SOUL SURMISE

JOSEPH O'CONNOR - THE GHOSTS OF ROME

Joseph O’Connor likes a drama. With the sensibilities of a thriller O’Connor has the characters of Ghosts Of Rome running across Rome, down back streets, through gardens, in and out of houses, rooms and even underground sewers avoiding the worst of the Nazis.

O’Connor does a great job of describing the claustrophobic fear of living in an occupied city, when the occupier is Nazi Germany in the depths of war. The Gestapo, personified in Commandant Paul Hauptmann, are ruthless and violent. Their only sense of discipline or value is that they don’t break the promise to maintain the neutrality of the Vatican.

This is the second book of a Trilogy of books set in 1944 in Rome six months into Nazi occupation. It is based around the Choir, the secret name for The Escape Line based in The Vatican, sneaking allies out of Rome. The first book My Father’s House was centred around Monsignor Hugh Flaherty the Irish priest who headed up the Choir. 

This one concentrates more on the heroic women in the story in general and Contessa Giovanna Landini, known as Jo, in particular. Her palazzo has been taken over by Gestapo officer Paul Hauptmann, the Choir’s Nemesis. There is a teasing that goes back and forth between them, the Contessa’s life in constant threat, showing a heroic courage. 

As well as Jo, there is an airman, badly injured, who parachuted in and is being looked after against the better judgement of some. Two young people are added to the Choir, Blon Kiernan and her friend whose studying surgery and gets her chance to practice!

As of the first book, it is a fascinating read. The reader is quickly drawn in, loving and hating the characters, intrigued by the setting, gripped by the suspense, near praying for a good ending.

When O’Connor set out on these stories he could not have imagined the swing to the right that our world would take. He couldn’t have known how claustrophobic so many of us feel at the news on our televisions or that echoes of Nazi Germany might be infiltrating the free world. It all seems to be closing in. Hope is hard to glimpse, though in the novel the Allies are slowly making headway.

Yet again O’Connor’s book preaches a hope that is brave, compassionate and determined. It would be easy in Rome’s war zone to find good reasons to pull back from the help that the Choir are giving here.

O’Connor also humanises the bad guy too. Hauptmann is nervous about what Hitler thinks of him, probably fearful too. Deeper still there seems existentialist struggles going on in his soul. This is a book of good and evil and we get to look into both; the worst of humanity in the latter but the inspiring goodness in the former!

Bring in the book 3!

GARY LIGHTBODY - THE FOREST IS THE PATH

Will Campbell College teacher Mark McKee ever get the thanks or credit he needs to be given to waking up just one teenage boy to literature? In one class, one particular year, Mr McKee read Seamus Heaney and one particular boy’s soul lit up like he had been blinded like St. Paul on the Damascus Road.

Words became the reason that Gary Lightbody had been given a space on planet earth. Many of us have been touched and blessed by the poetic songs that he has created with his band Snow Patrol. Now his first book that will be of fascination to many in so many different ways.

Unlike the vast majority of rock stars, Lightbody’s shift from lyric to prose is not a rock biography. Yet, at its very basic level fans will enjoy the Snow Patrol stories and the wee sneaks into the songwriting process of the most recent record, the book’s companion The Forest Is The Path. 

There are a few precious musical memories threaded in here. Another conversion moment for a teenage Lightbody is listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind on the day of its release. That fifteen years later David Grohl walks on to the stage and hugs him as he’s dedicating Chasing Cars to the former Nirvana man. Wonderful.

Or his dad meeting Bono at Ward Park in 2019. Priceless!

Yet, the music side of the memoir is not the raison d’être. This is a book about grief. It is all built up around his father dying and the aftermath. It has me deep in reflection about my own parents dying. They leave behind more than grief. We go on untangling the regret and love and stretch to come to terms.

In the grieving sense, I was reminded that this is the same genre as another classic on that subject by another Campbellian, CS Lewis with A Grief Observed. Like Lewis’s this makes for a very spiritual book, though not “official” spiritual as Lewis’s was.

I rarely read books twice but this one will get another intentional call, while I am on holidays this summer. I’d like to read it with more time and silence to ruminate. 

There are many little depth charges to return to. Lightbody surmises things like time, home, Belfast in fact, love of others, loving of self, the life beyond, how it might be impossible to actually grasp other people’s perspectives and things are only heavy only when we try to lift them. So much in such a small book. There will so many blogs I sense!

