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October 2024

FITZROY PRESENTS - THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO... COLDPLAY

Cold Play Moon 2

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO... COLDPLAY

SUNDAY DECEMBER 1st at 7.00pm

Fitzroy Church, 77 University Street, BELFAST

FREE

For 15 years we in Fitzroy have been putting on a series called The Gospel According To...

We started with U2, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Our former assistant Jonathan Barclay branched out and we had Les Mierables and The West End. David Thompson reached for the younger audience with Harry Potter, The Lion King, Narnia, Finding Nemo...

It is performance centred. for the music ones there are songs covered by an array of Fitzroy talent. With the music then I do what I call preach-jockey. That is simply linking the songs with a little nugget of spiritual potency that the song holds within it. I used to do this every Sunday night on a radio show that I hosted on BBC Radio Ulster. Fitzroy took it live.

Coldplay follows on from The Killers in June. When they brought the Glastonbury to church with We Pray on MainStage I started thinking. Then a few Fitzers started telling me the song they would like to do. This is the biggest collaboration maybe of all the music nights. 

Come along and bring friend. It is Church but not as you'd know it. It is a concert but not as you know it.

 


INTERVIEWING JO BERRY AND PAT MAGEE - VOCATION OF A FRIENDSHIP

Stocki  Jo and Pat

I am a believer in vocational friendships. It’s where people are drawn into friendships that are almost beyond their control and the friendship has a weightiness for them both and purpose beyond the two lives. I concluded that Pat Magee and Jo Berry had such a vocation.

I was sitting right beside beside them on the altar at Clonard Monastery. I had been given the challenge and the honour of interviewing them in front of a healthy sized audience. As I listened to their answers to my questions I sensed that their friendship was one of the most important things in their lives and that the unique idiosyncrasies and tensions of that relationship were helpful to us all.

Pat Magee is the Brighton bomber. In October 1984 he planted a bomb in Brighton’s Grand Hotel to kill as many of the Conservative Party, there for their annual conference, as possible. A strike against Margaret Thatcher, her cabinet and the British state. Jo Berry lost her father Sir Anthony Berry in the bomb. 

That the two should be sitting right beside me is story in itself but the story that the two of them tell is even more nuanced and at times quite emotional. 

Jo told us that she had me a decision very quickly after the bomb to not go down a road of seeking vengeance. Shortly after that came a remarkable coincidence when she was in a taxi in London and recognised the driver’s accent as being Irish. She asked about the IRA and her driver told her that her brother was in the organisation.  

Jo committed to seeking to understand the IRA’s raison d’être. She took trips to Belfast and met and listened to members of the organisation. I sensed a deep well of courage and resolute commitment.

After the Good Friday Agreement and the release of prisoners, something that was not easy for many to take, Jo had a new opportunity. It was now possible for her to meet the actual bomber, the man who killed her father. 

Eventually they did. Jo wanted to look him in the eye and see some humanity. The meeting was polite but as she was about to leave Magee said “I don’t know anymore who I am” and asked questions about her dad. The re-humanising had begun.

For Jo this opened a door to future engagement. It revealed to Jo a degree of humanity and empathising. Understanding, the re-humanising of the other and finding empathy are three important lessons at the heart of the bridge building that Jo and Pat have done and attempt to do around the world.

Being on the altar of a Monastery I dared ask about forgiveness. 

Patrick felt that forgiveness was a straightjacket with no bearing on his actions. He never asked for forgiveness and wouldn’t seek it. Jo felt that forgiveness put pressure on people. They are traumatised enough and then they are made feel bad that they cannot forgive. 

It was interesting but for me I felt there was some semantics at play. Whether Pat asked for it or not and whatever Jo thinks of its obstacles, the reality of their friendship that has become deeper over the years seemed to me to be a perfect out working of forgiveness which is not a transaction so much as a transformation. This close, I was feeling the transformation.

