Category: 2023

Jane writes:

Beaches is one of those films that is unavoidably sob-inducing. The story is a beautiful one of friendship and love. It is a story of women’s solidarity in the face of adversity and of the reality within that.

I suppose the song from its soundtrack that crops up most for people is ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’. Indeed a beautiful song. The one, though, that always stirs a moment of deep reflection for me is this one. I think it’s the balance of human kindness overflowing and the inevitable realisation of the fact that it’s likely to rain today.

I often wonder what its writer, Randy Newman, wants it to be saying but for me, it’s about the fact that within the relentlessness of life somehow the humanity of one for another is really what matters. It also speaks of how despite all that goodwill and generosity in play, life goes on and it’s often not easy. It’s the balancing act of the rough with the smooth. The yin & yang. The sense that life
can be really, really rubbish but somewhere in the human kindness is overflowing and that’s worth holding onto. A tension in play.

Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s gonna rain today.

When I first became a person of faith I could have been forgiven for thinking that God’s purpose was to fix things for people. I knew even then it wasn’t all roses and happy endings. Now I’m much older I clearly see it’s really complicated. The way God works in the world. I suppose, a bit like my understanding of the lyrical content of this song, it’s a tiny bit unfathomable but I know it’s about a consistent sense that despite what’s happening – and let’s face it we’re not short on stuff to be bothered about – there’s a undercurrent of God-given love, hope and goodness.

This isn’t a trite song. It doesn’t promise better times or the sun coming out tomorrow. It does though remind us that one act can make a difference. Let your human kindness overflow today if you’re able even if it is “raining”

Broken windows and empty hallways,
A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s gonna rain today.

Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles,
The frozen smiles to chase love away.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s gonna rain today.

Lonely, lonely.
Tin can at my feet,
I think I’ll kick it down the street.
That’s the way to treat a friend.

Bright before me the signs implore me:
Help the needy and show them the way.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s gonna rain today.

Lonely, lonely.
Tin can at my feet,
I think I’ll kick it down the street.
That’s the way to treat a friend.

Bright before me the signs implore me:
Help the needy and show them the way.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s gonna rain today.

Sometimes I feel powerless in the face of all that’s happening in the world – inequality, conflict, injustice, hunger, greed, exploitation. I can see there is so much that needs to be different, better.  

“I see the kids in the street, with not enough to eat. Who am I… pretending not to see their needs?”  

When I get overwhelmed like that, I find it helps to remember that the only thing that I can change is myself.  

Michael Jackson sings about “starting with the man in the mirror.” Now for me, that’s the woman in the mirror. It’s me whose ways have to change. Me who has to stand up and do something differently. 

“No message could have been any clearer, if you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make that change.” 

That change for me is often about sharing more of what I have; speaking up instead of staying silent and being more open to how other people experience things differently from me, rather than only seeing things from my perspective. I think it’s true that “when you close your heart then you close your mind.” 

I was in town once when I saw a couple of young people who appeared to be vandalising a phone box. I then wondered if I was jumping to conclusions and went over to see what was going on. It turned out that they were stuck inside, and so I learned a lesson in reflecting on first impressions. 

In my work I am responsible for leading unconscious bias training, which is all about noticing what is going on with our thinking and reactions and making an intentional effort to change assumptions. By making these kinds of changes I think we get to show more love and respect for each other, and so be more as God would like us to be – to be our best selves.  

“Gonna feel real good, gonna make a difference.” 

Lyrics

I’m gonna make a change
For once in my life
It’s gonna feel real good
Gonna make a difference
Gonna make it right

As I, turn up the collar on
My favorite winter coat
This wind is blowin’ my mind
I see the kids in the street
With not enough to eat
Who am I, to be blind pretending not to see their needs?

A summer’s disregard
A broken bottle top
And a one man’s soul
They follow each other on the wind ya know
‘Cause they got nowhere to go
That’s why I want you to know

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

I’ve been a victim of a selfish kind of love
It’s time that I realize
That there are some with no home
Not a nickel to loan
Could it be really me pretending that they’re not alone?

