We’re living in unprecedented times and the next few weeks will be challenging for those of us who are used to regularly meeting to worship, hear the Word and pray together.
The next few weeks call us to be church in different ways. Our weekly Friday Fix will try to give food for thought about the times that we are in and if you have something to contribute, please send it to Gill on thomasg@methodistchurch.org.uk.
Our Social Media posts will be supporting, encouraging and sharing ideas on ways that we can connect and worship. Let’s not be socially distant even if we are physically distant.
Finally, our lovely colleague Rev Nel Shallow, Grantham & Vale of Belvoir Circuit has put together some ideas, resources and suggestions on how to worship and how to be church at a time of ‘distant socialising’. You can download the PDF on the box below.
‘May your wishes all come true’ might make this seem at first glance like a trite song. But it’s a blessing from the start: ‘May God bless and keep you always’. Then there are lots of other telling sentiments: ‘May you grow up to be righteous, / May you grow up to be true, / May you always know the truth…May you always be courageous…May you have a strong foundation / When the winds of changes shift / May your heart always be joyful…’
Dylan wrote it for one of his sons. We can now receive the song not as a straightforward longing for eternal youthfulness in the sense of an interminable life of the kind that we might know in our youths (for what if we wouldn’t want our youths to be repeated?).
It works as an appeal to grasp after and hold on to deep and powerful convictions about the fulfilled life. The kind of ongoing youthfulness that it is worth aspiring to is about righteous, joyful, truthful, courageous living. Seek those things and we shall feel young, invigorated, spirit-filled, whatever our age. Never give up on justice. Never step back from truth-seeking.
I’ve seen Dylan a few times live. He’s as exasperating a performer as everyone says: playing songs you know well in versions which you don’t even recognise at first; not having much rapport with his audience (or at least not talking to them much); mumbling his lines without sometimes being in tune. But then you remind yourself: he can do what he likes – these are his words. He wrote all this stuff (words and music). If he wants to go up rather than down when singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, then he can! He can be as playful as he likes with his words and his melodies. And he inevitably attracts quality touring musicians to create tight, lively bands around him.
Dylan therefore creates an ‘occasion’, a memory, which is worth recalling, alongside the multiple listenings – on CD, or streamed – of songs he’s produced. You can even get away with singing along with him out of tune because he often does too (…though preferably do that at home rather than in public). Participation matters. (‘Forever youuuuuuuuuung…..for-ever youuuuung….May yooooooou stayyyyyyy………’) It’s how music works best. It’s also how blessings and other prayers become part of who we are.
I seem to have a habit of hearing a band and then getting totally immersed in what they offer.
I hear one song and then seek out a back catalogue, a gig and keep on looking for whatever is coming out as new.
This is just the case with The Lone Bellow. One song and I was hooked. A visit to Leeds at the Brudnell Social Club cemented my affection for all their close harmonies, life focussing lyrics and their intimate approach to BIG songs.
So a new album and new music brings me real joy. In particular the track -Count on Me.
It speaks of deep friendship. Of that willingness that comes from an honesty that can sooth and challenge without discrimination. We all need to be loved and indeed, our really good friends would do that unconditionally, regardless of all those petty and weird things that make us us.
But they must also be there to pick up the pieces when its gone horribly wrong and they can carefully mop us up even if we are a bit broken. Sometimes friends for me are the honesty that says you know you are going to have to deal with this. It’s painful. It might break you but we are here and we love you all the same. I’m a crier. A shouter. A person who wants harmony. Sometimes though walking away or facing the agony is about self-preservation and doing that alone is a daunting prospect. You need a friend of the truest kind to be alongside with their arm around your neck.
As people of faith many of us might feel the same way about God. Its not always that simple. Whoever you have in your corner though being able to count on them is what counts.
“Let it break you Let it help you lay down what you held onto Let it break you You can count on me, I can count on you To help you lay down what you held onto Help you lay down what you held onto”
Sometimes a song collides with a significant moment in your life. It expresses your thoughts and feelings better than you could. ‘Wires’ is one of those songs for me.
