Seven of our contributors have written Friday Fixes for the Methodist Church in Great Britain’s Lent 2025 Campaign – Soul Food. Some of you will already be signed up to that and so will be receiving daily reflection emails. You can sign up at: https://www.methodist.org.uk/for-churches/soul-food/
Rather than find another 7 reflections during Lent, we’re going to share the same reflection that we have written for Soul Food. And to ensure that we don’t drop the reflections too close together – we’ll be releasing our Friday Fixes around lunchtime which is a little later than usual.
“Have you ever been to prison, Simon?” Asked my friend Paul.
“No mate, never.”
“Me neither. Well…” He paused to take a drag on his cigarette. “Not really…”
We were standing outside his house, weak sunshine warm but not hot, he had been tending his garden, which is his main hobby. Apart from smoking.
The smoking is not so much a hobby as a way of life, I suppose. Some of the time it’s normal tobacco, some of the time it has been ‘herbally enriched’.
“I do smoke quite a bit of green,” he admitted, “it’s like medicine for me, it helps calm me down.”
“I know mate,” I said. “I can smell it.”
Anybody within a fifty yard radius can smell it.
We were talking about a young lad we both knew, in his twenties, just sent to jail for doing something bad. He once smashed Paul’s front window and has never apologised, so Paul has no sympathy for him whatsoever.
“It’s his own fault mate, nobody makes him behave like that.”
On the radio the DJ introduced ‘Bankrobber’ by The Clash, ‘Daddy wa-as a bankrob-ber’ warbled Joe Strummer, his scratchy voice loosely imitating the Jamaican musicians he admired so much. I nodded my head, unable to stop myself. My band used to do an unsubtle version of the song. We were terrible, but it didn’t matter.
The Clash version of ‘Bankrobber’ didn’t make it on to any of their studio albums, instead it surfaced just prior to the sprawling ‘Sandanista’, on the band’s compilation album ‘Black Market Clash’ – a home for unreleased and import tracks – combined with a dub version which was released elsewhere as ‘Robber Dub’.
The Clash had a bit of a thing about prison. Their anthemic ‘Stay Free’, perhaps the purest, finest, example of a platonic-male-love song, was about the release from jail of one of Mick’s school friends. On ‘Bankrobber’ incarceration is revisited from a different angle.
“An old man spoke up in a bar, said I’ve never been in prison, a lifetime serving one machine is ten times worse than prison,” Joe drawled.
The lyric makes you think about the nature of ‘freedom’ in contemporary society. How free are we, really? How real are the choices we make every day?
When I taught undergraduate criminology I asked my (mainly female) students to come up with an argument to answer the following question: “Which is more liberating, the bikini or the burqa?” Much interesting discussion was had, once we had got past the immediate objections.
“So do you mean, y’know, that society is a prison, then?” I asked Paul.
He narrowed his eyes, stretching out his fingers, ancient indigo dots, now smudgy but still visible, on each knuckle. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, do you think we’re trapped in cycles of work and consumption that offer an illusion of liberty but which are, thanks to constant social surveillance, surveillance of each other in fact, actually an effective form of imprisonment. Is that why you said you’d never been in prison ‘really’?”
“Ohhh…”
Paul looked around at the flowers, of which he’s so very proud, squinted at the pale blue sky and took a long drag on a cigarette.
“No mate, I mean… do the cells count as prison? Cos, you know, I’ve been in the cells, but that’s not prison, really, is it?”
“No mate, it’s not.”
“No, I didn’t think so.”
The music played on, Joe’s strangled voice hit the chorus: “Some is rich, and some is poor, that’s the way the wo-orld is, I don’t believe in lyin’ back, sayin’ how bad your luck is…”
I have a friend whose view is that each and every one of us has an addiction. I am not sure if I entirely agree (which is not to say I am not myself willing to accept a tendency for certain addictive behaviours – I don’t own a smartwatch precisely because I worry I am already addicted enough to my phone and the last thing I need is to have it accessible on my wrist rather than my pocket), but I have certainly seen enough of life to understand where such a view might come from. I’m certainly open to the idea that, in the Western world at the very least, addiction is far bigger problem than many of us are willing to admit.
One person who seems willing to acknowledge that challenge is Florence Welch, whose song, “Hunger”, openly explores her own experiences of addiction, not just of alcohol and drugs, but of all kinds of ways that bring emotional and hormonal highs in ways that are ultimately more harmful than helpful. It is, to my mind, a powerful song that is open about Welch’s experiences in a way that is raw and yet also hopeful – the acknowledgement that the hunger exists, and that the past attempts to satisfy it have failed, is itself a notable step in the right direction.
