social justice. I have been preaching and acting on that ever since.

BUT… it was not this that raised itself in my soul in the Mandela Hall. It was that concluding preach of the song…

“Don't wanna be like you.

Don't wanna live like you.

Don't wanna talk like you, at all.

I'm gonna be like

I'm gonna be like

I'm gonna be like ME!”

I had forgotten the impact of this on my teenage soul. I remember it marked me. I wanted to be myself. I didn’t want to be a clone. As the next song on the set said, I didn’t want to get caught in any societal Rat Trap.

When I discovered Jesus a couple of years later he didn’t make me conform to any cookie cutter Christian idea. He actually opened the door for me to be the person that God created me and Jesus redeemed me to be. 

Looking around me as Geldof threw poses and repeated my teenage mantra I realised that at 55 I was probably the only Presbyterian minister standing at the Boomtown Rats in the Mandela Hall because I was still being exactly like… me!

All this after Geldof had his usual political rant during Banana Republic with its angst against the Irish Police and Church. Standing right in front of me he shouts, “Priests, Priests, Priest, Vicars, Vicars, Imams… F(lip) Off!” I felt conspicuous but laughed it off. 

So, an excellent evening of powerful rock n roll. Late in the show Geldof channeled Jagger, Jim Morrison, John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry. They even covered Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town in the encores. I left having thoroughly enjoyed and having learned something about myself…. about the me who ended up at a Rats gig in 2017!

AWKWARD DANCE OF PEACE

My thoughts are in Derry/Londonderry this afternoon, for the funeral of Martin McGuinness.  For those surprised at that, I am surprised too, BUT peacemaking which I am absolutely committed to, as a call from Jesus to do so and as an attempt to give my children a better future, leads you into strange and often difficult relationships and indeed friendships.

AWKWARD DANCE OF PEACE

Between the bloody dark

And grace’s redeeming light

Between the hate riled gloom 

And the rays of forgiveness, bright

Friendships can be messy.

 

Between the blowing up

And the pieces fixed on landing

Between the bleak black funerals

And the bridegroom standing

Friendships can be messy.

 

This is an awkward dance

With partners disconcerting

The tender tentative steps

With all our wounds still hurting

Take two up and one back

Move close to hold the seams

Swirl in the suspicious space

To soar in audacious dreams.

LONDON, BE STILL AND KNOW (22.3.17)

As the news came through of the suspected terrorist attack at Westminster yesterday, my mind went back to a moment in August 1989. I was falling in love with Janice. We were up at Westminster on a hot sunny afternoon. We had sat at Westminster and gazed across the London skyline. I had never been to London until that summer and I was mesmerised and in love with its vibrancy, art and music. 

I was also falling in love with Janice. As we headed towards the Tube Station at Westminster that afternoon I found myself a few yards ahead of her. I looked back and she was laughing and my heart took a photograph of that moment. Love was bursting through my chest in the most delirious way! 

I think of that moment today. Where we fell in love. Where utter joy consumed me. Right there people were murdered and injured indiscriminately. Today people mourn the loss of their loved ones. A city is shocked and a little more fearful.

I added my heart taken photograph to the news of the terror attack and added a prayer. All in sixteen lines...

 

I caught her face at Westminster Bridge

My heart lit up, my soul shone

I reached for her hand, our laugh burst

We built the rest of our blessed lives on

London, you’re where I fell in love

Now you’ve fallen and lie bleeding

In the devil’s miracle of our fallenness

May you find what we all our needing.

 

Today, I remember London

And I offer up a prayer

For grace's interruption

God’s comforting repair

Let’s stop all this hatred

For this hate I’ve had enough

London, be still and know 

The indiscriminate power of love.

MARTIN MCGUINNESS - MY ANGER... MY APPRECIATION... MY CHALLENGE

Waking up to the news this morning that Martin McGuinness had passed away, my first emotion was sadness. In the couple of occasions when we had met he was warm. He retweeted one of my reviews of a James Taylor album! My sympathy went out immediately to his family. They are the ones who will feel his loss the most. May God give them grace and comfort in the days that lie ahead.

My second thought was for our peace process. Whatever you think of Martin McGuinness he was a major driver in our peace process. There is little doubt that the Republican shift from violence to the peace process was a strategic move of the mind. Let us find another way to achieve our aims of a united Ireland. Martin McGuinness, however, brought his heart to the process too. 

His relationship with Ian Paisley revealed that. Even after Paisley left the scene, and indeed since his passing away, McGuinness stayed in touch with Eileen Paisley. There was a heartfelt relationship between them. McGuinness’s heart is being, and will be, missed from our political institutions. Someone, please God many, in Sinn Fein needs to fill the void he has left.

Many will rightfully challenge me in this last paragraph and ask where Martin McGuinness’s heart was when the IRA, with him up to his neck in it, were murdering people for decades. Indeed!