Most of all I am taken with Gary’s fascination with the things that need die within us to help us live:

There is a good death in the end of anger, in the end of resentment, in the end of jealousy. Dying so one can live is the best kind of death. All those things made in the fire serve us not one bit. But sometimes in my life I have felt holding onto that fire feels like the only way to stay alive. I know now I was just plain wrong. But it took me way too long work that out.

Preach it brother. This is something of what I as a preacher am on about every single Sunday. It’s simple wisdom. It is profound. I am thrilled it is here in this book. 

Yet, I am, again as ever, distraught that Gary is unaware of that Biblical idea or indeed that he never even considered looking to find it. Even with Granny Wray’s impression on his life, her life built on that Bible that Gary read at her funeral, the church has done such an awful PR job on Jesus that Gary doesn’t seem to have looked at the ancient wisdom from that resource. I don't blame him. This is a scandal and tragedy of the church.

This is a special book. A helpful book. A book to ponder… and ponder again. Thank you Gary Lightbody for being prepared, yet again, to be vulnerable and honest with us. File it under spiritual!

JASON ISBELL - FOXES IN THE SNOW

For me, Jason Isbell hasn’t put a musical foot wrong since Southeastern was my Album of the Year in 2013. He became the only artist to have gained that accolade twice, with Reunions this time with his band The 400 Unit in 2020.

Things have changed for Isbell though since the last 400 Unit record Weathervanes in 2023. His marriage to fiddle player Amanda Shires, the woman who seemed to be his salvation from addiction and the mother of his beloved child broke up. 

It all seemed, to us on the outside, to be out of the blue and for Isbell his identity has had a sudden shift as a result.

Is that why he has not only left the band behind this time out but stripped it all back to his songs, voice and a 1940 Martin guitar. Isbell has talked about the personal subject matter and wanting no one else to carry it.

It has all the marks of a divorce record but that’s a lazy preconception and doesn’t best describe an album that looks ahead as well as back. Oh True Believer has all the venom of Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright and Eileen has the doomed sense of hopelessly hoping that ex lovers can be friends. Fox In The Snow however suggests that new love has arrived. There’s a little dawn after a lot of dark night of the heart. 

Sprinkled across is also a good little helping of the usual Isbell Americana proverbs. Bury Me, Don’t Be Tough and Crimson and Clay are three favourites of mine.

All in all, this is an engaging and unique record in what is becoming a body of work of the most consistent quality. For us fans this one is a lovely shift in it’s starkness, Isbell’s voice taking the starring role.

SOMEWHERE I HAVE NOT BEEN...

(This was my Thought For The Day on Good Morning Ulster on March 27, 2025) 

 

One of my favourite bands Deacon Blue have a new record out this week. I am loving it. 

A couple of weeks ago I was at a Presbyterian ministers’ Retirement Conference. It was all confidential so it would be great of you could keep that to yourself. Though retirement is not immediately imminent, it was an incredibly useful couple of days for Janice and I.

It certainly made the opening lines of the Deacon Blue record resonate:

 

Bus driver, won't you take me

To the furthest place from here

To somewhere I've not been before?

 

The song is about The Great Western Road that old highway out of Glasgow to Loch Lomond, The highlands and beyond. Full of possibilities.

It had me thinking instantly of CS Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles celebrating 75 years this year. In the first book chronologically, The Magicians Nephew, Digory and Polly get into Narnia not through a wardrobe but by magic rings that brings them up out of a stagnant pool, just like the one down the back drive in Campbell College.

Arriving there Digory says, “There's not much point in finding a magic ring that lets you into other worlds if you're afraid to look at them when you've got there.”

I am now on stepping stones from Deacon Blue to CS Lewis to Jesus who said that he had come into the world to bring us life and life in all its fulness. 

What would the point be of God coming to earth, dying on a cross and being resurrected back to life, to herald a new kingdom, if we were too fearful to look at it when we got there!

So, as thoughts of retirement distract me I am also very attracted to it as if getting on that Deacon Blue bus or picking up those Magic rings. I have no less excitement for the exploration of my 60s and 70s as I had for my 20s, 40’s and 50’s. 

I still want that bus driver to take me to the furthest place, somewhere I have never been. Further up and further in to life all its fulness.

MOTHERHOOD AT ITS BEST

(this was my Pause For Thought on Owain Wyn Evans, BBC Radio 2, on March 26th 2025... The theme for the week was Mothering Sunday)

 

It was our Church weekend away this past weekend and as with such gatherings, you get more time in conversation with some people that you might only catch once a week on Sunday.

Somehow one conversation got around to the fact that one evening in my wife’s family home, before we started going out together, there were 3 of my ex girlfriends and future wife in the house! 

