SOUL SURMISE

BUFFALO SOLDIER AND A BOY ON A CAPE FLATS TOWNSHIP

(I wrote this for Pause For Thought on BBC Radio 2 and then we didn't use it... The theme was Walking In Someone Else's Shoes)

 

I have learned not to judge people until I have at least imagined walking in their shoes. This morning I am thinking of one young fella that I met who had no shoes on at all.

It was 2008 and I was driving around Mfuleni, a township on the Cape Flats, near Cape Town. 

I was a Chaplain at Queens University, Belfast and was leading a bunch of students, helping to build houses for those who never had one. We did the labour while black South African builders did the building. That in itself was beautifully subversive.

It was our first day in Mfuleni and as I turned my minibus around a corner a young boy, maybe 10 years old, cycled up a long side, singing Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley. There’s a lot of Marley on those townships! The window on my van was down so I sang back.

The song started a friendship. Every time my wee mate appeared we’d both burst into Buffalo Soldier. Over the week, we’d sit and chat. One afternoon I gave him a few Rand to fix his dilapidated bike. He brought back cream buns bought with the change. 

I cannot remember his real name but I think of him often. He’d be in his mid 20’s now. I wonder where he is? What he is doing? He was a clever wee lad but the shoes, or no shoes, that he was given by accident of birth limited his possibilities. 

Today I fear that my wee Buffalo Solider singer could easily have been drawn into crime. When opportunities are limited it must be easy in shoeless feet to resort to any means to survive. As yet another township boy, later anti apartheid leader Steve Biko said, “Don’t blame the person who steals the bike, blame the circumstances that caused him to steal the bike”. 

Having walked for a few days here and a few weeks there with gifted children wearing very poor quality shoes, or going barefoot, I have committed to living the life the Old Testament prophets demanded, that the opportunities and justice of the poor should not be eroded by wealth wasted on big houses or, for that matter, expensive shoes.

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!

ANGELS UNAWARES by Timothy Schmalz

I was very taken by the bronze and clay sculpture in St. Peter’s Square in Rome called Angel’s Unawares. It is a sizeable piece, as it has to be in such a vast location. 

Sculpted by Timothy Schmalz, who we also must thank for the powerful Homeless Jesus sculpture, it was unfurled on September 29th, 2019 which was the 105th World Migrant and Refugee Day. 

It is a boat to note the movement of peoples and has a sizeable number of refugee and migrants. The faces and belongings of this mass of immigrants are carefully chosen and precisely worked in clay. I spent a time trying to place the country of origin, therefore what each was fleeing from and then where to.

Africa was easy. The Jew quickly spotted. I was trying to find the Irish sailing away from the famine. 

Schmalz sees all his work as prayers and this one I was particularly taken that this one was inspired by that verse in  the Hebrews 13:2 - Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.

This comes immediately after the writer starts his concluding exhortation with the line Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters.

From the beginning, through the law, the prophets into Jesus, the Acts and the letters we are constantly called to care for the orphan, the widow and the stranger. Indeed, these are the people that God puts before us as examples of the Kingdom. 

In the Kingdoms of the world, some rulers worse than others, these are the targeted, the neglected, the scapegoat. Any such Kingdom is an antithesis of the Kingdom of God. 

Instead the call of this prophetic piece of art is that people have been moving and fleeing since history began and God asks us, his followers, to accompany, welcome, protect, promote and integrate them. Why? Because as Scripture reminds and preaches - by doing so we will be entertaining angels unawares. 

KARL WALLINGER (19.10.57 - 10.3.24) - MY TRIBUTE

I have loved Karl Wallinger since he first appeared alongside Mike Scott in their Waterboys’ musical adventures to find the Big Music. 

When he shimmied to the side and started World Party I was right there and eagerly ready. I loved Karl Wallinger. Oh I didn’t love everything he recorded but I loved enough of it so much as to be a huge fan. 