While I may not be entirely sold, yet, on the idea we all have addictions, I do think we all have a hunger – a hunger to be loved, to be welcomed, to be valued, to be seen and heard and enabled to fulfil our potential. As someone who believes we are made in the image of God, I might call this a hunger for our divine selves. This is not something new to Christian thinking – Augustine of Hippo probably said it best, when he said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” (Confessions) We all have a restless desire to make our way home, to know ourselves loved as those made in the image of the One who is Love.
Of course, we so often try at satisfy that hunger in the wrong places. We find ourselves wanting more and more: whether of things, or highs, or experiences, or adulation, or power, or… well, the list certainly goes on. I know when my own Black Dog is raging, when I feel swamped in the fog of depression or am wired with the adrenaline of anxiety, I think that what will satisfy it is food, or drink, or buying stuff, or the flashing lights of my phone. Yet what actually stills me and frees me, even if only temporarily, is space, and stillness, and focus on my breathing, and repeating the words of the Lord’s prayer.
Do we all have addictions? I am genuinely not sure. But I am convinced we are all hungry, hungry for love. Not the various kinds of human love (as good as they are and as reflective of the ultimate Love) but divine love, the love that made us and holds us and will go through death to give us life in all its fullness. We all have a hunger, and I pray that each and everyone us might find that hunger sated in the One who made us and in whom we will find eternal rest.
Let’s face it. This song is not particularly deep and meaningful. It’s not the sort of song that you pop on when you’re feeling like a bit of navel-gazing or contemplative reflection. So apologies if you were hoping for deep lyrics this week. Instead you have fun, frivolity and love.
Sometimes our everyday life is so full of trying to unpack what an earth is going on around us, we need music to divert our attention for a little while. For me, this song does just that. It not only diverts, it energises too.
It transports me back to that point in time when the 80’s turned into the ‘caring, sharing 90’s’ when I was in my early twenties. A time when spending time with friends was paramount in my life. A time when we would get in a car and just drive – not quite to a funky little shack – but to a different town for a change.
It also transports me to a time when I found the USA exciting and vibrant. I could totally believe The B-52s driving a big American car along the sunlit Atlanta highway to this fun place called The Love Shack. The land of the free to be who you want to be – that’s what I thought the US was all about.
It’s a song that was a dance floor filler. My whole group of friends would be straight up dancing – usually pretending to drive a car; definitely ‘bang bang’ banging on the door baby! It’s quirky, camp and full of energy just like the band singing it.
It celebrates life, being together and having fun. Its lively, colourful nature suggests that love is not just about serious things, but also about joy, spontaneity, and embracing imperfections.
So perhaps this song is both fun (and frivolous) with something to ponder too. After all the Love Shack is a little old place where everyone is welcome. It’s an inclusive space – regardless of who you are. All you need do is bang on the door. Love and being included await.
Happy Valentine’s Day from the Friday Fix. You are loved – whoever and wherever you are.
I love this track. There is no other way of starting this reflection. It’s a real favourite. And I’ve lived with it a very long time.
If I go to see a concert that has any remnant of my beloved band Genesis in it, or frankly any kind of halfway decent tribute, the conversation with my equally geeky Genesis buddy turns to what we want on the playlist.
We always want ‘The Cage’ but very rarely is it played. We like ‘The Carpet Crawlers’ and are often satisfied. He’s a ‘Cinema Show’ fan whereas I’d rather have ‘Blood on the Rooftops’ (no comment on my personality please).
But when the first few bars of this song plays, an inner peace and warm glow descends on an audience, and the shared audible sigh of appreciation is heard and felt. It’s a track from an album which has within it all sorts of stories and, for me, it is a great way to end an album.
It’s also a song that, even without spiritual resonance or lyrical value, matters somehow. (You can tell by now, not only does the song matter to me but the band does too. It gels me with a certain kind of people. It connects me to dear friends. It takes me back to the days when I wrote out the lyrics of songs in my best handwriting so I still had them when I returned the vinyl back to its owners and listened on my dodgy cassette recording. Being a Genesis fan is a shortcut to understanding the other without any extra comment.)
This is a song where its subject is looking and searching. So clear about how things were. What was of value and the impact of having lost it all. It has a level of lament and deep honesty in it. Anyone who can openly say:
I miss you more Than the sun reflecting off my pillow Bringing the warmth of new life And the sound that echoed all around me That I caught a glimpse of in the night
is expressing pain and love and loss.