What I find most helpful about Jo and Pat’s relationship is that it hasn’t turned out all black and white. There are tensions, things not perfectly ironed out. Pat speaks of his regret that the conflict was needed but still holds that the armed struggle was the only way for his people to be heard. Jo doesn’t believe that violence is ever the answer. They journey through the grey. Reconciliation can be found without everyone agreeing.

The most shocking thing I heard in all of Pat and Jo’s story is when at the end of their first meeting Pat says he is sorry that he killed Jo’s dad and Jo says, “I am glad it was you”. 

It is a strange phrase but sitting beside them on that altar in Clonard I started to understand it. It could have been someone who would never have met her. Someone who would have added to the murder with disrespect for her father. Instead Pat had become more than a bomber and Jo more than a woman who lost her father. Understanding, empathy, re-humanising and, for me, a good deal of forgiveness was vibrating beside me. Snow Patrol sing, “I need your grace to remind me to find my own.” Pat and Jo need each other in that sense and we all need them too. A vocational friendship. 


VIVA LONE JUSTICE

Viva Lone Justice 2

What a most welcome thing?! Almost 40 years on from their debut record and 38 years since their last one Lone Justice are back. Well, not quite but nearly as good as! 

The rise and fall of Lone Justice was too fast and unfulfilled. They arrived out of nowhere in 1985 with a banger of a single Ways To Be Wicked written by Tom Petty. Their singer, just out of her teens, Maria McKee had a voice and a presence that caught the attention. They were destined to be huge but after a second record that treated us to the near revivalist spiritual of I Found Love they were gone.

Gone, most of them to amazing things, McKee had a very strong if not commercially massive solo career, her only major hit being Show Me Heaven from the Days Of Thunder soundtrack. She actually had another huge hit as songwriter of the UK number 1 A Good Heart sung by former Undertones lead vocalist Fergal Sharkey.

Since 1985 we have had various Lone Justice releases of live recordings, demos and out takes but Viva Lone Justice is not one of these. This is a new album if not really totally new! 

It seems that after original drummer Don Heffington passed away that original bass player and often songwriter Marvin Etzioni discovered tracks that he, Heffington and McKee had worked on around the time of McKee’s second solo album You Gotta Sin To Get Saved. Asking McKee if she’d like something done with them she suggested finding original guitarist Ryan Hedgecock and doing them as Lone Justice.

Great idea and great work by Etzioni who added other players to the new build - Tammy Rogers  contributed fiddle and strings, David Ralicke horns, Greg Leisz steel guitar, and former Heartbreaker Benmont Tench piano.

It is all so worthwhile and worth the wait. Yes, these are mainly covers but they give us all the energy, post punk country sound, big Maria voice and idiosyncrasy that made us love them in our youth.

The breadth of the collection can be felt in the short sharp blast of Teenage Kicks, so perfect for McKee and, the big ballad of the year this stuff must have been demoed, Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. Who else could hold The Undertones and Whitney Houston in tension?

Everything in between showcases McKee’s voice in all its early innocence and joy. Etzioni’s own You Possess Me is perfect for her, Wade In The Water has that Gospel sensitivity that always oozed out of early McKee and the closing Sister Anne by the MC5s is again so right for the spirituality McKee was tracing back in ’85. I particularly love what Etzioni has done to it, all the brass and tangled up piano making a real drama of it. 

It’s probably right that it didn’t come out as outtakes for a 30th Anniversary You Gotta Sin To Get Saved. It’s probably Etzioni who has done the heavy lifting and less of a Maria McKee record is a result. Lone Justice is a perfect space for this album and a very fine album it is too.  

 


MY SERIES ON JOHN MARK COMER'S THE WAY #5

The Way 2

My series based on John Mark Comer's book Practicing The Way continues on the podcast.

In #5 we look at the gradual growth that it is to become like Jesus. We even hear Comer suggest that our best decade is our 70s! 

We also look at humility and service and how our job is not to self save but to surrender. I myself found that particularly helpful. In Ephesians 2 we are saved by grace... and are God workmanship. Our role - surrendering!

All of this so that we can “be alive in the intimacy at the centre of the Universe”. Wow!