The first album Private Revolution had my jury still out but then Goodbye Jumbo, Bang, Egyptology and Dumbing Up gave us a run of near perfectly created, played and produced albums of energetic pop/rock that pumps out the spirit of love into a world well in need of it.

Think of that run of songs Ship Of Fools, Way Down Now, Put A Message In a Box, Is It Like Today, Give It All Away, Give It Time and She’s The One. The latter is best known of all as Wallinger collaborator Guy Chambers introduced it to Robbie Williams that he was producing at the time and Robbie made She’s The One a number hit, against Wallinger’s wishes, though he eventually appreciated the money!

On of the big reasons that I was so fond of Wallinger’s World Party was his covers of The Beatles and Bob Dylan. On Private Revolution was All I Really Wanna Do and on the 12” of the Ship Of Fools single was Nowhere Man. 

Later an extra CD single release for Beautiful Dream had Penny Lane, Sweetheart Like You and Mind Games. Wow! On Arkeology a 5 CD release of songs old, new, live, covered or alternative there is a blistering cover of Like A Rolling Stone but it is Cry Baby Cry, Fixing A Hole and my very favourite version of Dear Prudence is what grabs me.

I am heartened by the social media messages around Wallinger’s passing. He hasn’t released an album for 24 years and that wide ranging compilation Arkeology was the very last thing released 12 years ago.

Yet, he was not forgotten but coined to be loved. I hope he knew that and his family takes comfort in it.

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed The Waterrboys’ 1985, a full catalogue of the work that eventually became This Is The Sea. Karl Wallinger fingerprints were all over it. 

Just a soon as Scott and Wallinger caught a glimpse of the whole of the moon they took different directions. Scott to the muse more raw, organic in the raggle tangle sounds of the west of Ireland and Wallinger to the crisp clean sheen sounds of World Party. 

Much as I would have loved to have heard what Wallinger and Scott would have done together in the late 80s and 90s, I am maybe more delighted that I have both Fisherman’s Blues and Egyptology. The rivers roared out into different seas of wonderful music.

Thank you Karl Wallinger.

SILENT WITNESS & PETER GABRIEL ON JUSTCE AND FORGIVENESS

It is almost the last scene in a cliff hanging and gruesome in places Silent Witness. 

In search of a serial killer who might or not be alive our guys, Nikki and Jack discover almost by accident that the murder suspect that they are chasing has been held captive in awful conditions by a victim’s husband. 

As the camera pans to a man hidden below ground like an animal for decades his captor says,

 

“I thought I could punish him forever

I thought it would help

BUT it didn’t.”

 

It is a dilemma that so many victims have. “If I could punish him forever.” There is something within us that immediately seeks revenge and retaliation. If we can get our pound of flesh and pay back the trauma and pain we imagine there will be justice and maybe healing.

Our character in Silent Witness perhaps reveals the truth. He thought it would help. It didn’t.

My good mate Fr Martin Magill and I talk a lot about forgiveness. When we do we are usually stopped by people incredulous that we should be asking people to forgive. We are often told that we are giving victims a double trauma. We add to their pain the guilt by demanding that they forgive.

That is not how Fr Martin and I see forgiveness. We see it as a gift from Jesus for the healing of the victim. In forgiving is a process of letting go of the need for justice, it releases our anger, deep hurt and need for revenge. 

Peter Gabriel puts it well on his new record I/O. Gabriel looks at revenge and sings:

 

Just how long do you want to hate

With all that anger to burn?

You dream of revenge

And you dream of reply

You'd hope that someday we'd learn

Every time you think of that hurt

It spins around in your mind

With an eye for an eye

Again and again

Until the whole world is blind

 

He sees a better way:

 

This is how it turns

This is what we do

This is who we are

When we forgive we can move on

Release all the shackles one by one

We belong to the burden until it's gone

 

That is what Fr Martin and I are believing, hoping for, offering. A forgiveness that releases from the vicious hurt and mad anger. A release of the burden of trauma. We believe that is what Jesus was on a bout in his prayer - “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those trespass against us.”