For me it is a song about yearning. A deep desire to find the missing piece. It speaks of grief – there’s a lot of it about in my world at the minute – and a recognition that it won’t ever be the same, and that dents the soul.
I’m never really sure why our closeness to God often comes when we are in a spot. When we express our lament. If only we could be as open with God as this song writer is with the invisible hearer of these words.
I know it can be hard when there is so much to be thankful for, but I truly believe telling it like it is, in an emotionally true way, builds connection with others and the God we love. It settles the soul and an expression of what we feel and need – even if it can’t come to pass – helps us find a way through.
I often wonder if the ‘Afterglow’ in the title comes just from having listened to it (or sung it of course) and then settled into the fact you’ve said what needs saying for the moment.
I wonder what it might do for you today…….?
Bizarrely its quite hard to find an official website for Genesis these days and those that claim to be are a bit unusual.However you could try this https://thegenesisarchive.co.uk/ and see what you find.
“The lyrics are about what’s going on these days. Everything is crumbling apart but this is trying to keep a bit of faith.”
So said Doves’ guitarist, Jez Williams, about the track ‘Kingdom of Rust’ in an NME interview at the release of the same-named album in 2009. I don’t know about you, but I sure feel like that quote could have been uttered yesterday! Maybe that’s why great music is timeless.
It has always been one of my discomforts with the language of faith that we seem so easily to slip from the language of trust into the language of knowledge. We ask people whether they know Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, we sing that we know our Redeemer lives, we declare our understandings of scripture and human behaviour and divine nature as self-evident fact.
This year is the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, which produced the earliest edition of what we now refer to as the Nicene Creed. Given the way some Christians speak, you’d be forgiven for thinking that such a creed was a series of knowledge statements, and yet it isn’t. The phrase we Christians repeat time and time again as they recite the ancient statement is “I believe…” Creeds are statements of belief, of faith, of trust. God, as Creator, is ineffable, unknowable, to the creation and its creatures – including us. Indeed, an argument for the incarnation is that if God the Creator desires us to know the divine then it needs to be done on our terms, as part of the creation, because creatures cannot know anything beyond the universe within which we live. And so God comes to us as a human being, a creature subject to time and place – thereby experiencing the limitations that we are subject to while also enabling us to know what God is like in a tangible manner.
Yet even in the context of the incarnation we face the challenge that as human-beings subject to time and space we cannot know Jesus in the same way that his mother, disciples, and others present in 1st Century Judea knew him. We must rely on the writings of the generation that followed, the wisdom of saints both ancient and modern, and what we take to be the moving of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And note, I say “what we take to be”. I cannot prove the existence of the Holy Spirit. Yet I very happily declare in the creeds that I believe in it. I have faith in it. I trust in it.
When I look at the world today, I wish I knew, in empirical, factual terms, what God was up to, that somehow or other I could prove that the evil at work today was on a losing trajectory, that undertaking certain actions would guarantee the lifting up of the lowly, the feeding of the hungry, the healing of the sick, and the freeing of the oppressed. But that isn’t the case. Instead, this poor creature that I am is required to have faith, to believe, to trust. And so that’s what I do, even when it takes every fibre of my being to offer up even a single drop of the faith I know I need…
“…I know it takes an ocean of trust In the kingdom of rust”
I’ve just had to switch the radio off. I was listening to two people being interviewed who had opposing views and one person in particular is getting louder, more agitated which meant, to be honest, their argument was becoming less coherent. Rather than defending their standpoint, they were beginning to attack the other person’s and I just couldn’t listen to what was no longer a conversation between adults.
As someone who works for a peacemaking charity, heated conversations and conflicts are part of my weekly, if not daily, world. Despite all the knowledge and experience that I have as a trainer and mediator, I still begin to feel my blood boil and my exasperation increase when one person is not listening to another.
One of the ‘Ways of Working’ that we have at Place for Hope is that we seek to understand rather than agree. I’m always reminding people that the world would be very, very boring if we all agreed with each other. It is through exploring our differences and perspectives that we can grow into compassionate human beings. Of course, understanding each other involves recognising that we each have things to learn, and that means acknowledging that sometimes we (yes, me) might be wrong about something.
Disagreements and disputes tend to be a bit easier to navigate in the real world. If, like me, you also live some of your life on social media, discord and differing opinions can have a much nastier and detrimental effect. One unusual thing about the social media world is that you can find yourself embroiled in heated conversations with people you don’t even know.