Listen to all this (October 13th) and all of this series - HERE

 


CAMPBELL/JENSEN LIVE IN FITZROY - 24.10.24

Campbell:Jensen

photo: William Auterson

 

I want to start by apologising to Ashley. It needs to be said that I could not get it out of my head for the entire gig that Glen Campbell’s daughter was on the stage.

Yet, below that over riding thought something else was happening. Ashley has shorn the long blonde hair that graced her solo albums. She stands casual, with a wee hat over her short blonde fringe, looking very like her dad, and beside a giant of a man in what is very much a duo.

Thor Jensen can play a guitar and he plays it in ways that are difficult to define. Sometimes a rock riff but mostly jazz fret dances, often so fast that your eyes are struggling to keep up. He adds so much dramatic affect to songs that are otherwise quite simply honed.

Of course Ms Campbell is no musical slouch. Her dad was a most under rated guitar player but thankfully if you see Ashley live her banjo playing exploits are all up front and appreciated. She and the mighty Thor even trade licks on a couple of instrumentals. 

The songs shimmy genre with country, gypsy jazz, blue grass and folk sounds all across them. They cover sounds from every era of the song in the Twentieth Century, uniting them and bringing their Twenty First Century take. 

On top of the virtuoso foundation of their playing Thor and Ashley’s voices blend in the most perfect of ways. When they sing Everything’s Perfectly Fine you sense they are singing about the music, their relationship and your very own world.

Jensen jokes that these are all sappy love songs, from their debut record Turtle Cottage recorded on Stangford Lough, and that they are just Saps. It is true. I am wearing a Blood On The Tracks t-shirt and the songs this evening are the absolute opposite of that break up record. 

These are Silly Love Songs as Paul McCartney might describe them and I found myself reaching for my wife’s hand time and time again as I felt that they had described our love. If Ashley’s dad could have written as well as this he wouldn’t have needed Jimmy Webb!

Speaking of McCartney there were a few covers too and Eleanor Rigby wouldn’t have been the Beatles choice that I would have guessed BUT my they did what every cover should do in opening it up yet again for another assessment. One of the best Beatles’ covers I have ever heard. And speaking of Webb they do a fascinating cover of one of his lesser songs, Careless Weed.

Best cover of all has to be Gentle On My Mind to bring her dad onto the stage with her. Again there was no emotional hoopla, just a wonderfully executed song, drawing out the poignancy and warmth of memories of past trauma that can hold you in the present.

Saps can get criticised in a cynical world but tonight was a celebration of love, a reminder to enjoy it, to cuddle up in it and find hope and goodness in a world that would seem to not want it. That… and a set list of fine songs beautifully executed.

Wonderful in every way. 


MY SPEECH AT SLEMISH COLLEGE PRIZE DAY

Me and Jani Slemish

It is so good to be with you. I grew up spending a lot of time around here. My cousins lived in Wilson Crescent, The Dolphin that first put pineapples in what they called a Hawaiian Burger was a little further down and then I spent Saturday nights in Youth Club in Harryville Church after I spent my Saturdays scoring goals that Erling Haaland only dreams about on the pitches at Wakehurst.

There was one… ENOUGH STEVE!

This is my third ever Prize Day and none of them was when I was at school. As my mates in Ballymena Academy went off to the Assembly Hall to get their prizes I was down the back drive like a whippet to play football. More goals… 

Let me tell you about a seagull who wanted to live a life of thrills. The writer Richard Bach wrote a book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Now at this stage my daughter is shouting “BE RELEVANT DAD. NONE OF THOSE PUPILS WILL KNOW ABOUT SOME OLD GUY CALLED RICHARD BACH”.

Well, the soundtrack to the movie from the book was written by Neil Diamond and though Neil is weighing in at 83 this year… we all know his song Sweet Caroline that we all sing at sporting events - Good time never seemed so god SO GOOD SO GOOD SO GOOD!