In his horrific treatment of the one who murdered his wife he has only left his own mind, heart and soul shredded. The attempting to bring this person to justice by his own violence has kept the shackles and burden locked in. 

 

“I thought I could punish him forever

I thought it would help

BUT it didn’t.”

60th ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATHS OF LEWIS, HUXLEY & KENNEDY - WAS CS LEWIS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL

November 22^nd 1963. Quite a day! The day that Aldous Huxley died as Sheryl Crow mentioned in her song Run Baby Run. It was also the day we lost CS Lewis. If he had only written novels, Belfast born, Lewis would have left a legacy that Hollywood would have mined for many a long decade.

The Narnia Chronicles have produced some of the most popular films in recent years. Yet, Lewis I will argue below left so much more. Of course the deaths of Huxley and Lewis were over shadowed by perhaps the one of the most memorable, for all the wrong reasons, post war events; the assassination of President John F Kennedy.

As the world’s media have concentrated this week on the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy killing, I have been pondering CS Lewis. As I have surmised I wonder who left the biggest legacy? Who changed the world most?

Now I am no expert in Kennedy’s impact as I was just past my second birthday when he has so callously taken from us. I have no doubt that he was the first modern day pop star President. I have no doubt that he set in motion modern America and that the civil rights world changers likes of Martin Luther King Jr benefited from his Presidency. Let me state that I am in no way diminishing the legacy of JFK.

Yet, in the world I move in, CS is embedded deep in the DNA. As a Christian minister I wonder how many of my congregation have actually had their spiritual lives shaped by the work of CS Lewis. Mere Christianity, The Four Loves, A Grief Observed and The Great Divorce are among the Christian classics.

Then the fictional works like Til We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters, the Space Trilogy and The Chronicles Of Narnia were deep in spiritual insight and allegory. When I consider generation after generation allowing these works to seep into their souls and then live them out across the world I can only imagine how much impact the life and genius of CS Lewis has reaped. Three of my favourites bands, U2, The Waterboys and Over The Rhine are drenched with Lewis’s influence!

In my own life Mere Christianity was foundational as a 17 year old who like Lewis was surprised by God’s existence. Lewis helped me reason the transcendent interruption of grace that had redirected, reinvented and redeemed my life.

I have used and abused his Screwtape Letters, as Bono has done,  in performances to deal with darkness and light. I have read the Narnia Chronicles to my girls and watched the movies with them always loving the fact that God (Aslan) has a Ballymena accent like me. In Fitzroy where I am minister “Aslan is on the move” is our phrase when God turns up and shakes us. 

My most quoted piece of Lewis's writing is found at the beginning of The Magician’s Nephew. It is the first venture into Narnia and this journey was not through the Wardrobe but by magic rings transporting Polly and Digory through a pool into this big new world.

Lewis, as a man of his age, becomes a little sexist in that Polly is immediately a little frightened and wants to jump back into the little pond and head back to safety and normality. Digory though, in his macho stereotype role, proves courageous and brave. With an adventurous spirit Digory declares, “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 love that!

There are a lot of Pollys in the Church. Many people are happy to have the rings to the Kingdom BUT are concerned about safety. They are like the guys in Jesus parable who are given a talent and dig a hole and bury it. The Master returns and is angry with their conservative playing safe. The talent has not been lost and damaged but it is whipped away from them and given to those who were brave and a little risky with their talents.

Safety is not an attribute in the Kingdom of God. There is no one from Genesis to Revelation who plays it safe and gets any credit at all from God. It is the reckless, who risked and at times got it way wrong, find themselves in God’s list of heroes of faith in Hebrews 11.

When we are born again into a whole new life and Kingdom, God does not want us to remain in the maternity ward obsessed with that rebirth. He longs for those who enter the Kingdom to head further up and further in. He longs that they would grow up again and head out into that Kingdom, to discover the dangerous terrain that God would long to redeem. There would not be much point of Jesus coming to live and die and be raised to life again in order to let us into a new Kingdom if we are afraid to explore that new Kingdom when grace throws us right into it.

