SOUL SURMISE

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.

GOD IN THE CITY; BELFAST AS A CATHEDRAL

photo: Philip McCrea

 

Rain rings trash can bells

And what do you know?

My alley becomes a cathedral

 

I’ve long loved this Bruce Cockburn lyric. The entire song actually. It is from his very first record in 1970. Cockburn asks almost as a prayer:

 

Oh, Jesus, don't let Toronto

Take my song away

 

It is as if the city is the bad guy. To find God and everything spiritual we need to get out of the city. 

Declare me guilty. I love those walks on Ballycastle beach that I mention so often in these blogs. There, with the sound of the waves and the wonder of God’s creation all around me, uncluttered I sense God.

Or I remember almost 30 years now, driving through the red stone deserts of Nevada and Arizona and understanding why the apostle Paul took three years in the desert to prepare for his ministry. There was something sacred about it all. Something that you don’t feel as you look down a back alley with black bins over flowing with rubbish.

Bruce Cockburn asks that the trash and traffic wouldn’t take away his song.

Yet, my Canadian songwriting companion has spent the rest of his career finding that the alley can become a cathedral. He finds God’s light so lyrically in some of the world’s darkest places as well as the most ordinary. 

I was drawn back to Cockburn’s work reading Richard Carter’s book The City Is My Monastery. 

Rev Carter was a member of an Anglican religious order in the Solomon Islands who found himself in parish ministry at St Martin-in-the-Fields, smack bang in the middle of London.

I can hear him singing Bruce Cockburn…

Richard’s book is not some memoir of how he came to terms with that shift in vocational call and geographical space. It is a work book (Rowan Williams’ words for it) for how to make the city your monastery. Or as Cockburn put it how to find a cathedral in an alleyway.

Under the headings With Silence, With Service, With Scripture, With Sacrament, With Sharing, With Sabbath, Staying With and When The Me Becomes Us, Richard leads us into how to be a pilgrim, disciple, in the clang and clamour of a city in the 21st century. 

He does so with real spiritual insight and also with lots of beautiful poetry scattered through it. 

 

Our monastery is here and now

Where you are today

The person you are speaking with

The room you are sitting in

The street where you are walking

The action you are doing now

This is your monastery

This is your prayer

Eternity is now

The city is our monastery.

 

This is all a good thing when we stop to consider that the Bible is different to Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock. We do not, as Joni suggests, have to get ourselves back to the garden. The culmination of Scriptures is not that garden back there BUT a garden city. The new world longed for is a a new Jerusalem coming out of heaven with a river running through it.  

 

BAT OUT OF HELL, JESUS & ME - MY TRIBUTE TO MEAT LOAF

It was with sadness that I heard the news this morning of Meat Loaf's death. I am first and foremost a pastor and my thoughts and prayers go out to his wife Deborah and his daughters Pearl and Amanda. Below is my personal tribute, from a blog I wrote two years ago...

 

Meat Loaf might be seen as a really guilty pleasure. I was watching a documentary on Meat Loaf recently and it took me back to early 1978. 

I do not only remember Meat Loaf’s debut performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test but also the conversations the next day in school. Those of us particularly interested in music were all over this performance. We had seen or heard nothing like it. Bat Out of Hell blew us away.

The album however was not easy to get. Bat Out of Hell was originally a slow burn (forgive the pun!). It took awhile to find its way into Ballymena record shops. My first copy was a recording on cassette. It would be the end of the summer before I bought my own copy, during The British Open at St. Andrews!

I remember days where I listened to that record all day long. That was not something I tended to do. I had played Sweet’s Block Buster so many times in a row that I got bored with it so my policy was always play something else before replaying a single or album.  

I could not get enough of Meat Loaf and even now I can see what it was that caught our attention. Bat Out Of Hell was Queen through a blender with Bruce Springsteen. Indeed, E Street Band member Roy Bittan played piano and it was how a friend introduced me to Born To Run. Bat Out Of Hell was bombastic and dramatic but Jim Steinman’s songs were so strong that you forgave that and maybe secretly liked it. I mean Two Out of Three and You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth are great songs. When my daughters play The Greatest Showman or Hamilton I hear Steinman!

