Category: 2023

Gill writes:

Maybe it’s because we’ve had Valentine’s Day this week; or perhaps it’s because the Church of England went public about gender-neutral pronouns for God; or perhaps it’s because I have heard this song playing away in the background in shops and on the radio – whatever it is, this song has been at the forefront of my mind in the last few days.

The music of Howard Jones arrived at a sweet spot in my teenage years and gave a voice to my inner thoughts. His songs encouraged me to see both sides and throw off your mental chains; to get to know people well and to reach the real you inside; not to always look at the rain and to ponder what is love.

When I was training to be a Reader, we were tasked with coming up with a sentence or two that might describe God to someone who hadn’t heard of God before. As you can imagine, there were all sorts of descriptions but most of them contained something appertaining to God being love. Apart from one person – whose experience of parental love left them feeling cold when God is described as love.

I’ve written before about the different types of love, and it occurs to me that those of us who think of God as love might be influenced by the type known as agape – unconditional, sacrificial love.

I love you whether or not you love me
I love you even if you think that I don’t
Sometimes I find you doubt my love for you
But I don’t mind
Why should I mind?
Why should I mind?

Love challenges us and questions our assumptions. Love leads us to want to change. Love turns our world, and what we know of it, upside down at times. Love enables us to doubt. Doubt is something that some Christians fear so they might deny they have doubts, or they might just shy away from discussing them. But doubt is the thing that leads us to think, question and understand more deeply. As Pete Rollins puts it “To believe is human, to doubt divine.”

Can anybody love anyone so much that they will never fear?
Never worry, never be sad?
The answer is they cannot love this much, nobody can
This is why I don’t mind you doubting

The verse that resonated so much for me as a teenager is the third one. And it still does today. For many of us, our teenage years are the time when we’re most aware of having expectations placed upon us, or expectations that we worry we can’t live up to, of people telling us who they think we are and what we’re capable of. It’s the time when we kick back and assert our need for space to develop in the way God created us. Having space and nourishing environments for us to know and grow about ourselves and others is vital to our being human.

And maybe love is letting people be just what they want to be
The door always must be left unlocked
To love when circumstance may lead someone away from you
And not to spend the time just doubting

The key to knowing God’s love is to love yourself (you are fearfully and wonderfully made), then you can love others and the world which God not only created for all life, but entrusted us with. Letting love shape and direct our lives offers worship and love for God – and this is what Jesus taught and showed us to do.

So yes Howard, anybody can love anybody anyway, if they’re following the path that Jesus put them on.

Howard Jones is still making music – and you can find out more about what he’s up to here – http://www.howardjones.com/index.html

This week’s Fix first appeared a few days ago on the Theology Everywhere blog. We thought it was well worth a share on The Friday Fix too – enjoy!

Kerry writes:

Let me invite you to peer, quickly, into the Gizzverse. This is the realm, theoretical and experiential, inhabited by invested fans of the Australian band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. In 2022 they celebrated 10 years together and released 5 records in one year, for the second time! Their last offering of 2022 was the album Change, featuring 7 tracks which were initially birthed 5 years before. The band realised they did not have the musical capacity to complete the album then, but 5 years of growth finally enabled them to do it. The whole album is an experiment in music, each song structured around two chords and scales, D and F#. I am not sure if by now you are bemused, disengaged, or intrigued, but please hang in there.

AstroTurf is the third track on Change and is about, well, AstroTurf! It is an environmental lament. The band have taken increasingly seriously the environmental crisis we find ourselves in. Individual tracks on albums, multiple tracks on their 2019 album, Infest the Rats Nest, explore environmental change and crisis, and it does not end there. They regularly press records on recycled material; have dispensed with shrink-wrap covers for their albums, in favour of cardboard envelopes and, in one case, reclaimed denim. They were awarded a £20,000 prize (which they donated to the environmental charity The Wilderness Society) for the song and video of If Not Now, Then When?, (from the album L.W.). A persistent refrain in that song wonders what it will take to change our behaviour. The song AstroTurf is another of their environmental protests. It portrays the mentality where control and the pursuit of an artificial (im)perfection overwhelms natural beauty, and to counter this it offers the lament of butterflies.

AstroTurf, the product, appears to solve the intrusions of the natural world for the human speaking in the song:

Everything’s dead here
Covered with plastic
Everything’s fluoro
Evergreen matter. . .

When it don’t matter
Everything’s better
Throw-away plates are
Better for business
Everything’s easy
Better for the earth is AstroTurf. . .

Suitable texture, suitable colour
Miniature forest, better than nature
Make me feel better knowing I won’t go
Out on my lawn and see an animal
Everything’s sterile, even infertile
Proud of my monster, never been straighter. . .