CS Lewis threw us into another Kingdom. He fired our imaginations but kept it relevant to the ordinary. He led us further up and further and will continue to do so every time someone opens a book with his name on it. If in eternity we can look back into time and history I believe that we will see that on November 22^nd 1963 the most significant death was that of CS Lewis. No matter what the TV says!

 

November 22^nd 1963. Quite a day! The day that Aldous Huxley died as Sheryl Crow mentioned in her song Run Baby Run. It was also the day we lost CS Lewis. If he had only written novels, Belfast born, Lewis would have left a legacy that Hollywood would have mined for many a long decade.

The Narnia Chronicles have produced some of the most popular films in recent years. Yet, Lewis I will argue below left so much more. Of course the deaths of Huxley and Lewis were over shadowed by perhaps the one of the most memorable, for all the wrong reasons, post war events; the assassination of President John F Kennedy.

As the world’s media have concentrated this week on the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy killing, I have been pondering CS Lewis. As I have surmised I wonder who left the biggest legacy? Who changed the world most?

Now I am no expert in Kennedy’s impact as I was just past my second birthday when he has so callously taken from us. I have no doubt that he was the first modern day pop star President. I have no doubt that he set in motion modern America and that the civil rights world changers likes of Martin Luther King Jr benefited from his Presidency. Let me state that I am in no way diminishing the legacy of JFK.

Yet, in the world I move in, CS is embedded deep in the DNA. As a Christian minister I wonder how many of my congregation have actually had their spiritual lives shaped by the work of CS Lewis. Mere Christianity, The Four Loves, A Grief Observed and The Great Divorce are among the Christian classics.

Then the fictional works like Til We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters, the Space Trilogy and The Chronicles Of Narnia were deep in spiritual insight and allegory. When I consider generation after generation allowing these works to seep into their souls and then live them out across the world I can only imagine how much impact the life and genius of CS Lewis has reaped. Three of my favourites bands, U2, The Waterboys and Over The Rhine are drenched with Lewis’s influence!

In my own life Mere Christianity was foundational as a 17 year old who like Lewis was surprised by God’s existence. Lewis helped me reason the transcendent interruption of grace that had redirected, reinvented and redeemed my life.

I have used and abused his Screwtape Letters, as Bono has done,  in performances to deal with darkness and light. I have read the Narnia Chronicles to my girls and watched the movies with them always loving the fact that God (Aslan) has a Ballymena accent like me. In Fitzroy where I am minister “Aslan is on the move” is our phrase when God turns up and shakes us. 

My most quoted piece of Lewis's writing is found at the beginning of The Magician’s Nephew. It is the first venture into Narnia and this journey was not through the Wardrobe but by magic rings transporting Polly and Digory through a pool into this big new world.

Lewis, as a man of his age, becomes a little sexist in that Polly is immediately a little frightened and wants to jump back into the little pond and head back to safety and normality. Digory though, in his macho stereotype role, proves courageous and brave. With an adventurous spirit Digory declares, “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 love that!

There are a lot of Pollys in the Church. Many people are happy to have the rings to the Kingdom BUT are concerned about safety. They are like the guys in Jesus parable who are given a talent and dig a hole and bury it. The Master returns and is angry with their conservative playing safe. The talent has not been lost and damaged but it is whipped away from them and given to those who were brave and a little risky with their talents.

Safety is not an attribute in the Kingdom of God. There is no one from Genesis to Revelation who plays it safe and gets any credit at all from God. It is the reckless, who risked and at times got it way wrong, find themselves in God’s list of heroes of faith in Hebrews 11.

When we are born again into a whole new life and Kingdom, God does not want us to remain in the maternity ward obsessed with that rebirth. He longs for those who enter the Kingdom to head further up and further in. He longs that they would grow up again and head out into that Kingdom, to discover the dangerous terrain that God would long to redeem. There would not be much point of Jesus coming to live and die and be raised to life again in order to let us into a new Kingdom if we are afraid to explore that new Kingdom when grace throws us right into it.

