SOUL SURMISE

I'LL CALL YOU HOME - 4 CORNERS FESTIVAL 2025 CLOSER

I have said for many years that worship on a Sunday should never be a cul-de-sac. It should never be sent singing up to God and remain there. God never meant worship to be just about him. Indeed, that is why in Romans 12 Paul wrote that our real worship is when we sacrifice ourselves to God for love and service.

Worship is not a cul-de-sac but a highway out into the week that is ahead. In worship we remember the greatness of God and the brokenness of ourselves, we re-align in God's order of things, we offer ourselves and fix up or fuel up for the week ahead.

So, at the end of the 4 Corners Festival. On our last Sunday night we don't want to be caught up in a festival cul-de-sac. We don't want to gather up the week's events and horde them for our own enjoyment. We want to end our week by crashing out into the rest of the year to bring morsels of peacemaking across our wonderful but wounded city. 

So at this year's festival we will close with a look at the week's events but then Rev Neil Craigan, Belfast born but now a pastor in White Bear Lake, Minnesota will draw the different perspectives of home that we have seen or heard or felt and consider how we can go to find hime for ourselves and help create one for others.

About 25 years ago, my friend Rev Doug Gay who closed last year's Festival spoke at the wedding of Iain Archer who has sold out two of our Festival gigs at the Lyric Theatre. In That sermon who spoke of how we were heading towards home but that as we journey, home comes to meet us on our way.

How does that affect the way we live?

To finally take us out of 4 Corners Festival 2025 and into the rest of our lives Dana Masters who will sing throughout the evening will sing one final song. I'll Call You Home is a song about our wee piece of earth. It is also the story of how one young African American woman traveled here and found and made home. It seemed the most appropriate way to end a Festival called Home.

We are then thrilled that Dana's husband, Andrew, who is pastor at Lagan Valley Vineyard will lead us out in refection and prayer. Then we can go... 

 

I'LL CALL YOU HOME is on FEBRUARY 9, 2025 at 7pm in St Colmcille’s Church, 191a Upper Newtownards Road, BT4 3JB

BOOK HERE

 

TRIBUTE TO MARIANNE FAITHFUL (1946-2025)

( when I read my friend John Trinder's social media that Marianne Faithful had passed away I let out a little gasp... noooooooo! I had such a soft spot for this intriguing lady who lived the celebrity, the drug addiction, the comeback and, in latter years, this regal way of making songs sound weighty like classic poetry. Indeed her last record was her reading poetry over Warren Ellis's music. 

So, as I type, I am listening to No Moon In Paris, having been through her recent reworking of It's All Over Now Baby Blue. I'll be tracing that back catalogue as the evening goes on. Remembering all those covers of Dylan, Lennon, Cave et al. 

Here's my original review of her 2014 record Give My Life To London in which you will pick up my grá (love) for this woman)

 

I am intrigued by Marianne Faithfull. A couple of summers ago I read not one but a couple of her biographies. She fascinates me as a chronicler of those heady London days of the Swinging Sixties. It’s an era I love and often pretend to be researching for a novel when I indulge in its pop history.

Her place in that era that fascinates me gives her a place in my musical world now. When I bought her 20th album it was as much for the he near holy/unholy icon that she is as much as the limited often coarse voice that she carries. Yet, Faithfull makes records that have artistic interest. She is like the female Leonard Cohen though nowhere near as old and a whole lot more surprising that she is with us! 

Indeed she uses a Cohen song, Going Home but it is her collaborations with Nick Cave, as she has done before, the younger edgier Anna Calvi and Steve Earle that bring the real musical intrigue. Earle brings a country looseness to the title track, Calvi adds popped up guitar on Falling Back, a recent success on Later… With Jools, and Cave’s piano melancholy on Late Victorian Holocaust is perhaps the marquee song.   

Just as U2 went back to their youth for inspiration on Songs Of Innocence so Faithfull went back to her London days. Not somewhere she would like to go back to London haunts Faithfull’s life and if you’d read the biographies I’d read you’d understand.