Back to Jonathan…

He watched all the other gulls just eating and sleeping but he wanted more. So he took off into the blue and soared and swooped aiming at speeds and thrills that no other gull had ever experienced. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull wanted to fly. When I was your age at Ballymena Academy, I wanted to fly.

Our logo in Fitzroy, where I am minister, is 10:10. It’s my birthday. I love seeing the youth walking round with my birthday on their sweatshirts! It’s also the mark you got to be here today! It’s also a verse in the ancient text of the Scriptures where Jesus said that he came to bring life and life in all its fulness. I wanted that. 10:10! 

Amazingly I am less than 4 years from retirement, making me even more out of touch! I am now looking back on my life as you look ahead. And I can safely say that the life I, and my wife Janice have lived has been 10:10…

We’ve been places, met people, most of our heroes,  watched lives change, communities transform. We’ve learned from it all. It’s been amazing.

Take last Tuesday night. I am on the altar in Clonard Monastery and sitting a few feet away is the Brighton bomber. In 1984 the IRA tried to kill Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet in a Brighton hotel. Pat Magee planted the bomb.

Between us is Jo Berry. Jo’s dad Sir Anthony Berry, a member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet was killed in the bomb. After her dad’s death Jo went on a search to understand. She came to Northern Ireland and ended up in dangerous places.

After the Good Friday Agreement Pat Magee was released with all the other prisoners and it became possible to meet the actual bomber. Jo finally ended ups in a room face to face with the man who killed her dad. The meeting was ok but as Jo went to leave Pat asked her about her dad. What was he like? Suddenly they were re-humanising one another finding empathy and understanding even as they disagreed on many things. Your school motto of Respect, Understanding and Truth. Good things to carry with you. 

In the summer of 2022, while one of my daughters was studying at Reading University we went to Windsor and got a selfie outside the Castle thinking how good it would be to get in. A year later we were walking right in as I somehow was getting an MBE. I stood right in front of Princess Anne.

I had rehearsed what I’d say if I had a chance. I had been given the MBE for services to peace making so I wanted to thank the Royal Family for what they had done here for peace. Princess Anne didn’t seem to be getting it, not accepting my gratitude and then she said “It’s all about HUMILITY”

She reminded me of Pope Francis who Janice and I had met the year before. We got to walk past the crowds queueing up outside St Peters and were given run of the Vatican, meeting Pope Francis in his private library. Amazing and He was so humble, indeed asking us to pray for him.

Humility in a Castle or the Vatican. Not easy. BUT a lesson I learned.

Humility is linked with service. It is a seeing and putting others above yourself. One of my favourite actors is Martin Sheen. Indeed our dog is named after the character he played in the TV series West Wing - JED. Sheen says that in his family “And we had a phrase when I was young, in our community, that one serves oneself best by serving others first.

As another singer put it 

“The funny thing about life

Is you gotta give up your life to be alive”

The most amazing thing that I have learned as a minister is that we worship a humble God, - The God of the manger, donkey, towel and cross - not very God-like. Jesus as God in the flesh humbly served all around him gave himself for us all. More incredible than the Castle or Vatican actually. HUMILITY. 

So congratulations on your achievements. You have shown application, hard work and intelligence in what you have won prizes in today. 

These prizes will give you a clue to what your made to do. You’ll get opportunities to go to University and hopefully good jobs. You’ll be living off the Galgorm Road and driving the car of your dreams. And don’t buy a Range Rover unless you know how to park it!

BUT… that is no guarantee of a Jonathan Livingstone Seagull or 10:10 life. I think I can say that if you see the world and others with understanding and empathy  in our divided world and then from a humble posturing share all your gifts and time and  finances in service to others, then you will be a better doctor, lawyer, accountant, pharmacist, painter, singer, footballer or whatever…

Life was never meant to be about me, it is about those I can help, care for, stand up for. Serve. 

God of the manger, donkey, towel and cross. Humility service. 

So thank you for this kind invite. Thank you for listening to a man way out of touch. 