CS Lewis threw us into another Kingdom. He fired our imaginations but kept it relevant to the ordinary. He led us further up and further and will continue to do so every time someone opens a book with his name on it. If in eternity we can look back into time and history I believe that we will see that on November 22^nd 1963 the most significant death was that of CS Lewis. No matter what the TV says!

EVENSONG ON BALLYCASTLE BEACH

Last year we met a couple on Ballycastle beach. They were searching in the sand. We asked if we could help. Had they lost something. It appears that the woman liked frosted glass. The way the sea wears it down. 

As we were about to walk on the man says, "Are you Steve Stockman". I confessed. He said that he had heard me doing a Pause For Thought on the radio about this beach, about walking it with my wife and dog. "Welcome into that Pause For Thought", I laughed. 

He said that he had heard it during Covid and after lockdown, he was so taken by my story, that they came and walked the beach. They loved it so much that they now had bought a house in Ballycastle. Wow! The influence. 

Of course the buying of houses is not my aim. Here is that Pause For Thought. We did it as our "Evensong" again tonight as we do religiously while we are in residence in Ballycastle. 

 

The north coast of Northern Ireland has been in the spotlight recently. Not only Game Of Thrones but the British Open golf. The Open was played in Portrush. As a child I loved Portrush. It was loud and bright and busy. Amusements, Rollercoaster, big beaches.

Ballycastle along the coast, I really did not like. It seemed a little dull. Yet twenty years later my wife and I bought a house there because it was cheaper. And in the last twenty years I have come to love the quieter town… smaller… less crowded… more scenic beach views.

We live in a bright loud world and being still and reflective has become a lost art, a rarity, a very difficult task. Almost by default Ballycastle beach has become my meditative space. In the late evening we walk across the beach and marvel at the sunsets behind Kinbane Head and Rathlin Island.

It is on these walks that I hear most God’s still small voice. This is where my body, heart and soul slow down. When I stop for a deep breath. Here I often have a sense that in a very ordinary evening walk something extraordinary is going on. 

Like a while back. Out for the nightly stroll I looked across at my wife Janice… our beloved dog Jed. I then looked out at Fair Head, our high cliff shelter, all its veins jutting out in strength and beauty.

And the still small voice inside me whispered, “Look Steve… do you get it. This is what the human life is all about”

So I started to ponder. The Christian Bible begins and ends with visions of oneness… between human and human… human and creation… human and God. 

The entire Christian story is based around broken relationships being somehow restored by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The still small voice was pointing out that I was getting an inkling of it as I held my wife’s hand and smiled at our dog’s love, and as I inwardly gave thanks for the wonder of creation. 

I then heard the voice of Van Morrison speaking about another part of Northern Ireland, “Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time”.

 

and a poem...

 

Just how sensational is that blue

The one made by these light beams

Not the darker cathartic kind

That soothes the bluesman’s bad dreams

This one's made by the evening sun

Setting low above the town

Just two hours before the candle glow

That deep orange of it going down

 

Just how many shapes can clouds throw

Like they’re belching out smoke from a fire

As if they’ve built a hundred chimney stacks

All across the Mull Of Kintyre

And the ripples and dimples and sky waves

As they float out towards Rathlin Island

I’m not sure Dawkins has it right

‘Cos I’m pretty sure God is smiling

 

And I look at who I’m with

You’re the image of something higher

Higher than sunset's bursting colours

That set the sky on fire

 

Just how vivid is this evening air

The Fair Head’s deciding to strut right out

Veins of rock with heaven in the detail

Leaves the atheist a mountain of doubt

There is a beauty elusively placed

That picture postcards just can’t capture

Like you walking this beach beside me girl

God has me by the throat with his rapture.