What I remember being blown away about from her writings was how she was absolutely flabbergasted that Edward Fox should become a Christian and leave acting after his role alongside Mick Jagger in the sexually pioneering and controversial film Performance. Everything went in the Sixties accept the outrageous idea of Christian faith! 

Another of the megastar co-writers on Give My Love To London is Roger Waters whose Sparrows Will Sing perhaps bring us up to date with the spiritual state of Faithful -

“A child breaks the ice and peers into the hidden depths

I'm trying to decipher the horror of un-holiness

I have no doubt you'll figure it out someday”

Marianne Faithfull’s 20th record is a woman wrestling with her past and still questing in the present. It is as fascinating a record as the life it describes. Far from perfect it is rough edged enough to tell us much about the 60s and whatever we call this decade too.

 

( when I read my friend John Trinder's social media that Marianne Faithful had passed away I let out a little gasp... noooooooo! I had such a soft spot for this intriguing lady who lived the celebrity, the drug addiction, the comeback and, in latter years, this regal way of making songs sound weighty like classic poetry. Indeed her last record was her reading poetry over Warren Ellis's music. 

So, as I type, I am listening to No Moon In Paris, having been through her recent reworking of It's All Over Now Baby Blue. I'll be tracing that back catalogue as the evening goes on. Remembering all those covers of Dylan, Lennon, Cave et al. 

Here's my original review of her 2014 record Give My Life To London in which you will pick up my grá (love) for this woman)

 

I am intrigued by Marianne Faithfull. A couple of summers ago I read not one but a couple of her biographies. She fascinates me as a chronicler of those heady London days of the Swinging Sixties. It’s an era I love and often pretend to be researching for a novel when I indulge in its pop history.

Her place in that era that fascinates me gives her a place in my musical world now. When I bought her 20th album it was as much for the he near holy/unholy icon that she is as much as the limited often coarse voice that she carries. Yet, Faithfull makes records that have artistic interest. She is like the female Leonard Cohen though nowhere near as old and a whole lot more surprising that she is with us! 

Indeed she uses a Cohen song, Going Home but it is her collaborations with Nick Cave, as she has done before, the younger edgier Anna Calvi and Steve Earle that bring the real musical intrigue. Earle brings a country looseness to the title track, Calvi adds popped up guitar on Falling Back, a recent success on Later… With Jools, and Cave’s piano melancholy on Late Victorian Holocaust is perhaps the marquee song.   

Just as U2 went back to their youth for inspiration on Songs Of Innocence so Faithfull went back to her London days. Not somewhere she would like to go back to London haunts Faithfull’s life and if you’d read the biographies I’d read you’d understand.

What I remember being blown away about from her writings was how she was absolutely flabbergasted that Edward Fox should become a Christian and leave acting after his role alongside Mick Jagger in the sexually pioneering and controversial film Performance. Everything went in the Sixties accept the outrageous idea of Christian faith! 

Another of the megastar co-writers on Give My Love To London is Roger Waters whose Sparrows Will Sing perhaps bring us up to date with the spiritual state of Faithful -

“A child breaks the ice and peers into the hidden depths

I'm trying to decipher the horror of un-holiness

I have no doubt you'll figure it out someday”

Marianne Faithfull’s 20th record is a woman wrestling with her past and still questing in the present. It is as fascinating a record as the life it describes. Far from perfect it is rough edged enough to tell us much about the 60s and whatever we call this decade too.

NEITHER POVERTY NOR RICHES - LIVING WITH ENOUGH

We have lost the meaning of the word enough. We live in a world where actually it is hard to find any driving forces in our society that acknowledge the value of enough. Everyone who is getting more wants even more and everyone selling them more wants to sell even more.

Enough is almost a bad word in the unrestrained consumerist culture of our western world. The problem of course is that when we reach our level of enough, and pass it with the regularity and distance that we do, then the balances of world shalom are so tilted that other human beings have to live in abject poverty because of our dissatisfaction with enough.