Yesterday my emotions raged against IRA terrorism. In researching a U2 documentary, I came face to face with the 11 people killed in the Enniskillen bomb on Remembrance Day 1987. The anger deep inside me was palpable. These obscene and evil things should not have happened in my country.

In this blog I do not want to minimise the hurt and pain caused by the IRA’s terrorist campaign. When Fr Martin Magill and I spoke at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis, in 2015, I was very careful to bring into the room dear friends who had lost loved ones at the hands of the IRA. 

When Fr Martin and I wrote an Uncomfortable Conversations piece for the Republican newspaper An Phoblacht, Martin challenged the military campaign of the IRA and asked why they could not have taken a peaceful Dr. Martin Luther King approach. 

However, the IRA military campaign ended and without doubt Martin McGuinness had his role to play in that decision. Since that time I would surmise that McGuinness has changed more than any other politician in Northern Ireland. 

So, as much as I am angry about his past, I also appreciate that because of Martin McGuinness there are not many hundreds more people lost to the Troubles. I am wondering who I would know that might have been killed if the conflict had gone on past 1998. Martin McGuinness’s desire for a peaceful future and his ability to bring with him a Republican community, many of whom have a romantic notion of a United Ireland by violent means, is something we need to be thankful for.

As I listen this morning to all the Tributes, and other reflections, on the life of Martin McGuinness I am drawn back to the blog I posted when he stepped down as Deputy First Minister. There is a challenge in looking back at Martin McGuinness’s life that asks questions of myself.

How do I deal with the change in Martin McGuinness’s life? Am I prepared to acknowledge it? Or do I leave him frozen in time? Do I freeze frame him as the terrorist in order that I do not have to respond to his evident change of heart and soul and mind? Is that easier than dealing with my own hatred?

I am often amazed when I hear many people who talk about repentance and the need for change not believing that Martin McGuinness had changed. I imagine that their argument would be that change can only come through repentance and faith in Jesus and in their own formula of what that means. 

My surmise on that is that repentance is not a theological idea. Jesus’ call to repentance was to an action. It is an active turning of our lives around. Repentance is to live in a completely different way than we had been living. The Scriptures also tell us, time and time again, that it is by the fruit of our intentions that we are to be judged, not our head knowledge and doctrinal position. 

The probing question that the transformation in Martin McGuinness asks me is have I a similar harvest of change in my own life? Have I been able to love my enemies in the same way that he has? Have I moved from hatred to acts of reconciliation as he did? 

Shaking hands with the Queen, and other acts of reaching out, were difficult and even had him receiving death threats from republican paramilitaries. Am I prepared to take the same steps towards reconciliation?

In the end I understand why many will find it difficult to come to terms with the Martin McGuinness of his later life. The bodies, the funerals, the grief of the past are hard to get over. We all deal with the deep pain in different ways. Many of us find it easier to live out God’s grace than others do. For some it is a daily struggle. 

However, God calls us to a hard love. I keep going back to these verses because as a follower of Jesus living in Northern Ireland they are perhaps the most relevant verses in all of Scripture for my following of Jesus:

Luke 6: 27 & 28: “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.

Perhaps my response to Martin McGuinness’s legacy, all over our media today, might be a good guide to show me how much I have changed, repented in my own lives. 

Psalm 139: 23 & 24

Search me, God, and know my heart;

    test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

    and lead me in the way everlasting.

 

 

THE UNFORGETTABLE GIG; WHEN U2 ROCKED THE KING'S HALL - A Plug for the Radio Documentary

I am very excited to let the U2 fans among you know that I will be narrating a documentary about the 30th Anniversary of the Kings Hall Joshua Tree Tour concert that took place on June 24th 1987. Thank you to Karen Atkinson for involving me in this project. It has been fun.

Today, I had a wonderful conversation with artist Colin Davidson outside Game on High Street. It was as close to the exact spot as we could get to where the old record shop Makin’ Tracks was. Both Colin and I were outside that shop at midnight on March 8th 1987. 

Within seconds we were abuzz with memories. Being an artist Colin’s recollections were particularly vivid. He reminded me that there was a security barrier just 100 yards away. As Colin pointed out, Belfast city centre was closed down at 6.00 during The Troubles and here it was alive with excitement near midnight on a Sunday night! 

Those security gates had to be opened when two Mercedes arrived with U2 inside. They were in Belfast to make a recording for BBC TV's Old Grey Whistle Test at the King's Hall that day. Colin was closer to the front of the crowd than I was but even he didn’t see the band going inside. He did see the Edge’s hat and assumed that the guitarist was underneath it!

It was again Colin who took us forward a couple of years. When Rattle And Hum came out in October 1988 almost every record shop in Belfast opened and, as Colin rightly remembered, there were 10 times as many people buying at midnight. 

Of course everybody hoped that the band would turn up again. They never ever did again. I bought Achtung Baby at midnight in Dublin, Zooropa at midnight in Cork. No band appearances. Only Makin’ Tracks March 1987. I do have a vague recollection that dopplegangers The Joshua Trio did play at the Rattle and Hum release.

