SOUL SURMISE

U2 CONFERENCE 2018 - POP VISION - My Review

It doesn’t get much better. I was sitting across a lunch table listening to Steve Averill explain why he suggested that a young band from Dublin should change their name from The Hype to U2. Steve is a graphic designer and it was all about how big U2 would look on posters. It get’s elongated! 

As I am hearing the story from the very source, I am tucking in to a meal from my favourite restaurant, Holohan’s Pantry. It is all happening in the Alexander Hall in Fitzroy. It was no dream. It happened.

It happened a year ago this week. The U2 Conference came to Belfast and was hosted by Queens University and Fitzroy!  The reason that it has taken a year to blog about it is that a day or two afterwards I was in Uganda on sabbatical!

It had been two years previous when the main curator of the U2 Conference, Scott Calhoun, suggested taking the Conference to Ireland. We were having the conversation in Dayton, Ohio and I assumed that Scott was thinking Dublin. No, 2018 would be 20 years after Bono’s hands in the air with John Hume and David Trimble in the days leading up to the Good Friday Agreement Referendum. It would be Belfast.

What a thrill to host such a quality conference. Pop Vision, as it was named, was a mix of academics, music critics and U2 collaborators contributing to a few days of U2 conversation amongst fans from all over the world.

The conversation was well fuelled. I was gripped with Prof John Brewer from Queen’s University giving us the political situation in Northern Ireland in 1998. I felt close to the action as Catherine Owens took us right into the delivery of PopMart’s LED Technology. Stuart Bailie set U2 into the wider context of Irish rock music through The Troubles with special emphasis on U2. Another Queen’s University lecturer Dr. Fiona Magowan did a magnificent session on ethnomusicology and asked the question could music end conflict. 

Beyond that I had the privilege of making two contributions. The first was with the help of my Fitzroy singers who conjured up various U2 acoustic covers. To add to the fun and drama, some delegates were asked to pull a song from the hat and then do a short talk about the song, after it had been performed. These were passionate, intense, spiritual, emotional and humorous.

In the final Friday afternoon event I got the privilege of interviewing Andy Rowen who has had two U2 songs written about him, Bad and Raised By Wolves. For the rabid U2 fans present Andy was like a saint in from of them, when he pulled out a piece of shrapnel from the Dublin bomb of 1974 the subject of Raised By Wolves he had to pass it round like a relic. Andy is gripping and it was quite the afternoon, stepping back into the dark of our Troubles and then finding light in Andy’s redemption story. A wee twist in the tale/tail was when I thanked Peter Rowen for filming it. Even U2 fans hadn’t spotted the face on the cover of Boy and War in their midst. More glee!

Oh my! What a few days. The best part though was the community. Realising that I cannot even be considered a fan amongst such committed obsessive fans. I loved the buzz, the chat, the insights shared in those chats. This was a special bunch of people to have in our Church Halls for those days. Friends forged. Band celebrated. Much to remember, even a year later!

JUNE 21, DAY OF PRIVATE REMEMBERING - FR MARTIN AND I, SPEAKING AT WAVE EVENT

You might not be aware of it BUT June 21st, the longest day of the year, has become a special day in Northern Ireland for honouring anyone killed in the Troubles. Started in 2007 by Healing Through Remembering, it is offered as a day of private reflection rather than any large public events.

In 2012 Paul Gallagher, then working for VAST (Victims and Survivors Trust) invited Fr Martin Magill and I to lead a short reflection. It was one of the first things that Fr Martin and I ever did together and ever since I have found June 21st a poignant day.

This year Fr Martin and I are guest speakers for another small event organised by WAVE at their Belfast Centre, 5 Chichester Park South, Belfast, BT15 5DW. 

Wave is a cross community, voluntary organisation formed in 1991 to support people bereaved of a spouse as a result of violence in Northern Ireland. It has since been expanded to include anyone effected by The Troubles.

Fr Martin and I are thrilled to be invited to speak, by Alan McBride, Centre Director of the Belfast WAVE Trauma Centre, at this significant evening. Tommy Sands will be singing. The event runs from 6pm to 8pm and will include a barbecue. The event is free but your name must be given to reception 02890779922 or adminhq@wavetrauma.org

Please, take some time on June 21st to remember those still living with the grief, injuries or trauma of our Troubles and, if you're the praying kind, pray for their healing, our community's healing and a brighter day ahead. If you can make it along to the WAVE event it would be great too ee you.

THE FIRST ARE FIRST or GRACE - THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 12.6.19

Exam time. I wonder if there is the same stress in your house, as in ours. Jasmine’s finish tomorrow. The entire house will breathe out. 

We live in a graceless world. The first are always first and so it should be. Those with the highest mark get the highest grade, the person with the best CV and does the best interview gets the job, those with the highest number of votes get elected, Rory is 7 shots better than the rest and wins the Canadian Open. Even Graeme McDowell needs to sink a 30 foot putt to qualify for the Open at Portrush.