The Bible makes a couple of strong pointers to God’s ideal of enough. In the wilderness when God supplied the Children Of Israel with food, they were sent out to collect enough for one day and were not allowed to gather anymore than was enough for that one day.

In the New Testament Jesus teaches us to pray in The Lord’s Prayer that we would have daily bread in the same kind of way; no more, no less, just enough!

In a sermon, some time ago in Fitzroy, I was comparing and contrasting Jesus encounters with the Rich Young Ruler and Blind Bartimaeus and how difficult the rich find it to follow Jesus. I was also suggesting that this is perhaps why Jesus said that the poor were blessed though that is not an excuse to stop campaigning for the eradication of poverty. 

Before I preached one of my elders, Old Testament lecturer and commentator Desi Alexander, used Proverbs 30 v 7-9 in his prayer of intercession. I was struck in a whole new way by those verses in the context of my sermon on Mark 10 and these two very different encounters with Jesus. They became definitive verses on our modern dilemma of poverty and wealth –

 7 "Two things I ask of you, O LORD;
   do not refuse me before I die:

 8 Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
   give me neither poverty nor riches,
   but give me only my daily bread.

 9 Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
   and say, 'Who is the LORD ?'
   Or I may become poor and steal,
   and so dishonor the name of my God.

The book of Proverbs is indeed wisdom and here is prophetic wisdom for this generation. From this Old Testament world of Proverbs that could never have imagined the extent of wealth that we enjoy in the twenty first century the understanding of the temptations of poverty and wealth are spot on. I have lived at both sides of the balance.

In 2005 I lived for a few months on the west side of Vancouver and witnessed a class of community who had so much wealth that they really had no need for God anymore; in fact God would have been a real hindrance to the lavish lifestyle they enjoyed.

It was actually a poverty of soul caused by riches. I have on the other hand spent a lot of time in poor communities in north west Uganda and township communities on South Africa’s Western Cape. In these places I was a witness to an environment of poverty that caused crime to be rife not because those folk were any less human than my friends in West Van but because the tragic consequences of their wretched poverty drove them to it to survive.

The prayer in Proverbs to have neither poverty nor wealth suggests that we need to come to terms with the word enough and live our lives so that everyone has enough. Settling for the blessing of enough will the key to shalom and God’s Kingdom coming to earth as it is in heaven!

MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER, JULIE FOWLIS & KARINE POLWART - LOOKING FOR THE THREAD

Gillian Eilidh O’Mara’s cover art for Looking For The Thread has a transcendent look. Feel the cold but bask in the beauty of maybe a North Sea sky all purple, blue and salmon with a vast miraculous murmuring of birds all scattered across. It is the music within made art.

Within we have three gifted singer songwriters Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart gifting us songs that have the raw exposed struggles of life threaded through with the wonder of being alive. It is an utter treat. An unadulterated success.

Mary? In the early 90s her songs I Am A Town, Stones In the Road and This Shirt kept me company across Ireland as I traveled miles and miles in my job. I even got to see her live in Dublin’s National Stadium.

Karine? Karine was a guest on my show when I stood in for my friend Martyn Joseph for the lunchtime songwriter spot at Greenbelt in 2005. I have loved her ever since and her album Laws Of Motion was my very favourite album of 2018.

Julie? I know less but am a huge admirer of her Scottish soundscapes though preferring her collaborations, as in her work with Runrig and KT Tunstall. 

As a result this is right up my street but is it a collaboration? Most definitely.  Yes, the writing of the songs are shared but each of those songs benefit from the grace notes of the others, a harmony or Julie’s whistle. 

The music on this record is exquisite, a calming resplendence of a sound, drawn together by another artist who has won my Fav Album of The Year with Bonny Light Horseman; Josh Kaufman. Looking For The Thread could sit pretty closely beside Rolling Golden Holy on your record shelf. 

Best of all on this record are the songs. Polwart might just be becoming Britains finest writer. Rebecca about a tree continuing to grow after all the hacking it has experienced.