The song was released in January 2005 when my son was 3 months old. Although he was born without any intervention (it was down to one last push or the ventouse was at the ready), he was in quite some distress and this resulted in him spending a few hours in the Special Baby Care Unit.
Although he wasn’t rushed through the hospital ‘running down corridors, through automatic doors‘ and subjected to ‘wires’ as Athlete’s lead singer Joel Pott’s daughter was, the words really evoked the experience at the time – and still continue to do so. I remember the panic on my husband’s face when he came back to find us on the maternity ward and we weren’t there; I remember sitting helplessly next to the tiny, little bundle ‘in a plastic box‘; I remember seeing the determination and lifeforce in his eyes and feeling sure that it was going to be alright.
From the moment of conception, I’ve always had a strong awareness that I have no control over this life that had been created. Right from the beginning I’ve been learning to let go. It can be so easy to take life for granted; to think that life is a right when it’s actually a gift.
‘Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes’ (James. 4:14)
Our lives are precious and fragile but for some reason we humans have a tendency to be rather arrogant and nonchalant about something so fragile as life. Funny really because when we own something that we think is delicate and breakable, we have a tendency to take extra special care of it. Why don’t we do this with our own lives?
Revisiting ‘Wires’ again has reminded me that I could make more time for others; that I could show more love to others; that I need to live more today and not worry too much about tomorrow. Life is indeed fragile. Handle it with the same care that God has for creation.
(And just in case you’re wondering, that tiny bundle is a strapping, rugby-playing, full-of-testosterone teenager – ‘looking at you now, you would never know’!)
This is one of Elton John’s finest songs. It is underperformed – though Elton John has played it live sometimes, and there are a few versions on YouTube – and is hidden away on the 1972 album Honky Chateau, as part of that rich seem of ‘Americana’ material that he and his lyricist Bernie Taupin produced in the early 1970s (listen also to Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water, before you head to Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Caribou).
It’s still something of a mystery how a lyricist from rural Lincolnshire could come up, in his late teens and early twenties, with evocative, poetic lyrics which an emerging rock star from Pinner could make use of. But that’s what happened. Taupin must have been about 21 when he wrote ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’ just as he and Elton John were about to become big in the USA and having their first experiences staying in large American cities.
As a song it invites meditative reflection on the fact that it takes all sorts to make up a world and that a city brings alongside each other people with great differences, and that rich and poor live cheek by jowl in a modern city, with all the challenges and tensions that such economic distinctions produce.
For a townie from Merseyside this song was evocative. A trip to New York was surely never ever going to be on the cards (I wondered from my teenage bedroom what it was like). I find it staggering that I have been three times since and made trips, because of academic conference work, to a dozen or so other North American cities. I’m checking my carbon footprint much more these days but cannot pretend that I didn’t (and don’t) find such city-visits exciting and challenging. I always ensure I don’t just visit the ‘tourist bits’.
I’ve no idea what Taupin and John themselves make of their own lyric ‘I thank the Lord for the people I have found’. But the depth of gratitude seems real enough: wherever you are, and whatever the circumstances you find yourselves in, be grateful for whoever helps you get through. I really do think this proves to be a deep, and profoundly significant, evangelistic insight. God is wherever gratitude is being expressed. And wherever gratitude is being expressed, then important things are happening. (For the record, this kind of stuff crops up when people start telling their own stories ruthlessly honestly…).
Three years later, in the title-track of their autobiographical album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Taupin and John would conclude: ‘And all this talk of Jesus coming back to see us / Mmm mmm couldn’t fool us / For we were spinning out our lines walking on the wire /Hand in hand went music and the rhyme’. Perhaps they’d dispensed with all explicit religion by then. Or perhaps it was just reservation about particular aspects of eschatology. Who knows? And they have both now got a further 45 years of life-experience to work with.
At any rate, the lyric, and the wonderful song they created together, leaps out of their own experience and helps others.