No, The first are first and we’d go to court to defend it. 

Of course the stress to always being first leads to all our insecurities, inferiorities, and psychological frailty. To our community brokenness too.

Christianity has this other idea. It is the gem in the crown yet somehow it often gets hidden away.  We call it grace. U2 sing, “Grace, a name for a Girl, and a thought that can change the world”

How much would it change the world if we weren’t valued by what we did, by our achievements, our grades, our wages or BT post code. Imagine we were valued just as we are. Unconditional. Unmerited. That would relieve us of a lot of stress.

It would also help us live in a divided and now becoming a multi cultural society. Grace drops the labels. We don’t see Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant. Or Loyalist, Republican, Nationalist Unionist. Or Brexiteer or Remoaner, Gay or Homophobic. 

We look past the what we are and see the who we are and treat each other unconditionally. Grace… Name for a girl indeed (Jasmine Grace get out of bed and do some revision!) And… a thought that can change the world!  

ROMANTICA - GOD WALKS ON THE WATER

 

“Beautiful girl is a beautiful thing

A beautiful song is something you can sing

If you're feeling low the girl can hold your hand

But a beautiful song can understand”

- from God Walks On the Water by Romantica 

 

I knew that day when I left Lindsay’s house that it would be the last time I would see her. I found the whole thing deeply painful. Lindsay was 23, we had worked together on a project in South Africa, Alain her husband is one of my dearest friends. She was suffering in a way I was not. Alain was suffering in a way I was not. But my suffering was watching my friends go through the most awful suffering of all: cancer ripping them apart by a premature death through an awful disease. 

As I got into my car I wondered how to deal with my feelings. I immediately reached for my iPod and scrambled to put a playlist together that would help me untangle my deep emotions on the journey home. 

Tolstoy said art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man. I would go further and say that it’s a means of prayer between humans and God. On that drive home I used songs to wrestle with God and my own soul about what was going on in my life. Songs are a potent resource for dealing with pain. Someone said that “The blues is what you get when life ain’t right.” 

I believe that one of the conduits for God’s comfort is lament. The Bible is full of it - angry, frustrated, painful. Songs of lament do something deep in our souls. They can drill to the nerve centre of our pain, somehow empathise, soothe and mysteriously be companions as we journey through dark days. 

Since the days of David’s Psalms and Jeremiah’s Laments human beings have used the song to understand. Included in the Psalms are a collection of questioning prayers, laments or blues when the believe can not only show confusion and frustration with how the world is but actually rage at God and ask interrogate him on what he might think he is doing in the world. 

Looking to a song for consolation has been a habit of humanity since Saul brought a young David to his Palace to play the harp and soothe his soul. That afternoon on a tearful, melancholy trip home praying for Lindsay and Alain I thumbed up Minneapolis band Romantica’s God Walks On The Water. Songwriter Ben Kyle grew up in Belfast before moving Stateside and his little theological twists in his tales of life and death betray his dad’s occupation as a Pastor. God Walks On The Water is a stunningly beautiful song with a sweet mournful fiddle that catches you just guessing on this side of knowing. 

It’s a song where there are curses and blessings on the journey of life that causes the kind of deep heartbreak that Lindsay’s husband, parents, brother, sisters and friends were suffering so acutely as they headed towards a reunion of the other side of death’s earthly sting. The line that nails catharsis on the head is,

“God walks on the water

I walk through the rain

One day we're gonna walk together

When he comes back again”

Indeed it was a song that understood!

 

Romantica play in Fitzroy on June 17th @ 7.30. There are no tickets. Walk in and pay a donation. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Beautiful girl is a beautiful thing

A beautiful song is something you can sing

If you're feeling low the girl can hold your hand

But a beautiful song can understand”

- from God Walks On the Water by Romantica 

 

I knew that day when I left Lindsay’s house that it would be the last time I would see her. I found the whole thing deeply painful. Lindsay was 23, we had worked together on a project in South Africa, Alain her husband is one of my dearest friends. She was suffering in a way I was not. Alain was suffering in a way I was not. But my suffering was watching my friends go through the most awful suffering of all: cancer ripping them apart by a premature death through an awful disease. 

As I got into my car I wondered how to deal with my feelings. I immediately reached for my iPod and scrambled to put a playlist together that would help me untangle my deep emotions on the journey home. 

Tolstoy said art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man. I would go further and say that it’s a means of prayer between humans and God. On that drive home I used songs to wrestle with God and my own soul about what was going on in my life. Songs are a potent resource for dealing with pain. Someone said that “The blues is what you get when life ain’t right.” 