 

And I look at who I’m with

You’re the image of something higher

Higher than sunset's bursting colours

That set the sky on fire

 

This is our place

Our mystical space

Where we clear the clouds that have been

This is our time

The verse to our rhyme

Where we find visions of pictures unseen.

 

 

Last year we met a couple on Ballycastle beach. They were searching in the sand. We asked if we could help. Had they lost something. It appears that the woman liked frosted glass. The way the sea wears it down. 

As we were about to walk on the man says, "Are you Steve Stockman". I confessed. He said that he had heard me doing a Pause For Thought on the radio about this beach, about walking it with my wife and dog. "Welcome into that Pause For Thought", I laughed. 

He said that he had heard it during Covid and after lockdown, he was so taken by my story, that they came and walked the beach. They loved it so much that they now had bought a house in Ballycastle. Wow! The influence. 

Of course the buying of houses is not my aim. Here is that Pause For Thought. We did it as our "Evensong" again tonight as we do religiously while we are in residence in Ballycastle. 

 

The north coast of Northern Ireland has been in the spotlight recently. Not only Game Of Thrones but the British Open golf. The Open was played in Portrush. As a child I loved Portrush. It was loud and bright and busy. Amusements, Rollercoaster, big beaches.

Ballycastle along the coast, I really did not like. It seemed a little dull. Yet twenty years later my wife and I bought a house there because it was cheaper. And in the last twenty years I have come to love the quieter town… smaller… less crowded… more scenic beach views.

We live in a bright loud world and being still and reflective has become a lost art, a rarity, a very difficult task. Almost by default Ballycastle beach has become my meditative space. In the late evening we walk across the beach and marvel at the sunsets behind Kinbane Head and Rathlin Island.

It is on these walks that I hear most God’s still small voice. This is where my body, heart and soul slow down. When I stop for a deep breath. Here I often have a sense that in a very ordinary evening walk something extraordinary is going on. 

Like a while back. Out for the nightly stroll I looked across at my wife Janice… our beloved dog Jed. I then looked out at Fair Head, our high cliff shelter, all its veins jutting out in strength and beauty.

And the still small voice inside me whispered, “Look Steve… do you get it. This is what the human life is all about”

So I started to ponder. The Christian Bible begins and ends with visions of oneness… between human and human… human and creation… human and God. 

The entire Christian story is based around broken relationships being somehow restored by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The still small voice was pointing out that I was getting an inkling of it as I held my wife’s hand and smiled at our dog’s love, and as I inwardly gave thanks for the wonder of creation. 

I then heard the voice of Van Morrison speaking about another part of Northern Ireland, “Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time”.

 

and a poem...

 

Just how sensational is that blue

The one made by these light beams

Not the darker cathartic kind

That soothes the bluesman’s bad dreams

This one's made by the evening sun

Setting low above the town

Just two hours before the candle glow

That deep orange of it going down

 

Just how many shapes can clouds throw

Like they’re belching out smoke from a fire

As if they’ve built a hundred chimney stacks

All across the Mull Of Kintyre

And the ripples and dimples and sky waves

As they float out towards Rathlin Island

I’m not sure Dawkins has it right

‘Cos I’m pretty sure God is smiling

 

And I look at who I’m with

You’re the image of something higher

Higher than sunset's bursting colours

That set the sky on fire

 

Just how vivid is this evening air

The Fair Head’s deciding to strut right out

Veins of rock with heaven in the detail

Leaves the atheist a mountain of doubt

There is a beauty elusively placed

That picture postcards just can’t capture

Like you walking this beach beside me girl

God has me by the throat with his rapture.

 

And I look at who I’m with

You’re the image of something higher

Higher than sunset's bursting colours

That set the sky on fire

 

This is our place

Our mystical space

Where we clear the clouds that have been

This is our time

The verse to our rhyme

Where we find visions of pictures unseen.

 

and a poem...

