The 10 albums that I've enjoyed most in 2012

Here are the 10 albums (in no particular order) that I've got hold of and enjoyed the most in 2012:

Taken from the Latin and literally meaning 'within the walls', Intra Muros is the album of "spooky" Christian music Bryan MacLean was completing at the time of his death. Due to 'the great strength of songs like the amazing Love Grows In Me and My Eyes Are Open', Intra Muros 'stands as fine testament to the ability of a great songwriter.'

The darkness, loss and wandering that suffuse Babel is fused with the transcendent sound and anthemic choruses that Mumford and Sons conjure up with banjo, double bass, guitar, keyboards and vocals.

The Bob Dylan of Tempest, 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' and so many other songs, is the faithful watchmen who sees the storm of the apocalypse on the horizon and who warns his people before it is too late. Tempest is, therefore, a profoundly religious album.

Bill Fay’s songs on Life is People are simply astonishing - simple and melodic yet with unusual imagery and insights delivered with gravity and grace. 'Cosmic Concerto (Life Is People)' is a highlight from a collection of stand-out tracks; a celebration of the miracle of ordinary life, the infinite variation in each human face, which stirs his soul.

The Laughing Stalk - Woven Hand’s David Eugene Edwards says, 'The myths of our country are in the songs. The untold stories and gaps in history books are in the songs – our recollection is preserved in this music. Those songs as well as the stories that my parents told me, the bible and the books I read, all this is the foundation of my imagination of America.'

The fluid, flowing lines of Aradhna’s Namaste Saté possess the something more that comes from an ability to inhabit and then transcend the spirit of your sources.

Wrecking Ball is a masterful summation of Bruce Springsteen's strengths and an inspirational call to real hope in the face of genuine despair. The album is propelled forward by the anger of its storytelling songs before seguing through 'Wrecking Ball' into songs of hopeful fortitude for which Springsteen appropriates the language of faith and the imagery of the Bible.

Home Again - Michael Kiwanuka, who has been compared to Bill Withers and Al Green, has an "honest, unpretentious and raw style" that "is straight to the matter, unspoilt soul music at it’s best." Alexis Petridis wrote that "Kiwanuka addresses The Lord with such frequency that you picture Him hiding behind the sofa and pretending to be out. At first, it just sounds like a lyrical tic, but by the time you reach I'm Getting Ready – "to believe" – it's pretty clear that it runs substantially deeper than that."

One of the things I love most about the work of Leonard Cohen is his self-deprecating humour. There is real self awareness and humility on Old Ideas combined with the distance and irony of setting many of the lines ostensibly about himself in the third person. Leonard the man speaks to Leonard the persona. All performers seem to need to create a stage persona that is in some way separate from the reality of who the person actually is. On this basis, ‘Going Home’ is to do with the experience of leaving the stage in order to experience reality - "Going home / Behind the curtain / Going home / Without the costume / That I wore."

Gungor’s Ghosts upon the Earth is a set of songs for the jaded in which the phrase "fearfully and wonderfully and beautifully made" sums up much of what is experienced on this album. "All praises to the one who made it all and finds it beautiful". Michael Gungor writes, "As the various vocal parts circle the listener’s head when the band’s last chord fades out, one can imagine hearing the voices of all of these elements of creation (moon, sun, earth, wind, etc.) singing the praises of their creator."

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Woven Hand - As Wool.

My Greenbelt 2012 journal (4)

Monday 27^th August

 

The sense of peace from last night holds for me and my final day is less working issues through and more simply enjoyable, particularly as I catch up with friends from church.

John Schad gave a reading from his novel ‘The Late Walter Benjamin’ that being well dramatised heightened his wonderfully interesting and creative take on Benjamin’s life and writings. ‘We penetrate mystery,’ Benjamin said, ‘only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world.’ ‘Every second was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter’

This was followed Deborah Fielding on reading and writing short stories. Fielding gave us a personal and eclectic presentation with readings of, quotes about, and hints and tips on the writing of short stories. Read other writer’s short stories then just do it were the main messages that emerged. Her chapbooks combine art, design and narrative in one compendium, always a fascinating combination.