I believe that one of the conduits for God’s comfort is lament. The Bible is full of it - angry, frustrated, painful. Songs of lament do something deep in our souls. They can drill to the nerve centre of our pain, somehow empathise, soothe and mysteriously be companions as we journey through dark days. 

Since the days of David’s Psalms and Jeremiah’s Laments human beings have used the song to understand. Included in the Psalms are a collection of questioning prayers, laments or blues when the believe can not only show confusion and frustration with how the world is but actually rage at God and ask interrogate him on what he might think he is doing in the world. 

Looking to a song for consolation has been a habit of humanity since Saul brought a young David to his Palace to play the harp and soothe his soul. That afternoon on a tearful, melancholy trip home praying for Lindsay and Alain I thumbed up Minneapolis band Romantica’s God Walks On The Water. Songwriter Ben Kyle grew up in Belfast before moving Stateside and his little theological twists in his tales of life and death betray his dad’s occupation as a Pastor. God Walks On The Water is a stunningly beautiful song with a sweet mournful fiddle that catches you just guessing on this side of knowing. 

It’s a song where there are curses and blessings on the journey of life that causes the kind of deep heartbreak that Lindsay’s husband, parents, brother, sisters and friends were suffering so acutely as they headed towards a reunion of the other side of death’s earthly sting. The line that nails catharsis on the head is,

“God walks on the water

I walk through the rain

One day we're gonna walk together

When he comes back again”

Indeed it was a song that understood!

 

Romantica play in Fitzroy on June 17th @ 7.30. There are no tickets. Walk in and pay a donation. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JAN CARSON - FIRE STARTERS

Jan Carson does for East Belfast what Anna Burns has recently done for West Belfast in her Booker Prize winning Milkman. In the descriptive prose of the book Carson’s social comment is most carefully observed, poetic and darn well funny. Funny in an East Belfast kind of way, in fact.

As someone who thinks about the corners of Belfast in an almost daily basis (member of 4 Corners Festival planning group) I am all too aware of what Jan does in the two main characters of Fire Starters. I am often in conversations that divide east Belfast, not down religious but class divides. 

In The Fire Starters, Sammy Agnew is from the lower end of the Newtownards Road, below the Arches, whereas Dr Jonathan Murray is from Ballyhackamore, “five minutes up the road… though the distance is continental.”

In a calling a spade a spade approach to her psycho-geography it is hard to believe that any of these two areas of Belfast would be thrilled with Jan’s descriptions. 

The women of the lower end of the road - “They wear their skirts hoisted up above their knee, revealing splayed thighs and varicose veins, winter fur and occasionally fine-laced ghost of a petticoat hem”. 

The upper end in Ballyhackamore - “The women are fleshy and frocked in the kind of clothes you’d wear to a wedding if only invited to the evening do. They are highly heeled and, for the most part, orange in both hue and political outlook.” 

She’s brutal, like Belfast. She gets it right. She might need to go flat hunting somewhere around Ardoyne!

I have to confess that I enjoyed most her descriptions of the streets and avenues and what happens on them in a hot summer when bonfires and marching. 

I laughed out loud and pondered deep in silence her observations of a post Troubles East - “The Troubles is too less a word for all of this. It is a word for minor inconveniences, such as overdrawn bank accounts, slow punctures, a woman’s time of the month. It is not a violent word. Surely we have earnt ourselves a violent word, something as blunt and brutal as ‘apartheid’.”

When Jan got into her magic realism I wasn’t as gripped. The child with feathers and actual wings, the group meeting of parents of Unfortunate Children could have been another novel entirely. Not very east Belfast.

When it came to Sammy and Jonathan, there was more realism about Sammy’s son being the Fire Starter for than Jonathan’s daughter being the offspring of a Siren creeping out of the Lagan. 

Jonathan’s story, however, was the most frightening, edge of the seat and like the edge of a stone down a blackboard. In the end (spoiler) it also left us, in the very last line, with some hope.

That hope was not so much about these two fathers struggling with parenthood as much as hope for the Belfast that Jan has set her intriguing, often times eccentric stories in. 

Overall, on the lines and between them, this is a story of a city, dealing with its past, struggling in the present and always worried at what the future might bring. It’s a city where trauma and violence are always a heartbeat away and where we are always on the verge of shooting ourselves in the foot… or straight through the heart.

The Fire Starters reveals Jan Carson as one of our brightest, most original talents. I for one want her next novel now!

MARY GAUTHIER and MARTYN JOSEPH in FITZROY

Fitzroy are delighted in November to host two Real Music Club gigs in one week!

MARY GAUTHIER

NOVEMBER 2nd @ 8pm

FITZROY CHURCH, 77 University Street, BT7 1HL

Tickets: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/belfast?q=Mary%20Gauthier

MARTYN JOSEPH

NOVEMBER 7th @ 8pm

FITZROY CHURCH, 77 University Street, BT7 1HL

Tickets: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/belfast?q=Martyn%20Joseph#

 

before that...