Now, if this has set about some imaginings going in radio land that I must be some tall dark handsome hunk never mind a little over flirtatious, well at least the first bit of that could not be further from the truth. With looks like mine, the radio is a perfect platform!

Anyway, the reason for such a meeting of late teenagers and early twenties was the way that my future mother-in-law Anne had created an open house for us all.

The 60’s band The Byrds made a bit of the book of Ecclesiastes popular… “There is a season turn turn turn… A season for every purpose under heaven,” they sang.  

The Bible also speaks about gifts that God gives to human beings. One of them, far too often underrated is hospitality. Hospitality. Welcoming people in. Giving people time. Listening, I have heard it said, is as close to being loved as you can get. 

Janice’s mum made hospitality to young people her purpose for a season, when Janice was in her teens until going off to University. Janice’s friends were always in an out of her house. 

Indeed when I knew I was going to Janice’s for a 9 o’clock supper I didn’t eat anything after lunch. It was always an amazing spread. Sandwiches, Voulevants, Sausage Rolls, Cheesecake, Pavlova. A hospitality that I never experienced before or since. 

Anne’s funeral was full of people of our age. As they shared their condolences, with Janice and I, there were so many who told us that Janice’s mother and those open house evenings and Sunday afternoons shaped their lives. Some were ministers like me, some had committed their lives to work overseas, others were living lives honed by a welcoming lounge in Holywood, County Down. 

I doubt if Anne had planned all of this. I am not sure that she had any idea how profound her hospitality was. BUT as I look back, it was motherhood at its very best.

 

DEACON BLUE - THE GREAT WESTERN ROAD

 

“Bus driver, won't you take me

To the furthest place from here

To somewhere I've not been before?”

 

Deacon Blue’s eleventh studio record begins with the wide screen panoramic of an adventure to wherever. Where their catchiest lead off singles in some time, Late 88 and Turn Up The Radio! seemed to speak of a looking back, the strings bringing a soulful nostalgia and the lyrics about a band starting out, this record goes back and forward across The Curve Of The Line as another song puts it. 

As I’ve listened over a weekend, on the road and in my home, I am thinking is this as good a record as they have released apart from that one breaking through in late 88, Raintown. A year down the line will finally tell if these initial enthusiasms are correct but this feels like a very special collection of songs indeed. 

As I tried to take in each individual song, I kept asking which will infiltrate a set list when a large percentage of a Deacon Blue audience like the bangers from way back. Truthfully, it will be a disappointment whatever they leave out. 

I mean those two singles are certified arena thumpers, add to that the the preach of People Come First, the popped up Wait On Me, the drive of Up Hope and the buzzing positivity of Ashore. Leave them out at your peril.

Then there’s Jim Prime’s piano like a deep melodic trail through the adventure. Surely the title track has to be an understated statement as a concert opening. Prime is also all over How We Remember It that has little melodic shifts that make me gasp and Curve Of The Line which is written just too late for a cover from Kris Kristofferson or Johnny Cash! It’s Ricky Ross himself though on piano on the wee gem of a closer If I Lived On My Own. 

Fifteen years in to this particular band's conglomeration, everyone is playing out of their skin and into all their musical experience and the comfort being with one another. Take Underneath The Stars, maybe one of Ricky Ross’s best honed songs. Gregor Philp’s lazy grace notes precision guitar, Prime’s hammond and Dougie Vipond and Lewis Gordon giving the whole thing whatever strength of platform needed. Lorraine McIntosh’s voice seems more wondrous than ever. What 35 years of marriage does to your harmonies! I wanna hear it all!

All, taken in and scanned across we are still steeped in Deacon Blue values, human connection, a better world and always hope. Hope for the huddled masses. Hope for the companion who waits for us. Hope for body, heart, mind and soul. Hope for wherever that bus driver takes us down whatever our own Great Western Road looks like. 

 

A wee tip is that there is a deluxe version available on mp3 from the Deacon Blue website and if you'd already purchased the album you pay just a much smaller fee for the six tracks, three out takes from the album and three songs from their enthralling recent BBC Piano Lounge performance. Great move to not make us pay for the record again. Good work Cooking Vinyl. Bruce Springsteen take note!

STORIES ARE LIKE EUCHARIST (Gannaway - March 2025)

 

“Stories are like eucharist,” 

Said Damian Gorman, poet and playwright,

“You break them up, to feed each other.” 

 

How true

And especially true of this weekend away

By sea, sky and stars

The breeze blowing the bonfire like ticker tape

Showering particles of light

All gathering in a bright hopeful flame of joy.