 

Just how sensational is that blue

The one made by these light beams

Not the darker cathartic kind

That soothes the bluesman’s bad dreams

This one's made by the evening sun

Setting low above the town

Just two hours before the candle glow

That deep orange of it going down

 

Just how many shapes can clouds throw

Like they’re belching out smoke from a fire

As if they’ve built a hundred chimney stacks

All across the Mull Of Kintyre

And the ripples and dimples and sky waves

As they float out towards Rathlin Island

I’m not sure Dawkins has it right

‘Cos I’m pretty sure God is smiling

 

And I look at who I’m with

You’re the image of something higher

Higher than sunset's bursting colours

That set the sky on fire

 

Just how vivid is this evening air

The Fair Head’s deciding to strut right out

Veins of rock with heaven in the detail

Leaves the atheist a mountain of doubt

There is a beauty elusively placed

That picture postcards just can’t capture

Like you walking this beach beside me girl

God has me by the throat with his rapture.

 

And I look at who I’m with

You’re the image of something higher

Higher than sunset's bursting colours

That set the sky on fire

 

This is our place

Our mystical space

Where we clear the clouds that have been

This is our time

The verse to our rhyme

Where we find visions of pictures unseen.

SINEAD O'CONNOR (1966-2023) - A TRIBUTE

Breaking news at the end of BBC’s Newsline “Sinead O’Connor has died…” My heart did that little caving in when it’s hit with sorrow filled news. “No, no, no, no… oh dear… Sinead”. I muttered.

I first came across Sinead O’Connor when she was still a teenager, adding her voice to In Tua Nua’s song Take My Hand and then a song with U2’s Edge, Heroine, the theme song for the movie The Captive in 1986. 

I pretty much missed her first album The Lion and The Cobra in 1987 but nobody in the world missed 1990’s Nothing Compares To You the global mega single from her second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.

The video for Nothing Compares To You, written by Prince, introduced a new superstar, an Irish girl with shaved head and a seemingly innocent porcelain skinned face. At 24 she had set her mark on the history of music. What a mark it would be.

She would never reach the same commercial success again but in the vast array of directions that her music took from there on she always caught my attention and mad em pay attention - jazz standards, Irish trad, reggae. There was even an album called Theology, filled with Biblical symbolism.

I would suggest that her last two records were as strong as any before them. I always looked forward to what she would be saying next. That there will not be another and lots after that is a shame. Her music will be missed.

Sinead’s performances off stage are as well known as her art. She had a personal story of childhood trauma to be shared. She also was never backward about coming forward. Her heroes Dylan and Marley were protest singers and she took on that mantle. 

For her as an Irish girl that was the backward theocracy that she grew up and suffered under. Her ripping up of a photograph Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live will sit side by side with Nothing Compares To You in her obituaries. It was at the beginning of the opening up the Catholic Church paedophile scandals and a couple of decades that turned Ireland on its head.

I sympathised with her honesty about her brokenness and mental health issues. I empathised with her desire to bring about a just and loving world. Like Jesus, she was always on the side of the underdog, the hurting, the poor, the marginalised. 

I remember just two weeks after the Pope incident she was to sing at the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Celebration Concert in 1992. Everyone was to sing a Dylan song and Sinead had rehearsed her deeply spiritual version of I Believe In You but when it went live broke into Bob Marley’s War before being booed off. 

I was living in Dublin at that time and trying to understand the changes that were happening in the Republic of Ireland led by the likes of Bob Geldof, U2 and Sinead. I remember in the midst of all of the commentary seeing through Sinead’s hurt. Like a pastor I saw her as a prodigal daughter, broken, resilient and brave, often seeming lost but ever seeking. 

As the news broke tonight I was back there with my 1992 notebook feeling sympathy, empathy and heart ache for her pain filled life, added beyond understanding by her son Shane’s suicide last year, and the joy that her music has brought me and will continue to do.

“No, no, no…”

MY NICK DRAKE SUMMER

I know already that it will be a Nick Drake summer for me. 