Bat Out Of Hell was full of desire, a lot of it sexual. It is not lost on my looking back four decades later that I was sixteen and not doing well with girls so it probably reached my teenage hormones. Jim Steinman’s songs though have more going on than sexual lust.

There is a lust for life. These are songs about milking all that life has to offer. I was a year away from finding Jesus. In my favourite verse in John 10:10 Jesus speaks about “life in all its fulness.” Bat Out of Hell might not have the creed, though heaven and hell are a core part of Steinman’s lyrics, but it is an adrenaline rushed soundtrack of that life in all its fulness.

To be fair it really helped that producer Todd Rundgren understood songwriter Jim Steinman’s vision and crafted the songs into a stunning piece of rock music. The melodies are strong. The playing has flourish. Meat Loaf has charisma. Some songs are long but there is not a wasted second.

For Meat Loaf it never got better. Oh I enjoyed Jim Steinman’s solo record Bad For Good and Meat Loaf’s eventual follow up Deadringer but nothing ever quite reached the heights.

Indeed when in 1993 Bat Out Of Hell II was contrived from its sound to its cover to how they sold it. The music business svengalis conned us all into buying the follow up. They gave us the sound, the image and took us back but I was almost twice my age with different tastes in music and at a different stage of life. We all bought the nostalgia and though there were some good songs, it was no longer who we were. When I took it to a second hand shop they refused to take it. They had so many already!

Yet, down the year I still came across Meat Loaf’s songs that I liked. A song on the radio or a documentary on television had me seeking out familiar songs and trailing new ones. At regular intervals, I want to hear that voice, that Steinman arrangement, a little bombast.

Maybe I am looking at that wee bit of nostalgia that was overdosed on Bat Out Of Hell II. Maybe I am looking for that adrenaline rush that thankfully for me is more than a rock roll dream come through but a real life imaginative way to live!

Thank sir. Thank you for the music and the memories. 

STOCKI ON SKY NEWS... ON ADELE AND STING

Apparently I was on Sky News on January 2nd. I have been fascinated by who saw me. Two from South Africa, one from Johannesburg and one from Cape Town, another from Kampala, Uganda and two from the Republic Of Ireland, one in Cavan and one in Meath! No one from Northern Ireland seemed to notice!

Of course I know I was on Sky News. Sky News journalist David Blevins came to Fitzroy and did an interview. It was about the shrinking number of people who put themselves down as religious in polls. 27% of the population now deem themselves to be non religious and that figure has doubled in ten years.

David did an excellent piece with Northern Irish league footballer Robbie Norton and Mary Lou, the Humanist Chaplain at Queen’s University, conversing about our long held Protestant-Catholic identities and the relation that both those who hold Christian faith seriously, like Robbie, and no longer hold it at all, like Mary Lou, aren’t claiming the traditional labels. 

In the piece I come in to suggest that Jesus hasn’t had the best PR and that perhaps once we get past this big wall of how we define our religion we might get on to the spiritual questions.

In the edited piece my surmising on Adele and Sting had to be cut.

Though neither singer is from Northern Ireland and would understand the religiosity, though Sting might as his first wife was from Andersonstown, both have recently made spiritual pontifications from places of ‘non religious’!

Adele perhaps surprised me the most. Her song I Drink Wine is the highest quality of social comment, right on the proverbial money… and very personal.

It’s a song that asks deep questions of where to find satisfaction and fulfilment of self. It recognises that the world is corrupting our hearts. It is not so much what she is critiquing that fascinates me but in what she is looking at:

 

In these crazy times I hope to find 

Something I can cling on to

'Cause I need some substance in my life

Something real, something that feels true

 

These are deeply spiritual questions… almost a searching for God. Her comments on her TV Special Adele With An Audience when she shared about a spiritual experience while on a beach with her friend Stormzy only adds to the intrigue.