This song from Taylor Swift starts with that very situation. That somebody is having a go at you and they don’t even know you. More than that, she’s insinuating that somehow the anonymity that the digital world offers gives them the confidence to say what they wouldn’t say in the street, or pub, or workplace, or school, or home.
You are somebody that I don’t know But you’re taking shots at me like it’s Patrón And I’m just like “Damn, it’s 7:00 a.m.” Say it in the street, that’s a knock-out But you say it in a tweet, that’s a cop-out
Recent weeks seem to have been filled more than ever with nasty, harmful and inciteful comments made by privileged, powerful rich men that feed division and hatred within our communities. And when somebody questions their intentions and behaviour, or tries to encourage them to show grace and mercy to those less fortunate than them, rather than sitting down to talk and listen like grown-ups would do, they prefer to take to the keyboard with their angry and bitter responses.
You just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace And control your urges to scream about all the people you hate
Knowing how to respond to abuse and bullying on social media is something that is on ongoing learning experience for us. It’s still quite a new encounter to be on the receiving end of hateful, angry comments from people who have absolutely no idea who we are.
I’m not actually sure that Taylor’s response to tell the other person to calm down is helpful. In my experience, telling someone to calm down may wind them up a little bit more. Telling yourself to calm down might be a better way forward.
Probably the best way to respond is to be an adult. By that I mean that if we are going to reply, we do so in a calm, assertive, and measured way that avoids getting further caught up in the argument. Another adult response would also reflect on what this might be all about and, most likely, step away and not respond. That way you’re not adding fuel to the fire and getting caught up in a debate that you didn’t even intend to get caught up in.
I like to believe that the Jesus who I follow would lead by example. That he would respond like an adult, and I can try to be like that too. Take a step back and calm (yourself) down. Take yourself to a quiet place or space. Be insightful, not inciteful.
Would you like to help us build up our Friday Fix reflections stock? It’s currently looking empty!
Is there a pop song that is helping you through the long month of January? Is there a rock song that resonates for you at the moment? Is there a soul song that has become your prayer?
We’d love to hear from you if you do have a song – just email your thoughts to us at fridayfixmail@gmail.com and we’ll do the rest.
It’s probably no surprise to those who know me that one of my favourite books and films is ‘Bridget Jones‘s Diary’. I realise that nearly 30 years on from when it first appeared, there are some problematic elements to the story but I think there are still some valuable lessons and observations that are just as relevant today such as standing up for yourself and recognising and walking away from toxic relationships.
Most of all, and most importantly, I think there’s an underlying message of learning to accept yourself. In fact, one of my favourite scenes from the film really drives home the message. If you’ve never watched the film or read the book, Bridget (in a scene resembling Darcy‘s proposal in Pride and Prejudice) is told “I like you very much. Just as you are”
It seems to be a thing that many of us find difficult – to accept ourselves just as we are in the way we were fearfully and wonderfully made. This song from the Stockport band, Blossoms, delves into the idea that we can pull the wool over our eyes (and the eyes of others) by pretending to be ‘perfect me.’ The thing about pretending is that it takes up a lot of energy. It’s exhausting. And when you think about it, it diverts us from living life in all its fullness.
Mid-January is the time when many of those New Year’s Resolutions start to fall apart at the seams. Those promises we made to ourselves to regularly get a good night’s sleep, to look our best, to show our friends empathy, and to be more intentional about our time with family might have seemed a good idea on New Year’s Day, but now in the cold, murky, foggy light of January we might be finding these promises, these resolutions, more difficult to carry out than we thought.
We’re only human. We can only do so much. Striving to be perfect – perfectionism – is not all it’s cracked up to be and I’m not sure it’s what God is really after for us humans. In the book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron challenges us with the idea that ‘Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough—that we should try again.’
To be true and direct It’s as hard as you’d suspect Is that cynicism I detect? Or my lyricism I detest? Wait, I’ve three more things to say You’ve got to learn from your mistakes Over time you will change No one leaves here unscathed
Being a better human is not the same as being a perfect human. And that’s what this song reminds us about – we should learn from our mistakes and that, over time, we will change – for the better hopefully. It also reminds us that we’ve got to come to our senses and recognise that life isn’t easy. It does keep you guessing, so most of all – just keep breathing.
I’ve come to my senses Life’s not easy It leaves you guessing Just keep breathing
So if you’re one of those who is beating yourself up that you haven’t achieved what you might have set out to do at the beginning of this month, ‘tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it yet’ (the wise words of Anne of Green Gables) and that God loves you just as you are.
The Friday Fix 