A few weeks ago Karen took Liam Creagh and I to the Maysfield Leisure Centre. Again it was longer there but outside a building site on a snow skiff cold blowy day we reminisced about U2’s gig there on December 20th 1982. I remembered that it was just as freezing outside the venue that night but inside it was sweltering. U2 whipped up a sweat and I might have used a friends scarf as a towel! 

Liam had reviewed that gig and interviewed the band afterwards. It was very low key he remembered. Down to earth. That is how Colin Davidson had remembered them when they signed his Joshua Tree record in Makin Tracks. 

The Maysfield concert was historic for U2 unveiling of Sunday Bloody Sunday. A song about the Northern Ireland Troubles, Bono seemed nervous as he introduced it. He told us it was about this place, assured us that it was not a rebel song and promised that if we didn’t like it he would never play it again. There are rumours that a few walked out. If they did they didn’t walk past me.

In all of this reverie I came to see how important a place Belfast has been to a band from Dublin and how important that band is to Belfast. That they came to Makin' Tracks at the height of the Troubles. That they wrote a song about us. That they played the relatively tiny Kings Hall days before they played two shows at the vast stadium of Croke Park in Dublin and not long after Wembley Stadium in London.

I actually became aware how important Northern Ireland was to Bono in conversation with Karen as we made the documentary. We were talking about the night of the Enniskillen bombing also in 1987. The IRA bombed a Remembrance Day parade. Eleven people were killed, mainly pensioners, and 63 were injured. That night U2 were playing Denver, Colorado and, during Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bono went off on one and in rather earthy language damned “the revolution”. 

As I commented I suddenly became aware of Bono’s emotions. It wasn’t a cold political statement from a band who without question were fond of the political soap box. In Bono’s voice you knew that this was personal. His passion revealed his love for us in wee Northern Ireland. His declaration for peace didn’t only echo across Denver that night but in film theatres across the world for the next couple of years. It was U2 making their investment in our peace process which they would come back to again and again.

As you can tell, I have loved helping out with his documentary. Karen has done a great job and as well as Colin, Liam and myself there are interviews with various fans, promotors and journalists including Hot Press’s Niall Stokes and the legendary Dave Fanning.

Tune in…

The Unforgettable Gig: When U2 Rocked The Kings Hall - BBC Radio Ulster, Sunday March 26th at 12.30 pm

TOMORROW IN FITZROY 19.3.17

Tomorrow morning (11am) we will be crossing borders with Jesus in John 4... There he crosses gender, race and religion to engage with a Samaritan woman by a well... it is politically and religiously subversive stuff... but perhaps there is more... is there a border to the soul of our being that Jesus can cross too. We will look at the relentlessness or consumerism and how it messes with our desires. We will find help from Rowan Williams and actor Andrew Garfield... there will be some slam poetry and original rhymes too. We will also be looking, praying and responding to the East African famine. Worship with the youthful exuberance of Michael Dolaghan and his band!

In the evening (7pm) we are thrilled to have some guests from Selma, Alabama with us. We will be looking at the movie Selma, asking how it was there in 1965 when Dr Martin Luther King came to town. We will then be finding out how an African American Baptists Church involved in those days of 1965 and a white Presbyterian Church are crossing the divides in reconciliation. This is part 3 in our Lenten Series on Rowan Williams book Being Disciples - this week's chapter is appropriately on forgiveness!

More about the Selma event here

THE RELENTLESSNESS...

The idea for this poem came from one of my former students. 

We are on our last day in Cape Town, on a mission trip. We had spent a lot of time on townships, with those who had a lot less of our western materialism.

I was asking what they would and would not miss about Cape Town and then asked, "Is there anything you are not looking forward to about going home?"

"The relentlessness," she replied.

It is ever etched in my mind. That moment. Those words. It is a powerfully prophetic word to our culture.

As I preach tomorrow on Jesus and the Samaritan woman (John 4) I was drawn back to the poem. In Fitzroy we have have been, as a congregation, studying Rowan Williams' book Being Disciples. In the book, under the theme Love and Want, he writes, "We privilege the consumer mentality (I'll have that one) and so we fail to ask the deep questions about the direction of the desire at the root of our being."

Jesus goes right to the root of the Samaritan woman's being and fills that God shaped hole. 

 

Relentless

Advertorials of diets and fashions

Relentless

Cinematic porn of loveless passions

Relentless

Greed’s multitude of instant gratification

Relentless

The consistent pounding of temptation

The relentlessness

The relentlessness

The relentlessness.

 

I see a fracture and drift

From our wealth and my soul

Filling my deluded empty dreams

But not the God shaped hole.

 

Relentless

The constant battle of winning and loosing 

Relentless

The myth of the privilege of choosing

Relentless

The seduction of all this momentary stuff

Relentless

The addiction of never ever enough

The relentlessness

The relentlessness

The relentlessness.

 

I see a fracture and drift

From our wealth and my soul

Filling my deluded empty dreams

But not the God shaped hole.