A willow deeply scarred
Somebody’s broken heart
And a washed out dream (washed out dream)
They follow the pattern of the wind, ya see
‘Cause they got no place to be
That’s why I’m starting with me

I’m starting with the man in the mirror (oh)
I’m asking him to change his ways (oh)
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

I’m starting with the man in the mirror (oh)
I’m asking him to change his ways (oh)
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make that
Change

I’m starting with the man in the mirror (oh yeah)
I’m asking him to change his ways (better change)
No message could’ve been any clearer
(If you wanna make the world a better place)
(Take a look at yourself and then make the change)

You can’t (Then you close your) close your, your mind
With the man in the mirror, oh yeah
I’m asking him to change his ways (better change)
No message could’ve been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

gonna feel real good now

I’m gonna make a change
It’s gonna feel real good
Come on (change)
Just lift yourself
You know
You’ve got to stop it
Yourself (yeah)

I’ve got to make that change today
(Man in the mirror) you got to
You got to not let yourself brother
(Yeah) you know
(Make that change) I’ve got to get that man, that man

You’ve got to
You’ve got to move
Come on
Come on
You got to
Stand up, stand up (yeah, make that change)
Stand up

Stand up and lift
Yourself, now
(Man in the mirror)

Gonna make that change come on
(Man in the mirror)You know it

You know it
You know it
You know
Change
Make that change

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Glen Ballard / Siedah Garrett

Man in the Mirror lyrics © Universal Music Corp., Yellowbrick Road Music, Arlovol Music

Marc writes:

The bass from this one echoed around the church as we prayed. The subwoofer had to be on.

Isaiah 2:2 says:

“In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple
will be established as the highest of the mountains;
​it will be exalted above the hills,
​and all nations will stream to it.”

Or in other words:

“If you look into the distance, there’s a house upon the hill
Guiding like a lighthouse
​It’s a place where you’ll be safe to feel our grace
‘Cause we’ve all made mistakes”

What if the house of God, the temple on the mountain was like a lighthouse, a beacon calling out to all those in distress, welcoming all who were lost?

What if that Temple were the Church?

What if the people who follow Jesus were given a mandate to keep the light on for those who needed to find a way home?

​If only Jesus had said:

“You are the light of the world.
A town (or a temple, perhaps!?) built on a hill cannot be hidden.
Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.
Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.
In the same way, let your light shine before others,
that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
​(Matthew 5)

Light brings hope, and guidance, clarity and warmth. But one of the things light does is something we don’t talk about in church.

When you go camping and dusk is falling and you turn on a light you attract a whole host of bugs. Uncomfortable creatures who make us itch, that sometimes bite and suck blood, that we want to swat away are drawn to the light.

Isaiah is prophesying of a time when the temple would do the same. The light of the temple that was originally for just the people of God will attract all nations, all sorts of people who make the Israelites uncomfortable, including their enemies. But all would gather in the light to worship.

I think we need to be aware that we are called to be a light, to leave that light on, and to attract the people that make us uncomfortable. To be a people and a place of welcome and refuge for the world around us, a place to show and find grace because we’ve all made mistakes.

Tom Walker is calling out to a friend who has been lost to addiction, who he wants to welcome home and help, and declares that he will leave a light on.

I wonder if we could declare the same as people of faith calling those with needs home to the embrace of God? Could we really be a place of love, welcome and blessing?

Or will we do what I inevitably do when I’m camping and swat them away?

Find out more about Tom Walker at https://www.iamtomwalker.com/

Lynne writes:

Yep, you read it correctly, I am about to lay down a few words about why and how MC Hammer’s late-80s pop-rap hit, U Can’t Touch This, enriches my faith.

Bear with me… I am going somewhere with this one…

I really love to dance. When I was a teenager, dance was my entire life. I spent six evenings a week – and every penny I could earn working three jobs – at my dance school, where I learned ballroom, Latin American and rock and roll (and, for a brief period when it was a ‘thing’, line dancing).

I could even say there’s a tenuous link between my love of dance and my decision to become a Christian, as the local Methodist youth group provided a safe place (and a great amount of space in the church hall) to practice the cha-cha-cha in competition season.

For me, dancing wasn’t just a bit of fun, or a good way to spend time with my friends, or even just a great way to keep fit. It was all of those things, but it was so much more. Like a lot of teenage girls, I struggled with self-confidence and body image, which for me was compounded by a traumatic experience at the age of 11 that left me feeling detached from, even repulsed by, my own body. Joining the dance school helped me to reconnect with my physical self and find joy in it once again. If my body could give me so much happiness when I danced, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing after all?

One of my favourite Bible verses is a really simple one, from Psalm 139:14 –

“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.”

As a teenager, I perhaps wouldn’t have expressed it this way, but dance helped me (and keeps on helping me) to own those four words, “fearfully and wonderfully made”, for myself.

Dance is still hugely important to me. Nowadays (with my teenage years far, far behind me) my social dancing is largely restricted to regular Zumba or Body Jam sessions at my local gym. Those classes are an absolute highlight in the week for me. I love being surrounded by other women (and the occasional man), of varying ability and dance skill, just giving themselves up to the music for an hour, enjoying their physicality and celebrating the fact that they, too, are fearfully and wonderfully made.