Like Adele, many are no longer defining religious but are still seeking spiritual answers. As I said on the Sky News piece it is a shame that Jesus PR hasn’t been good since the 2nd or 3rd century!

Speaking of spiritual questions, a few days later and Jools Holland, on his Later... With Jools show, is talking to Sting about such questions in the ex Police man’s work. There is no way that Sting is will declare himself religious but he told Holland that he was all about asking the big questions about who we are and why we are here.

Those spiritual questions are riddled through his new record The Bridge. There’s a song called The Book Of Numbers and lots of church bells and even a song called The Bells Of St. Thomas where the bells are like the conscience of a man being seduced in what Sting himself calls a very strange lyric. 

Best of all is the song Loving You that had me propelled into the Old Testament story of Hosea. This is the tale of a man whose wife commits adultery but he stays true to the vows made in Church. There are so many similarities to the Old Testament prophet Hosea’s story of an adulterous wife:

 

We made vows inside the church

To forgive each other's sins

But there are things I have to endure

Like the smell of another man's skin

 

Sting’s heartbroken husband then does the Hosea thing and shows grace and a profound forgiveness:

 

I pray the waters of forgiveness

Will rain down on you and me

Just like newborn babies

In the cradle of a tree

 

This is love. A love that the Bible might claim as God’s unique unconditional love:

 

If that's not loving you, I don't know what is (I don't know what)

If that's not loving you, then tell me what it is

If that's not loving you, I don't know what is (I don't know what)

If that's not loving you, then tell me what it is.

 

So, as religious affiliation is on the decline, spiritual questions continue to be asked. The Church needs to get into such conversations and in ways that they will get heard. We might find Jesus as a good role model as to how to do that!

A FILM CRACKS OPEN THE POWER OF THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS

Sometimes the sermon comes alive while it is being preached. My mind is an adrenalin rush while preaching. For me it is where the Holy Spirit takes the skeletons of my thoughts on paper and brings them alive in the actual preach. Sometimes I tell Janice that this week’s sermon is disappointing on paper but once preached she is asking me what I was talking about!

Also, there are times, with me many times, when a song, a book, a film throw up illustrations that crack the nut of the Biblical text. 

It was a film that cracked Zechariah’s song at the end of Luke 1: 76-79 -

 

And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High;
    for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,

to give his people the knowledge of salvation
    through the forgiveness of their sins, 

because of the tender mercy of our God,
    by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven

to shine on those living in darkness
    and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.

 

So, as Zechariah waited for the Messiah he prophecies about how his son John The Baptist will prepare the way for that Messiah. He economically rolls out the benefits of Jesus birth, life, death and resurrection. Knowledge of salvation, forgiveness of sins, the tender mercy of God, path of peace… 

As I preached I was drawn to the forgiveness of sins. It seems an obvious every Sunday idea. Yet, a film cracked a nut.

The film was The Keeper, a true story of the life of Bert Trautmann, a German prisoner of war in England who fell in love with a woman and football and stayed after the war ended. He became a hero playing for Manchester City in the 1956 FA Cup Final, playing the last 20 minutes with a broken neck. There are a few nut crackers in there for reconciliation in a post war society but that’s for another sermon and blog.

There is a scene in the movie where Bert is doing his first press interview after signing for Manchester City. The journalists are dragging up his German army past and it comes to light that he had won an Iron Cross medal. What exactly had he done? 

Margaret, now Bert’s wife, is angry that Bert hasn’t told her everything he did during the war. She’s his wife. There should be no secrets. He turns and looks her in the eye and asks, “What is the worst thing you have ever done?”

Margaret is knocked back. When it is put like that we all have secrets. There are things that we have done that we do not even want to tell those who love us the most.

For Bert Trautmann what he had been involved in was not only something that he didn’t want to share but brought with it a guilt that lingered with him. It haunts him throughout the movie.