You Know Where You Are is about birds. No one has written more songs about birds than Karine. This one is as close to Jesus' words about God’s care for birds in Sermon On The Mount as I have felt. I use the word felt as much as heard intentionally. 

Hold Everything is best of all. It is almost brutal in listing people’s last breathing moments before reminding us to hold life preciously.

Fowlis has this ethereal sublimity. She does two traditional songs in Scottish Gaelic. Her lone voice launches the record and sets the scene on the opening song. You sense the rugged wild highlands, somewhere other. 

Her own composition Silver In The Blue takes one of the albums strongest themes, nature itself and gives us the miracle of the salmon’s journey, drawn by moons and the universe. She closes it with the warning, “Pray the world will awaken.” 

Chapin Carpenter has been writing amazing songs for 40 years. Few as good as the four here. Each a poetic master class, particularly effecting is a song in the voice of a Satellite left to just spin around space eternally and its longing for home.

The closing Send Love is like a benediction as love is thrown into many of life’s struggles:

 

All my life I've never felt like I belonged

(Send love)

Every fix I came up with turned out wrong

(Send love)

And every moment called a "gift" suddenly was gone

(Send love)

Send love

 

Looking for the Thread is a spiritual piece of work. A treat for ear, head, heart and soul.

 

 

A SURMISE ABOUT MY WE PRAY T-SHIRT

WE PRAY. Now there’s a t-shirt that I would NOT be wearing if it was Fitzroy that had come up with such a slogan. In that scenario I would never wear it. 

It isn’t. This is not a Christian t-shirt. This is a Coldplay t-shirt and as soon as I saw it in their website shop I was having it. 

So why will I wear a Coldplay t-shirt that has WE PRAY across it but not a Christian one with the same words?

Well, one is a dull, predictable platitude.

The other is fascinating, thought provoking and a little subversive.

I love the way that God intrigued Moses with the Burning Bush to draw him closer. Moses a little thrown by what he is seeing is drawn in and God calls him to lead the exodus!

Then there is the prophet Nathan. Sent from God to judge King David for adultery and murder, he told him a story and ambushed him. As David raged at the character in Nathan’s parable, the rich man who stole a lamb from a poor man’s family, Nathan concluded by looking at the King and saying “IT IS YOU!”

That intrigue and thought provoking is what I am interested in. I have been wearing t-shirts with bands or slogans on them for almost 50 years. I wear them most every day. Every shirt is thought about. Every day. Oh some days I make bigger decisions than other days but they never go unconsidered. 

My hope is to spark a thought. Might be to plug a record. It might be to have a wee in joke with the family or friends. 

Some are for the fun of it. I love Norn Iron Tees. After a week with a Youth team in Uganda I came down for breakfast with YOUSENS ARE DOIN’ MY HEAD IN on my shirt. In Rome with students from the Catholic Chaplaincy I came to breakfast with IS THERE ANYTHING TO BE SAID FOR ANOTHER MASS?

There are many I have used. I am particularly loving my Nick Cave WILD GOD and my GRA shirts at the moment. Cave’s Wild God and all he sings and is saying about God is so profound. Grá is my favourite Irish word. It means a deep cardia love, passionate and active. I love explaining that'd what my grá is.

WE PRAY is such a potent shirt when it is a Coldplay one. Why would one of the most famous bands in the world put that on a shirt? Why did they write a song with that title? Why did they sing it at Glastonbury? What is prayer? 

That it is Coldplay gives it a weightiness. It is a current favourite. It might need washed!

SOUL SURMISE INTERVIEW WITH PETER GARDNER OF THE PEACE LOOM

For the week of this year's 4 Corners Festival (2025) we are excited to have Peace Loom situated in 2 Royal Avenue inviting anyone and everyone off the street to do a wee stitch of at the french knitting loom. Please come along!

I took time to have a chat with Peter Gardner half of the Gardner & Gardner art duo who came up with the idea, to give us the why, how and what of the loom.

