COLDPLAY BRINGING PRAYER TO GLASTONBURY

Coldplay has been the chatter of the week. Their Glastonbury performance was a machine gun fire of stadium anthem hits peppered with guests and big symbolic moments. Michael J Fox on guitar on Fix You. Oh my! It was quite a show. Even the naysayers had to pay some attention. I wondered myself why I had never seen them live!

Then there is the middle. A new song. We Pray. What is is about Glastonbury that invokes prayer. In 2019 I was writing on this very blog about Stormzy taking Glastonbury to Church. 

Here Coldplay are looking upward too. We Pray. It’s personal and very Biblical:

I pray we wake in, pray my friend will pull through

Pray as I take in onto others, I do

I pray in all your love, pray with every breath

Though I'm in the valley of the shadow of death

 

It goes cultural:

 

Pray that we speak in a tongue that is honest

And that we understand hearts be modest

Pray that she don't lose herself in the mirror

She's a queen, she's a goddess

 

And ends up with the hope of heaven:

 

And so we pray

I know somewhere that heaven is waiting

And so we pray

I know somewhere there's something amazing

And so we pray

I know somewhere we'll feel no pain

Until we make it to the end of the day

 

As I said in my review of the band’s album Everyday Life I am not going to declare Chris Martin as your latest Christian superstar. Martin grew up in a Christian home and has constantly returned to that well for lyrical inspiration. He has distanced himself from that evangelical branch of Christianity and now calls himself an all-theist. 

Perhaps We Pray is about all faith’s praying. No one can be against that. It seems to suggest that wishing might not be enough. The prayer word suggests something more robust. I know for sure that it’ll probably appear in some guise in Fitzroy this winter.

As a song for Glastonbury, it seems to me to be perfect. It never ceases to amaze me where a God, dismissed by a modern British culture, turns up so many times in the midst!

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[Teopa]

We pray.

In truth, we pray