When I finally get away, after a wedding next week, for our first week off, I will dip into a pile of books. Most years I try to pick one music biography amongst the novels. I then delve into the artist’s music as I am reading about it.

The rock biog at the top of my list this year is Robert Morton Jack’s tome on a young songwriter from Tamworth-On-Arden who died in 1974 at 26 years of age as pretty much an unknown artist - now the legendary Nick Drake.

This seems to be the Drake book to read. It sound like it has been well researched and has though not “official” it has the blessing of Nick’s sister Gabrielle who handed over Drake’s own papers and her father’s diary. 

What lifts Drake above books on Lucinda Williams, Leon Russell and Springsteen’s Nebraska is the release, at the very same time, of a double album of Drake covers. We have had Drake Tributes before including the reverent Way To Blue. This new one is perhaps more adventurous.

The Endless Coloured Ways; The Songs of Nick Drake has an array of artists not easily linked to the quiet atmospheres of Drake. Fontaines DC, Radiohead’s Philip Selwey, Feist and Liz Phair to name a few.

I have only got a listen or two at this stage but am loving Ben Harper’s Time Has Told Me, Lets Eat Grandma’s From The Morning, Nadia Reid’s Poor Boy and Joe Henry sharing vocals with Meshell Ndegeocello on Time Of No Reply are the four that have really struck me so far. 

Drake is someone that I have revered for thirty years and yet have not been the devotee that I feel I should be. A perfect summer’s vacation is when I get the time to take an artist that I like so that I can fall in love with them. Who knows we might nip off the M6 and visit his grave next week!

Let us get on the ferry… 

SURMISING MICHELANGELO'S PIETA AT MY DAD's DEATHBED

The Pieta in St. Peter’s Basilica. What a moving piece of art!

My friend, Rab, had spoken to me about it a few years ago. Rab would describe himself as “relatively agnostic but interested in many aspects across religions” so when he shared with me how taken he was with the Pieta I took note and cannot thank him enough.

His wife was investigating the Basilica and Rab kind of drifted over and caught sight of the Pieta. It is the work of Michelangelo. A beautiful 15th century sculpture in marble, the Pieta depicts Mary holding her dead son, Jesus, in her arms. It moved Rab to tears. 

My experience was similar. We had met Pope Francis. I needed time to surmise that and all the things that he said. We went through the Vatican Museum and much as it was impressive I was still pondering the events in Pope Francis’ private library. 

Janice went off to marvel at the art and beauty of St. Peter’s. I was at a loose end and remembered - Rab’s Pieta. I found my good friend Fr Martin Magill and asked about it. He took me over to it and it was that same wow factor as Rab experienced. 

We encouraged Janice over to join us and all three of us stood and wept. 

The theologically squeamish might shout, “It is not in the Bible.” No, it is not. That does not mean that between the cross where Mary stood watching her son die and the tomb he was laid in that she didn’t cradle his body.

However, fact is not the point. This is not theological. This is artistic. Whatever the facts, Mary did watch her soon die. She went through her valley of the shadow. She experienced that trauma. Michelangelo expresses that experience of Mary’s; beautifully, poignantly, painfully.

For Janice and I we were drawn to dear friends who lost their son to a very unexpected suicide just weeks ago. It is not the order of things for a parent to cradle their child’s body. Our friends experienced it. They said that they could have held him forever. Michelangelo captured their heartache.

Fr Martin recognised who we would be particularly thinking of. He added his own experience of far too many young suicides in west Belfast. 

All of our tears were deeply felt. Fr Martin suggested a prayer and I prayed for my friends and then all the other parents who experience what Mary went through. The love and sorrow that mingles. Again, there is something of the Gospel story that understands our humanity and our brokenness. 

As I type this, I sit by my father’s hospital bed as he drifts, thankfully comfortably, out of this life. However, tough and all as my grief is, that is how it should be. A son beside his parent. The Pieta is for all those who have to feel the sharp wounds of the wrong way round. As I sit praying with my father I remember them again too.