 

Very briefly, who are Peter and Heidi Gardner?

We are a husband-and-wife artist duo, working under the name Gardner & Gardner.  Heidi has a background in art history before becoming a maker and Peter combines their shared art practice with his role as the Church of Scotland minister to the visual art communities of Glasgow. 

 

Tell me what was the very first thought that sparked the Peacemakers Loom?

The genesis of ‘Peacemakers’ grew out of our sense of helplessness in the face of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.  We began to focus on the idea of peacemaking at a personal and relational level, distilling it down to the smallest of actions, a simple stitch, made in response to the conflict we encounter within our lives and the wider world.

 

What are you trying to do?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the 1930’s, ‘ Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking, when they should be listening,’  ‘Peacemakers’ offers an openhearted hospitable space, where we share in the task of knitting on the loom.  We wait, welcome, knit and listen, without hurry, trusting that the Spirit of God is already present.  Sometimes there is silence and sometimes there are stories, our work is to listen.

 

How does it actually work?

The ‘Peacemakers’ loom is a circular, 1.81m in diameter, French knitting loom, which we designed and fabricated in 2014. It is made from birch plywood, beech dowels and sisal twine.  

At the start of the week, we cast on donated yarn and make the first row of stitches.  Everyone is welcome to join us and share in the repetitive, contemplative, simple action of knitting on the loom. Over the week as thousands of stitches are added, the layers of knitted yarn start to pile up on the floor.  Made by many hands, a single textile piece slowly builds, reflecting the temporary community of peacemakers who have gathered around the loom.

 

What interesting places have you had the Loom?

Each venue has its own unique character.  In St Giles’ Cathedral, during the Edinburgh Festival, we welcomed people from all over the world.  At universities around Scotland, we have walked the loom with students pausing between classes.  In Coventry Cathedral, the ‘Peacemakers’ loom was installed below one of Ralph Beyer’s carved inscriptions, ‘Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest…’

 

You must have one or two stories...

What is said at the loom stays at the loom!  Part of the covenant of trust that forms between host and guest is that the stories shared at the loom belong to the folk who shared them, therefore they are not ours to tell.

 

How does a normal day or week go?

Over ten years of walking the loom with visitors we are constantly surprised…  We firmly believe that ‘Peacemakers’ is not about the wood, or the wool, it’s a mystery, a work of the Holy Spirit.

 

How do you judge the success of a Loom?

If, on any day, one person finds the peace they need or feels they’ve been heard at the loom, that is a cause for rejoicing.   

 

What do you do with the end piece?

The communal action of knitting on the loom produces a very long narrow tube of loosely knitted stitches.  Revealing all the different yarns, this single textile piece symbolises the breadth of stories shared and all the folk who walked the loom with us.  It is measured, rolled into a ball and given to the community who made it.

 

It'll be your first time in Ireland, never mind Belfast. How might that be different?

We are very aware that we are bringing ‘Peacemakers' to a fast-changing city with a long history.  Coming as guests, we are unsure of how our experience may be different but we know that over the past ten years ‘Peacemakers’ has always offered a place of welcome and attentive listening and that’s what we will do in Belfast.

 

Are you looking forward to it?

Last year, we were over in Belfast for a few days for a wedding and we fell in love with the city. We are really excited to be returning, this time with the loom, for the 4 Corners Festival.

 

Please come and see us and add your stitch. The Loom will be set up in 2 Royal Avenue from Saturday Feb 1st to Feb 8th (2025)... Opening Times:

Sat 1st: 12-5pm

Sun 2nd - Fri 7th: 10am-5pm

Sat 8th: 10am-3pm

 

 

 

 

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 Turner were regulars. Halcyon Days too. It gave the place quite the vibe and I still meet people who tell 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. 

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! 

 

Derryvolgie Hall - 30th Anniversary Service of Thanksgiving

May 23, 2025 at 7pm

Assembly Buildings, Fisherwick Place

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