Trautmann’s story and these scenes cracked something open about “the forgiveness of sins” that Zechariah sings about in Luke 1. 

I think that we preach so often on daily sins and weekly sins that we have reduced sin to petty little habits or little moments of bad decision making causing us to do something selfish or not do something we should have done.

The Keeper film goes to the very depths of the very worst of us. Deep rooted guilt lies in all of our lives. It can haunt us like ghosts. It can eat away at any goodness in our souls. It can paralyse us and lead us into all kinds of mental ill health. It can keep us from God and stop us living a full life and doing amazing things.

Zachariah reminds us that Jesus came to deal with these festering secrets. Zachariah’s father would declare Jesus, “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”. My most haunting sin. The worst thing Bert Trautmann ever did. Guilt free. Atoned for. Imagine the rebirth. The freedom. The new possibilities.

BEWARE OF DARKNESS... GUARD YOUR HEART...

 

The 50th Anniversary Edition of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass has been lingering in my excited expectation for weeks and is finally here. 

 

As I prepared for its arrival I was listening to the original, the 2000 remasters and The Concert For Bangladesh as well as reading the brand new book about it all - All Things Must Pass Away and Other Assorted Love Songs.

 

I have been needlessly drawn to the spiritual musings of Harrison’s eastern faith and always trying to caress them with my Jesus faith. 

 

Beware of Darkness caught my soul afresh. I have been listening to these songs since I finally found the album in a shop on Cockburn Street in Edinburgh on my family summer holidays of 1980 and have loved this song and even the covers by Leon Russell, Sheryl Crow and Norah Jones. Yet, I heard it deeper this past few weeks.

 

I believe, as Harrison’s wife Olivia has said, that George was preaching to himself as much as any of us. Here was a man who had lived at the very zenith of pop stardom for some 7 years and was about to become the biggest star of 1971 attempting some kind of Hare Krishna holiness in the middle of unimaginable wealth and hedonistic temptation.

 

He warns us to be alert to wealth and power and takes it from outside to within. 

 

Watch out now, take care

Beware of the thoughts that linger

Winding up inside your head

The hopelessness around you

In the dead of night

Beware of sadness

 

I was particularly interested in his reasoning why. Too often in the traditional Christian idea of temptation or sin it is all about breaking some rule concocted my some headmaster type God. Harrison gets closer to the truth. Beware of these things because they are a hurdle to us finding our full human potential. George might have called that perfect consciousness. I would call it the “life and all its fulness” that Jesus invites us into. That is what a God of love wants for us. Fulfilment of our humanity that he created and redeemed.

 

It can hit you

It can hurt you

Make you sore and what is more

That is not what you are here for

 

What we are here for? That is my reason for following Jesus. It is not about some ethereal otherworldliness. It is the opposite. I follow Jesus to make the most sense of can of the world and my fulfilled place within it. 

 

 

As I tried to find the caressing of Beware Of Darkness with my own pilgrimage I happened to be reading Guard My Heart by Sue Divin. A wonderful novel set as a modern Romeo and Juliet story in Derry/Londonderry/Doire, the title comes from one of the Scripture’s Proverbs - 4:23. 

 

Catholic Aidan’s mother used to tell him, in Irish, “Guard your heart for it is the well spring of life.” The novel is about two young people trying to do exactly that in a world very different to George Harrison’s but just as complex to spiritually navigate. 

 

Proverbs 4:23 is a very good paraphrase of Beware of Darkness. It’s a world of sectarian darkness that could so easily envelope Aidan and Iona in Divin’s book. If these two 18 year olds are to discover themselves, push themselves to the next chapter in the story of who they can be they would do well to beware of the darkness of, and guard their hearts from, our wee island’s prejudiced hatreds?

 

And me? I am no wealthy pop star. I am, sadly, no 18 year old just finding my way but Harrison’s song has me alerting myself to the seductions of a society offering all kinds of glittery things than could drag me well away from what I am here for.