My dancing isn’t just restricted to the gym though! Any chance I have to throw a few shapes and I’ll take it. My favourite way to decompress after a very difficult day is to put on my catchy-titled ‘Cheesy Songs to Dance Around the Kitchen To’ playlist and just cut loose for 30 minutes. As MC Hammer says (finally we get to the point): “It feels good when you know you’re down”.

Perhaps it’s just that this song never fails to reach me and get me dancing (usually a terrible rendition of the Hammer Dance in my socks), no matter how low my mood? Or perhaps, when I’m strutting around my kitchen like I am Beyoncé, joining MC Hammer in his boastful claim that “you can’t touch this”, deep down I know it’s true.

Hammer might be bragging for his own sake but I know that you really can’t touch this, because God’s works (including me and all my wobbly bits) are
wonderful and I know that very well.

Said playlist is three and a half hours long and contains many a classic, from Madonna to Example, so why have I specifically chosen ‘U Can’t Touch This’ to dedicate this blog to? Perhaps it’s because a life coach recently told me that I apologise too much for liking frivolous things, simply because they give me joy, and this is me trying to redress the balance?

A final thought from the great wordsmith, MC Hammer himself:

Music hits me so hard
Makes me say “Oh, my Lord

Thank you for blessing me
With a mind to rhyme and two hyped feet

Tom writes:

The principal years of my musical upbringing were from 1989 (when I started Secondary School) to 1999 (when I moved to the US for a year as a university student). This means that I am undeniably a Brit Pop kid (and I acknowledge the problems with both the term and the culture that often went along with it). I’ve also previously mentioned that halfway during this decade of musical
inculturation I moved to Pilton in Somerset, home of the Glastonbury Festival. It was at the Festival in 1995 (my first) that Britpop obtained one of its most memorable moments. The big deal was supposed to be The Stone Roses but they pulled out at the last minute. So into the breach stepped Pulp. There was much nervousness about this, including from the organisers. In the end, though,
they stole the show.

It helped that at that point the band were riding the wave of the success of the single “Common People”, the lead single from the album A Different Class, which was released later in the year and probably Britpop’s greatest anthem. “Common People” takes the LP’s over-arching themes of class and wealth from the viewpoint of those who are working class and live in poverty, and ramps them up to 11 on a scale of 10. With wit, charm, intelligence, and no little amount of scathing invective, Cocker and the rest of the band take aim at those with wealth who choose to “slum” with those less fortunate themselves, all the while knowing that “if you called your dad he could stop it all”. The song is clear – living alongside those in poverty, even joining in with their lives, while knowing you can escape at any moment, is neither appropriate, nor a way to make friends amongst those whose social and financial problems cannot so easily be solved.

As Cocker sings in the album version of the song (but, interestingly, not the radio-played 7” single edit that’s also used for the video):

Like a dog lying in a corner
They will bite you and never warn you
Look out, they’ll tear your insides out
‘Cause everybody hates a tourist
Especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh
Yeah and the chip stains and grease
Will come out in the bath

You will never understand
How it feels to live your life
With no meaning and control
And with nowhere left to go
You are amazed that they exist
And they burn so bright
Whilst you can only wonder why

As I listen to these words today, I find myself wondering about how the Church lives out its calling to be “Church at the Margins”. Too often, I think, the Church can fall into the trap of tourism. Too often we look to “walk alongside” those whom society has treated unjustly and pushed to one side, all the while knowing that we can escape when we choose. We try and be a “Church for the Margins” or a “Church currently on the Margins”. I think, for example, of the challenges we sometimes set ourselves to live on a limited amount for a week or other period of time – no doubt well-meant, possibly even eye-opening and view-point changing, but nowhere near the true experience of those who are forced to live on such limited resources every day of their lives, such as those the Hope@Trinity project work with in Clacton-on-Sea where I’m Superintendent.

As a Christian, as someone who seeks to work for justice in the world, as someone who is undeniably middle-class and always at risk of forgetting the maxim, “Nothing about us, without us, is for us”, I am grateful to the ongoing challenge that “Common People” offers. I know that I’m one of those Cocker could easily be targeting in his lyrics. As the Church, as we rightly seek to focus on the justice, dignity and solidarity that God calls us to, as we seek to properly offer new places for new people and be a Church on the margins, we must be careful never to lose sight of the risk that we might fall into the trap of spiritual tourism.

Find out more about Pulp at https://www.pulpwiki.net/

Gill writes:

I’ve been reminded this week of the Johari Window – a key tool in understanding self-awareness and self-development. In 1955, psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, of the University of California, were exploring group dynamics. They discovered that there was some dissonance between how people thought others perceived them and how they were actually perceived.