I wonder, when we think of faith, if we are guilty of thinking we in the church might have the monopoly on God’s grace. It is true that God loves everyone but maybe he saves a little bit extra for us? We even sing about that sometimes – and we are at risk of doing so a little too carelessly in my view. “……still the greatest treasure remains for those who choose you now”
Startlingly lovely then is this song of self-assuredness. The singer/writer proclaims with ease
I don’t go to church anymore
I know He still loves me
I know He still loves me when I’m smoking blunts
Loves me when I’m drinking too much
He loves me then (yeah!)
He loves me when I do what I want
He loves me
He doesn’t judge me
Yes, He loves me
When I heard the words I asked myself “Is this really what a life in God is all about?” A place where I can be so sure of his grace, so sure of her unfailing commitment to me that I might sing such carefree and honest words.
I also asked myself where do the rules we set ourselves as a Church fit in to this picture, this story of God’s unswerving love for us? What are we requiring as a people of God that might mean it’s easier to celebrate outside our walls than come in and see the God we share.
I’m sure my old Sunday School teachers might have been shocked at the thought that God might love me even if I knowingly misbehaved. I don’t know what it says about repentance. I don’t know what it says about how to live a God-filled life. I don’t know what it says about the requirement to change a bit of who I am so that others can see God in me. However I do know that it says “He loves me”
Over the last couple of days my regular morning walk from St Pancras to Methodist Church House has offered time and space to reflect on the day ahead and the various meetings, conversations and tasks that I have to work through. I have found enjoyment in the crisp winter morning walk too from seeing the sun come up against a blue sky being greeted by the ‘Good Morning London’ message on the top of the BT Tower.
As I walk I sometimes listen to music and over the recent days, I have found myself listening to Emeli Sande. I haven’t listened to her for a while and in coming back to her music I have been struck again by the way she is able to tap into emotions and feelings through her lyrics and how her songs often offer a sense of inspiration and hope.
Her song ‘You Are Not Alone’ from her ‘Real Life’ album has been one of the songs that I have found buzzing around in my head this last week. As I reflect on the number of people who feel isolated, marginalised, unheard, voiceless, lonely and scared, I hear something in these lyrics that reminds me of the importance of enabling people to know that they are not alone, that there are others to help, to listen. That there are others who hope for a better, brighter more just and peaceful future.
Now that we are in the first stages of Brexit, the challenges in the song for me are around how we find ways to ensure that people’s voices are heard, that people do not have a sense of isolation or loneliness, that together we strive for our nation, our world to be one that is more just, more inclusive, more loving, more kind and more caring.
You are not alone – Emeli Sande
Are you sick and tired of bein’ lied to? Getting kinda bored of being ignored? Can’t find the tribe that you belong to? Oh, my friend, you are not alone
Are you tired beggin’ for some answers? Are you scared you won’t make it out alive? Does it make you sick when truth is censored? Oh, my friend, you are not alone
Oh, you are not alone here, don’t fear You are not alone here, no way There’s plenty more others here, yeah, yeah My friend, oh, you are not alone
Are you tired of workin’ for the minimum? Has your heart adjusted to the dark? Well, does it make you sick they kill the innocent? Oh, my friend, you are not alone
Are you dreaming of a brighter future? Or somewhere the children can be free? Will you risk it all to tell the truth? Yeah My friend, oh, you are not alone
Oh, you are not alone here, don’t fear You are not alone here, no way There’s plenty more others here, yeah, yeah My friend, oh, you are not alone
Are you tired of feelin’ so invisible? Are you sick of silencing your voice? Do you still have hope that peace is possible? Oh, my friend, oh, you are not alone
Oh, you are not alone here, don’t fear You are not alone here, no way There’s plenty more others here, yeah, yeah My friend, oh, you are not alone
You are not alone here (Don’t fear) You are not alone, no way, no way There’s plenty more others here, yeah, yeah My friend (You are not alone) You are not alone (You are not alone) You are not alone here Don’t fear, you’re not alone here) (No way) (There’s plenty more others here) No way, no way Yeah, yeah My friend, oh, you are not alone
This is foot-tapping, no nonsense, uplift. Whatever may happen to you in life, there is no reason to let yourself be crushed. ‘Easier said than done’ may be the response. But the song itself, if we but let it work on us, will not let our spirits be dampened or brought down. We will resist. We will fight on. Even if we’ve been wholly or partly responsible for landing ourselves in difficulty, things can still be turned round. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will ultimately be able to crush our spirits.