As a pastor I pray that you out do Jonathan Livingston Seagull and have a life that is more than eating and drinking and working and sleeping. Indeed I pray that you’ll find that LIFE in all its fulness that Jesus invite us into. 10:10! May your deep gladness meet the world’s deepest need. May you give up your life to be alive. If you does you will be blessed and we will all benefit from your contribution. 

Thank you!


JOY OLADOKUN - OBSERVATIONS FROM A CROWDED ROOM

Joy OFACR

In the summer of 2021 my friend Ricky Ross introduced me to Joy Oladokun, via social media. I fell in love with her voice, her familiar melodies and her songs to deep soul. In Defence of My Own Happiness was my album of the year. Proof Of Life didn’t woe me in the same way but Observations From a Crowded Room reveals a young woman maturing in her craft.

These songs inhabit the space where I would love to do church. Her observations are so real. She is subjectively vulnerable, wrestling inside her own soul yet at the same time she is giving us objective insight into the state of the world almost a quarter of a century into the Third Millennium after Jesus walked the earth.

Oladokun has her personal reasons for trauma. She grew up in church writing Christian songs and then when she came out as gay she left that behind and started writing outside the church. A black queer woman in America these days will be brushing against all and of antagonisms.

In Am I Oladokun inverts John Lennon’s Imagine. Instead of dreaming of a better world, she takes us into the nightmare of how the world is:

 

Does anybody feel like everybody's flying

Even though the sky is falling?

Has anybody noticed someone's always crying?

We don't do a thing

Does anybody feel like it's getting hotter

Down here under the sun?

Am I the only one?

 

Like Lennon, Oladokun wants to contribute to change. In the Third of her spoken word Observations she says:

 

But I feel like at the end of my life, like, when I'm on my death bed

When I'm looking back on my life, I feel like I'll be able to confidently say

That so much of it was motivated by love

And actual care for the world around me

And hope that I could make it a different kinder place

For people who don't always feel welcome in it

And I sort of saw the world change, you know?

 

Her relationship with the church certainly seems fractured:

 

Tell me, was it ever really love

If it's not meeting our needs?

If we're so scared of where the truth leads?

 

BUT Oladokun has not been as able or maybe willing to jettison God. In Questions, Chaos and Faith she lays out her aims, “I have traveled all the world/Looking for songs and girls and God.” 

In Dust/Divinity she sings, “Though it hurts me to believe / It kills me not to”, a feeling that so many of our millennials are experiencing. 

That previous song Questions, Chaos and Faith, my preferred title for the album declares her deconstructionism:

Nothing is certain, everything changes

We're spirit and bone marching to the grave

There are no answers, there are only

Questions, chaos and faith

The album comes out the same month as a new book Invisible Jesus: A Book about Leaving the Church and Looking for Christ by Scot McKnight and Tommy Preson Phillips that looks at the huge numbers of younger people leaving the church, even suggesting that their deconstructionism might be a prophetic movement of reformation. 

In the midst of the uncertainty and trauma of a dark night for her own soul and the world’s Oladokun still finds resilience and hope and light. In the closing Goodbye

 

I hope you find the light

Find the light

 

I hope she does… and me.


IS THAT WHAT THE ONES YOU KNOW ARE TELLING YOU?

Racism

 

You pay that for this hotel room

I’m lying in it here for free

Took a train, first class ticket

Then a cruise across a pretty sea

We’ve come to take your houses

Steal all your government handouts

Threaten all of your religion rights

Grab your culture and stamp it all out

 

Is that what the ones you know are telling you

About what they are really here to do?

 

The ones that I know are telling me

That they just want to be free

 

Free from the pounding in their heads

Free from the knot in their gut

Free from the bombs down their street

Free from the bullets in the baby’s cot

Free from the humanitarian disaster

Free from the devastating destruction

Free from the years in refugee camps

Free from the Taliban’s hateful instruction.

 

The ones that I know are telling me

That they just want to be free

 

Is that what are the ones you know are telling you

About what they are really here to do?

 

This began on the week of the racist attacks in Belfast in August 2024. 