But at the same time creation is given a voice, a lamenting voice in the butterflies:

Six butterflies fluttered by
Looked horrified
“I just hatched from chrysalis
I’ve only hours, . . .
And this is where I will die
Heart-breaking way to end
I will cry on AstroTurf”

This is not a direct dialogue between the parties, but two monologues. The voice of power mistaking domination for dominion, and control for beauty; the voice of vulnerability seeing beauty in the created cycle of life and in the natural order of being.

The persistence of some human beings to dominate creation, to eradicate natural beauty in favour of artificial (im)perfection, is wanton and devastating. Our arrogance is such that we can presume the only voice we will listen to is our own, but King Gizzard pose an alternative voice and invite us, through song, to listen in. Convenience and control define some of our ways of relating to the world and the response is the sigh of creation (Romans 8.22). This is what Pope Francis highlighted at the beginning of Laudato Si’: ‘This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. . .This is why the earth herself . . . “groans in travail”’.

What I think the song does is elevate the voice we don’t hear, the groan of creation. I am not saying I believe human beings and butterflies are equal, or the same. Human beings are uniquely “capable of God”. They are, for me, created in the image of God. In the Wesleyan tradition, they have been given the natural, moral, and political image of God to serve God’s purpose for all creation. All life participates in God, but human beings have a greater ability to enjoy or frustrate the relationship than any other form of life. That distinct place we have is not one that should cause us to ignore God’s voice, grace, and presence, as it is mediated in other parts of creation.

For John Wesley, the political image of God in us is significant for the whole of creation, because it relates to our call to be for God, in our being for the world. In his sermon The Great Deliverance he writes of how humanity ‘was God’s vicegerent upon earth . . . all the blessings of God flowed through [them] to the inferior creatures. [Humanity] was the channel of conveyance between [their] Creator and the whole brute creation’.  There is an intention for humanity to act for creation. It is a purpose and call to live for creation in such a way that we tend it with the Divine intent, that we act for it in a way consistent with God’s love. It is a call to listen to the lament of creation in the songs of butterflies and abandon AstroTurf and all it symbolises.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have gigs at Alexander Palace on 22nd March and Troxy, London on 23rd March, plus they are part of the line-up for the End of the Road Festival in Salisbury from 31 Aug – 3rd September. Find out more about them at https://kinggizzardandthelizardwizard.com/

For the first time ever, we’ve had a submission of a song that we have had previously. Isn’t it great that a song can cause such different reflections?!

Tom writes:

They tell me that modern congregations can’t or won’t sing.

They tell me that modern congregations, even if they’re willing to sing, won’t do harmony.

They tell me that modern congregations don’t get responsive liturgy.

Who “they” are I can’t tell you precisely, but it’s certainly a view I’ve regularly come across as a student of the Church’s worship – from both sides of the Worship Wars divide: those whose love is a choral, liturgical style that seems slowly to be disappearing; and those who provide a more concert-style worship because that’s what people seem to want/need. (I paraphrase, and do so knowing the arguments and debates are far more complex.) Just rest assured, I’m told that these things I list are true by a range of people.

And then I close my eyes and listen to a memory:

A concert at the Eden Project. Mercurial, symphonic, Mancunian pop-rockers Elbow are on stage, led by the soaring voice and humble personality of lead singer Guy Garvey. Part way through, Garvey is talking to the crowd and breaks into a bit of repeat-after-me vocal exercising. And he doesn’t need to tell the crowd they’re to repeat after him, he simply sings a few la, la, la notes, and the crowd responds, following him where his melody leads. And, of course, as the crowd already knows, those vocal antics eventually lead into the opening “Oh, oh, oh” warble of their track, “Grounds for Divorce”.

Yet, as if this isn’t enough to question the assumptions behind the starting assertions, there comes an even stronger memory:

The same place, the same concert, just a little later. The band have already gone off and then returned to do an encore. They finish this final return, as they were bound to, with their greatest hit, the soaring anthem “One Day Like This”. As the song reaches its final harmonic crescendo, with its chorus repeating ad infinitum, Garvey encourages the crowd to not only join in but to carry the weight of the song, to become not just the lead singer but the backing singers as well… and then the musicians stop playing… and Garvey stops singing… and the lights go down… and the crowd keeps singing, in full-blown harmony, for what feels like forever, until finally it forms its own gentle fade-out.

Whenever people try and tell me what people nowadays can’t or won’t do in worship, and especially when it relates to singing in harmony or responding to responsive liturgy, I think of Elbow and “One Day Like This”. Because it seems to me that while we can sit around and complain at the lack of ability in modern day congregations the reality is that concert crowds prove time and time again that it isn’t true. Maybe, just maybe, in the ability of these crowds, God is challenging us to offer them something they actually want to respond to and sing!