They developed what’s known as the Johari Window (a merge of their names) which rests on four assumptions that humans make:

• There is information that is known to only me (hidden self)
  
• There is information that is known to only you (or, whoever you’re communicating with) (blind spot)
  
• There is information that is known to you and me (open self)
  
• There is information that neither of us know (unknown self)

The more self-aware you become, the more the open self and blind spot areas grow wider, and the hidden self and unknown self become smaller.

I love the tenderness and vulnerability of this song. All of us need reassurance and affirmation of who we are and what we are capable of at times in our lives. We need some people to really ‘see’ us and know us. To reflect back who we are.

I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know
I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you’re home

This is probably the loveliest love song that Lou Reed ever wrote. The Velvet Underground were managed by Andy Warhol, and consequently were part of the pop art world of challenging modernism with provocative perspectives on everyday life. The Velvet Underground’s music was dark and aggressive at times. Yet here is a beautiful, melancholic song professing unconditional love.

Nico was a German model and singer whom Warhol pretty much foisted on the band. Lou Reed apparently found her irritating and I imagine there were times when there was little sense of love. However, after many takes that reduced her to tears, they produced this tender, reflective, and compassionate song.

I like to think that for a moment at least, Lou and Nico were able to see and appreciate each other’s gifts – that they were able to see each other. That they were able to move past the twisted and unkind thoughts and attitudes and lay themselves open by putting down their hands.

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you’re twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
‘Cause I see you

Thomas Merton said this:

“Man [sic] is the image of God, and his inner self is a kind of mirror in which God not only sees Himself, but reveals Himself to the ‘mirror’ in which He is reflected.”  
​
When we live with open hearts and minds,  we start to see God not only in the people we meet or live with; or in the places where we go and hang out. We also God in songs, film, writing and everyday interactions.

And finally, the next time you pass a mirror and groan because that’s not how you want to look (or how you used to look). Stop. Others see you differently to how you see yourself. They don’t see what you see. They’ll see a beautiful human. And they probably get a glimpse of God too.

Remind yourself about The Velvet Underground at https://www.velvetundergroundmusic.com/

Marc writes:

“How am I gonna be an optimist about this?”
That’s the perpetual question I have in my calling to be part of the church, to be faithful to Jesus, and to reclaim the title “Christian” from all the negative connotations it brings up in peoples’ minds!

When I look around and see the walls keep tumbling down of the movement that I love, grey clouds rolling over the hills, bringing darkness from above and it all looks a little bit hopeless, what am I going to do!?

But when ‘Pompeii’ by Bastille came on in the car today, it was a different line that really jumped out at me:​

Oh, where do we begin,

the rubble or our sins?

I think the problem is that a lot of the time we begin with the rubble. We begin by looking at the destruction that has been caused or the havoc that has been wreaked, and we start by sifting through the debris.

​Particularly with church life and church history, I think I’d be right in saying that we have often spent a lot more time trying to fix what we have ended up with rather than challenging the root cause, the neglect, the abuse, the culpable actions that we as a people of faith have inherited the consequences of and often benefitted from.

And when we start with the rubble we can regularly discover that if we close our eyes it almost feels like we’ve been here before… like nothing’s changed at all.

Wherever I have seen the courage to deal with the sin, the disturbances of Shalom that are as a result of our action or inaction, the courage to address the sometimes missing image of God in our collective experience and expression as disciples, the willingness to hold up our hands and be held accountable for our shortcomings, THAT is where I have seen change. That is where I have seen growth. That is where I have seen God moving and breathing.

I’ve never been to Pompeii, but it’s a place where friends have been. It appears to be a place that is resigned to the history books, lost to rubble, damage and decay. Bits still stand out to remember what was once there before the destruction, but it’s lost to life.

I wonder if the church will end up the same way?
I wonder whether we’ll insist on carrying on starting with the rubble and ignoring our sins?

I hope I see the day when I can close my eyes and it feels like we’ve changed for the better, and we discover something new.

Find out more about Bastille at http://www.bastillebastille.com/

It’s that time of year when many of the Friday Fix writers are away, have been away or are going away, so this Friday we don’t have a Fix to share.

Many of the usual contributors will actually be at the Greenbelt Festival celebrating it’s 50th birthday (and also the 50th birthday of Friday Fixer Kristie!).

So – as it’s a Bank Holiday Weekend with time to listen to music – here’s the Greenbelt 2023 Playlist to get an idea of the music we’ll be listening to live at Greenbelt.