 

Some of us have publicly broken up 

Our broken stories

With nerves and anxiety

With honesty and vulnerability

With fears and tears

That got carried in empathy

Releasing other people’s stories

In ones and twos

And we are fed in the fragility of trust

In brittle hearts caressing 

With the kiss of community

As close to family 

As can be, without the same blood.

Abiding.

 

Abiding in a bigger story

Over 200 years of the Fitzroy story

Over 2000 years of the Son's story

Over 2000 before that of the Father's great big universe filling love story

Delivered now by the Spirit in tears and warming souls.

 

At the core of all of this

Bread and wine

The body and flesh of Jesus

Broken and poured out

For healing and wholeness

Life in all its fulness

10:10.

 

Stories are like eucharist

Thank you.

 

- Fitzroy Church Weekend - Gannaway, March 2025

WHAT I WEAR!!! INTENTIONAL T-SHIRTS AND HUMILITY & FORGIVENESS

(My Thought For The Day on Good Morning Ulster on March 20, 2025...)

 

Sartorial and Steve Stockman don’t really go together. My late father was maybe the neat and tidiest human I ever met but his son… Scruff has been a nick name at various times. 

I was at a Conference last week and the dress was to be smart casual but someone said, “Never worry sure Steve’s coming”. Jeans and a rock band t-shirt is my every day attire. 

But don’t think it is careless. Oh no I am careful to look as careless as I can and many of my t-shirts are chosen for the day that’s in it. Going to the A Complete Unknown the Dylan film. Will it’s a Dylan shirt… St. Patrick’s Day it was my green Rory Gallagher. Ever Intentional.

What we wear scruffy or tidy can have an impact.

At that Conference I was at, Rev Robert Bell shared about intentional clothes. He was speaking from St.Paul’s letter to the Colossians where Paul tells the church to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another… Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

I was struck by it because it had been almost the same thought that Pope Francis (who we keep in our prayers) shared with us when we met him in his private library a couple of year’s back. He said, “Read the Gospels until you wear the Jesus you are reading about”.

Now some might dismiss this as nice and inane. My teachers always hated us using the word nice. Yet, I have come to see these words as brave and revolutionary. 

To be humble in a society where every seems to need to be the winner. Brave! Compassion on someone can get you social media abuse and forgiving others that others don’t think you should forgive. Think of the courage of Gordon Wilson. 

I’d love to live in a city or neighbourhood or home where people wore intentionally compassion, kindness, humility. Imagine that kinda world. 

So, for the next few weeks in Lent, and then on after, I am going to wear those Jesus values with the same intention as I wear my jeans and t-shirt. Every morning as I reach for that shirt, I’ll reach for who I might forgive and live in my community, wearing Jesus. 

NUALA MCKEEVER - THE "IN THE WINDOW" INTERVIEW

As Nuala McKeever's In The Window play starts a run in the Lyric Theatre, I chatted to her about how plays come together, how comedy and play blend and about Margaret and that man coming in the window. I now cannot wait to see it!

 

After the seeming to me success of Truth, Love or Promise you've gone back to re do In The Window. Why were you keen to do that?

Lots of people have asked me over the years to do In The Window again, because they know loads of people who’d love to see it.  Then in January this year, a college in the South asked me to put it on for a group of students.  So that was all the prompt I needed!  I rang the Lyric and booked it in for 2 weeks!

 

As you revisited it, did you discover anything new?

Not really.   I’m aware that some of the lines are a tiny bit dated now. I wrote it in 2012.  There’s a reference to a phone bill.    No one talks about phone bills anymore!

 

When you do revisit something do you ever want to rewrite?

I did change a reference when I did it down South, as audiences there don’t know what a “pastie supper” is!   I changed it to a “spice bag”.  I also took out a line some years back, a joke that wasn’t funny anymore because my and society’s attitudes have changed.

 

Andrea Montgomery, who I interviewed at 4 Corners Festival this year, is Director on this one. What does a Director do?

A Director rehearses the play with the actors.  Usually, a scene is acted out as the actors choose to do the lines. The Director can then say, “Try doing it a different way, with anger, or as if you’re surprised, or hold off on revealing how you feel until you turn away…..   that sort of thing. They direct the acting.  Also, they decide on the movements. In the case of my one woman plays, Andrea will look at how I’m moving between characters and assess whether or not the characters come across clearly and distinct from one another.   Usually an actor tries it one way and the director agrees or asks for something different. The director will discuss the character’s motivation.  Why a person is doing or saying something is crucial.  It makes all the difference to how it’s performed.