ROMANTICA

JUNE 17th @ 7.30

FITZROY CHURCH, 77 University Street, BT7 1HL

No ticket needed... donation at the door

 

 

 

 

 

GRÁ

Grá

Irish word 

For the English word

Love

But much more robust

Like onomatopoeia

A thump in the chest

A thud in the heart

Grá is who we are

Not what we think

Or define, or write down or preach

It fires what we do

It points to where we go

It gathers who we are with

A veto on everything else

Half the letters of grace

With twice the literary impact

The quintessence of who we are

What is our grá?

GETTING HEARD - PENTECOST AND THE GOSPEL IN EVERY LANGUAGE

Preparing to preach on Pentecost Sunday I was pondering the people in Jerusalem hearing the Gospel in their own language and came across this in my commentaries:

What language would you speak in your missional location, if you were filled with the Holy Spirit? How might those outside your congregation hear their mother tongue and be welcomed home?

That in the end was the challenge I brought to Fitzroy, as a Session and congregation. For whatever reason, the good news of Jesus is being lost in translation in the world today. 

It would be easy to read Romans 10:14, “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” and say that therefore we need to preach. Actually what we should maybe draw from it is that we need to get heard.

In 2019 preaching doesn’t get heard the way it did in 1959 or even 1989. Something has shifted and the way the modern western world communicates has changed how people hear. In Uganda I could stand in the middle of Arua and gather a crowd with my preaching. Not so at Corn Market.

The Spirit needs to help us decipher the means to get heard. The visual is so much more important in an image dominated world. Neil Postman in his insightful book Amusing Ourselves To Death helped us see that image dominated learning leads to us being more subjective in our sieving of information. 

If we want heard, communication needs to change in response. Actions speak louder than words has never been more true. John’s poetry of the word becoming flesh suggests Jesus was ahead of this but are we?

In the Church we still lean heavily on the preaching, even when we see it getting lost in the translation. We have also got into a habit of our actions contradicting our words. 

This week at the Presbyterian General Assembly we voted yet again to remain out of fellowship with our mother Church, the Church of Scotland, because of their more liberal take on the LGBT issue. We refuse to engage with them while at the same time encouraging our political leaders in Stormont to get over their differences and work together. That simply is not getting heard. That is big time lost in the translation.

Holy Spirit come. Give us discernment. Help us communicate in ways that the world around can hear the Gospel in their own cultural language! 

HOLY SPIRIT by VICTORIA WILLIAMS - SONG FOR PENTECOST

 

There was a Pentecost Sunday, back in the day. I was doing my radio show on BBC Radio Ulster and used the Holy Spirit as the obvious theme for the evening. Two songs in and I got a text from my friend Geoff predicting early that I would play Michelle Shocked’s version of this Victoria Williams’ song!

I had forgotten about it! How? As I scanned all my CDs I had somehow missed it. I immediately got on the phone and spoke to Tim, Janice’s cousin, who lived with us at the time. Telling Tim where to look in my thousands of CDs he found it, then drove it to the BBC where I was able to include it at the end of my one hour show. 

It was worth the drama. It’s a great song. As songs go, it is the best expression of the energy and indeed joy that Pentecost conjures, the Holy Spirit being poured out on the heads of a motley crew of Jesus’ followers, chosen by Jesus himself to transform the entire world. 

Michelle Shocked with its Gospel harmonies gives a Pentecostal Church feel to the song. Perfect. Thank you Geoff for the reminder!

Victoria Williams’ music was infused with the spiritual impact of Christian conversion. Williams is looking everywhere she goes and the song finds the Spirit on Lake Bistineau and in the New York City subway. In the former she is singing with friends around a campfire and in the latter receiving the generosity of a stranger. 

In conclusion, Victoria makes her declaration that is perfect on this Pentecost Day:

 

“I have seen it on a mountaintop

I have felt it beneath stars

I have felt it in a churchyard and even in some bars

It will make you laugh, make you cry, make your heart go ping

Yeah the Spirit, Holy Spirit will make you shout and want to sing

That the Spirit, Holy Spirit is flowing”

 

Utterly joy pumping!

TOMORROW IN FITZROY - 9.6.19

Tomorrow morning (11am) we will be celebrating Pentecost, the gift of the Spirit, the birth of the Church. We will look at how against the odds frightened men cowering in a room burst out the door and started a mission that would change the history of the world and be the cause of us actually being in a Church in south Belfast to hear all about it! What was Pentecost and what does the Spirit do... and the Church do? What language do we need to have to speak to our place in our time? 

In the evening (7am) Stephen McIlwaine will bring the first session of our Bible Literacy Course to a close by taking us into the life and times of 1 & 2 Kings. This has been a stimulating and informative series and will continue from September. Come and get this last opportunity before the summer break!