There was a mischievous (kind word for it) meme about how asylum seekers had got free hotels that we paid big money for. It was not at all thought through and seemed to be making big statements from a distance. 

Spending time with those just arrived on our shores, as I have been able to do through Janice’s work in Fitzroy, I hear a deeper story that generates more empathy, sympathy and compassion. 

Don't mistreat any foreigners who live in your land. Instead, treat them as well as you treat citizens and love them as much as you love yourself.” 

      - Leviticus 19:33


ALL PART OF THE EXPERIENCE (THE PAST LIKE A PLAYLIST)

Cousins in BC

 

Hedges and bridges

The Moyle and 4 swans

Sunshine and rainbows

Rock pools and prawns

Whiterocks and whiskey

Causeway and castles

Sorley Boy and Casement

Tractors and hassles

Rathlin and Jura

Tor Head and the Glens

Sheep and Belted Galloways

Tunnels and scary bends

Morellis and Mortons

Insults and belly laughs

School room and Skerries

Graveyards and photographs

Selfies and stories

Chartreuse and black nuns

History and now

Ancestors and cousins

 

It’s all part of the experience

These unscheduled rites of passage

Blessed heirlooms handed down

The scars on souls all damaged

We carry the past like a playlist

In the subtle melodies we bring

At the mercy of the grace notes

The songs future generations sing

 

This is about a wonderful couple of days ion the north coast of Antrim with Janice's cousin Heather and her husband Tim from Canada. We were visiting sites of Janice and Heather's parents, grandparents and great grandparents.

I was also influenced by James K A Smith's book How To Inhabit time where he suggests that we carry the past, even the past we didn't live, with us. I agree.


BRIDGES FOR PEACE - 40th Anniversary of the Brighton Bomb

Pat and Jo

October 12th was the 40th Anniversary of the Brighton Bomb. It is one of those moments in the Troubles that we remember. The day that the IRA audaciously attempted to kill the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and almost succeeded.

Twelve years ago at the 4 Corners Festival I met the Brighton bomber and Jo Berry whose father was killed in the bomb. They were interviewed by Lesley Carroll. It was a fascinating night about the role of listening and understanding in reconciliation. Sadly the protests outside made us front page news. 

On October 22nd, at 7pm in Clonard Monastery, I will get the opportunity to interview Jo and Pat in front of an audience. I have interviewed many people. Rock stars Gary Lightbody and Ricky Ross have been personal highlights. Theologian the late Eugene Peterson too. This however will be the biggest challenge.

I have learned that the interviewer’s job is to relax the interviewees and then give them hooks to hang their stories on. I pray that I can do that. I have been reading Pat Magee’s memoir again. I am deep in YouTube videos of Jo Berry. 

I will be asking them about their lives before Brighton, the very different ways that they navigated that event and how meeting one another hundreds of times, and being interviewed all over the world has changed them. 

After the 4 Corners Festival event someone said that those protesting outside had no reason to listen to Pat Magee. They knew what he would say and they disagreed. 

My problem with such a lazy response was that we were not listening to a lecture by Pat Magee. Jo Berry was also on the stage. Her father was a member of the British cabinet. She deserved a little more respect from a loyalist community. We were listening to Pat and Jo in conversation and that is a different voice than either of their individual ones.

So can I encourage you to come and hear this conversation. It is not at all black and white. That might be why it is helpful in a society who will never come to agree with each other’s stories but might benefit from listening and reaching beyond ourselves for understanding. There will always be tensions, with dilemmas still live.  

I leave you with a quotation from the end of Pat Magee’s memoir that Jo Berry quotes in her foreword:

“We need to transcend division; to leave Otherness behind as a useless, debilitating, myopic and self-destructive state of mental negation. I think it is profoundly inappropriate to speak of winners when so many from all sides have experienced loss. Nobody wins until we all win.”

 

Read my review of a scary but useful evening with Jo and Pat at 4 Corners Festival in 2014 - HERE

Read my review of Patrick Magee's memoir Where Grieving Begins - HERE