 

You are a stand up comic and playwright. How do you work out the balance of those two skills?

Not sure!   I did stand up shows when I didn’t have ideas for a play.  There’s a lot of humour in the plays I write, so the skills are similar. I like comedy that comes from people’s attitudes – so it’s all really character-based. In stand-up the character is often me, but a slightly exaggerated me.

 

So, where did Margaret come from?

Margaret is middle aged. Her parents have died and her best friend has died. She’s on her own. She’s feeling low……

The idea for In the Window came to me as one line.   It was a cold January night. I was getting into bed. I had little work on, a tax bill to pay and my life was feeling pretty bleh.   I was pulling on a pair of socks, cos I couldn’t afford to keep the heating on.  A line popped into my head – “I’d almost welcome a burglar, just for the company”.   Immediately I thought, “I don’t mean it!!!” and ran downstairs to make sure the front door was locked!  But the line made me laugh and I wrote it in a notebook on the bedside table.   It started me thinking,  what would happen if a person was going to kill themselves and someone broke in. Would the person say to the burglar – don’t bother killing me, I’m going to do it myself, take anything you want, I don’t need it…..?  The idea that there’s a certain freedom and honesty when you hit rock bottom, is something that I’ve experienced myself a lot.

That was the initial idea. Two people forced into close proximity.   

The play didn’t exactly go that way, but it was the starting point.

 

And the man coming in the window?

Well, he’s described as “a fella in a hoody”.   And he turns out not to be what Margaret, or the audience, expects at all.  He’s much more interesting!

 

Do you set out to write a play because you have something you want to say… or does the writing of the play start saying things you hadn’t even thought of?

That’s what I’m grappling with at the moment! I have some money in the bank and time on my hands and it’s the perfect set-up to start writing something new. But I’m stuck!   I have lots of ideas or starts of ideas but I want something that comes to me as a story, not a political or psychological treatise that I then try to wrangle into a comedy.  I’m waiting for the scene, the line, the irresistible thing to pop into my head, as it has before….   On the other hand, sometimes good writing comes out of struggling and working on a thing and sticking with it.   I tend to start easily and run out of enthusiasm when things get hard!  I need a commission or a deadline to make me stick at it and circumvent the voice in my head telling me that there’s bound to be something better…

 

What do you that hope people go away from In The Window thinking? 

I hope they go out with warmth and joy in their hearts, feeling that love and empathy and connection are not weaknesses, but rather, our greatest strengths. And maybe, being reminded that people aren’t always what you think at first glance!  And also, that romance is possible, even if you’re not in the first flush of youth!

 

In the Window runs from March 19-30, 2025...

GET TICKETS HERE

WHAT MAKES ME HAPPY?

(my Pause For Thought on BBC Radio 2 on March 19, 2025... the theme was What Makes You Happy?)

 

What makes me happy. Well a few days away with my wife Janice. Even better with my daughters too. Very happy. 

Music makes me happy.

And sport makes me happy. I am not a Newcastle United fan but I was so happy on Sunday when they won the League Cup, 70 years after their last domestic trophy. 

While on sport, let me go back to the 1924 Olympics where I know that, had I been alive, Eric Liddell winning his gold medal would have had me in tears. He was a 100m runner but because he didn’t want to run on a Sunday he was shifted and won against the odds in the 400m.

There’s a moment in the film about his life, Chariots Of Fire, where his sister suggests he shouldn’t be wasting his time running and should go back to China, where he was born, and be a missionary like his parents. He explains to her that when he runs he feels the delight of God.

This reminds me of a quotation from the writer Frederick Buchner, “Vocation is when our deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest need.”

I believe when humans do to the full what God has created us to do, both God and us are at our very happiest.

Now I remember in Primary School when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, I didn’t put my hand up and say “I want to be good at performing weddings and funerals”.  BUT it turns out that that is indeed what I seem to be best at. 

Making those important romantic and grieving moments of life personal, trying to reach into people’s hearts and souls in prayers and reflections. 

When people thank me for such moments and what it meant to them I feel God’s delight. It is strange to say that funerals make me happy. I think of some young people I have buried in deepest tragedy and trauma. Vocationally content is perhaps a better description. 

Weddings are easier to be happy with. Once I even used a quotation from a song in my sermon that I thought the bride and groom my resonate with. When they laughed and said that that song was their first wedding dance I might as well have scored in a Wembley Cup Final. I live for such vocational moments. I was so happy.