What’s more, there are clues as to how we go about not letting ourselves be crushed. I love the lines: ‘Walk with the rich, walk with the poor / Learn from everyone, that’s what life is for’. They are stunningly challenging when we all know it is much easier to stick with our own kind. They invite us to think beyond just the economic differences which divide us.
‘Learn from everyone’ is a real hard task to contemplate (what: from those who voted Brexit/Remain [delete as appropriate]? from Northerners/Southerners [ditto]? from Conservative/Green/Labour/LibDem supporters?). And the song gives us the reason why all this is possible. It puts into song how the Realm of God shapes us in practice: ‘Remember you’re walking up to heaven / Don’t let nobody turn you around’.
This is, then, the track to listen to when you’re feeling low. Co-written by Bibb and Charlotte Höglund, and performed by Bibb in a number of different versions (here with Maria Muldaur), the music is – plainly and simply – a means by which God’s Spirit works to lift people up. Have a listen to the Bibb and Wilson Pickett version or one of the live performances with Staffan Astner too!
1991. The Lamb and Packet pub in Preston, Lancashire. A Sunday night in the summer. My best friend Andrea’s last summer living in the UK before she emigrated to the States. A group of around 6 young women full of the joys of life, chattering away and suddenly the voice of Don McLean interjects with ‘A long, long timeago‘ and everything changes.
The chattering stops. We all look at each other. Someone punches the air with a ‘yes’ and we’re off- joining in with ‘I can still remember how that music used to make me smile‘. And that is it for the next 8 and a half minutes. Fingers dancing, faces contorted in a variety of expressions and the beats being drummed by hands banging on the table.
Halfway through, the male contingent of the friendship group enter the pub, know exactly where we are (thanks to our dulcet tones) and join us immediately in the song. Because it’s ‘our song’. The song that connected us. Newcomers to the group gained greater respect when they joined in with singing ‘American Pie’. We weren’t an unwelcoming bunch at all but once you joined in with our song, you were definitely in!
Singing together is really good for you. But I’m sure you know this already. A particular piece of research from the University of Oxford in 2015 (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.150221) affirmed that singing in groups helps to ‘break the ice’ really quickly which in turn means that social bonding happens faster. Singing together is really effective in helping large, diverse groups to bond but as I said at the beginning – you know this already.
So did John and Charles Wesley. It’s often said that Methodists were ‘born in song’ and singing enthusiastically, with gusto, is a reputation that continues. It’s thought that the Wesley brothers saw how singing can be a powerful, galvanising force when they experienced a fierce storm in the Atlantic on their way to Georgia in 1736. A group of German Moravian Christians who were travelling with them sang and prayed together which gave them the strength to see the situation through in a calmer way than the other passengers.
Singing together – whether as a choir, a congregation, a crowd at a concert or a bunch of friends at a party or down the pub – is good for us as an individual and for us as a society. It’s brilliant for our health – physiologically and mentally. It’s how we express ourselves. It’s how we connect with others. It can build bridges and break down barriers.
For Christians, singing together helps to explore the Word deeper, to express beliefs and understanding and builds each other up. Ephesian 5:19 says‘addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart‘.
Back to Andrea. It’s a hot summer evening in 2015. Floating on my back in a pool in a garden in San Diego, California. The local radio station is playing in the background. The song changes. The voice of Don McLean breaks into the air with ‘A long, long time ago‘ and I join in with ‘I can still remember how that music used to make me smile‘ with a little ‘yay’ and a grin at Andrea, who is at the other end of the pool – and we’re off, singing at the tops of our voices relentlessly for the next 8 or so minutes.
The Friday Fix 