Sessions from Anthony Green and Simone Lia enabled me to finally get the exhibition in the Gallery. The initially unrecognised issue for me with this exhibition has been that the organisers have chosen to show work which break two standard lines in regard to contemporary art. The first is that narrative art is merely illustrative and, therefore, second rate. The second is that it is professional suicide for visual art to be explicit about Christian faith. Each of the artists included here, in different ways, are explicitly narrative (often confessional) Christian artists and within the mainstream art world. This is something to be celebrated but shouldn’t solely apply to those who can make it work in the mainstream art world. Instead, artists such as these should be inspiration for others who also aim to be explicitly confessional or narrative Christian artists but do not have similar standing within the mainstream art world. This exhibition may be a helpful development in affording equal understanding and support to these artists as for those whose vision is to address issues of faith through allusion and elusively.

Having recognised this doesn’t ultimately change my reaction to the work itself. Green, as he eloquently explained in his presentation, paints his life as a petit histoire recognising that to do so sanctifies ordinary life. In doing so, as an ex-Slade student, he would seem to be following in the footsteps of Stanley Spencer. It seems to me that Green’s work, wonderful as it undoubtedly is, has similar weaknesses to that of Spencer when the ordinary aspects of life being celebrated are so personal that a family history is required in order to fully appreciate or understand the imagery. Which brings us back to the standard critique of narrative art – which I think can be applied to Green’s Resurrection – that the work does not stand alone but needs literary explanation. Lia’s worm paintings don’t have this problem but, unlike her graphic novels, seem slight and ephemeral as images. Leunig, by contrast, provides a masterclass in single images which are both simply designed and drawn yet possess real pathos and depth.

Green did, in his talk, eloquently and forcefully emphasise the sanctify of ordinary life and each of us as ordinary people. My resolution of my own issues over this weekend has partly been though accepting the value of ordinary ministry and also the tensions and stretch that come from straddling several different areas of ministry with the risk that none are done as well as they might but also with the potentiality for creativity which comes from the attempt. 

Bellowhead, in their headlining set, played with a spirit of wild abandon that was based on disciplined familiarity with each other and their sources and which therefore provided something more than the acts who preceded them could deliver. Aradhna, who I heard again earlier in the day, also, it seems to me, possess this something more that comes from an ability to inhabit and then transcend the spirit of your sources.

In the tension of the now and not yet,

between order and disintegration,

between anarchy and regimentation,

in between, the broken middle,

the crack where the light gets in,

is the edge of chaos where life evolves,

where change occurs not free of cost –

ragged edges, blind alleys, the snake in Eden –

evolution into consciousness, falling up.

The edge of chaos

is order and disorder,

movement and stasis,

unity and fragmentation,

paradox and mystery

bringing change, development,

creativity, growth and mutation.

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Aradhna - Namaste Saté.

My Greenbelt 2012 journal (3)

Sunday 26^th August

Instead of the Greenbelt communion I go to St Bartholomew Nympsfield for their Patronal Festival where the 60 strong congregation is made up of locals and retreatants from Erdington at the Marist Retreat Centre in the village. Diana Crook preaches an impactful sermon equating the training and dedication of the Paralympians with that of the disciples, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, St Bartholomew, and ourselves. Jesus’ question to us – ‘Do you want to go?’ is a liberating one. We follow because we choose to and want to. This is a message which I need to hear.

Lila Dance are perplexing – something vigorous and fascinating is happening but, like Mister Jones, I have to confess I don’t know what it is. Peterson Toscana, in line with Jesus’ parables, is deliberately raising more questions than answers. He mixes his own story told as a sequence of prayers with the retelling of several Bible stories. These, while amusing and different, are not as funny or radical as I’d expected from the advance notices and I’m left rather underwhelmed. The session is titled 'Jesus had two daddies' though and that got me thinking about the phrase 'The unorthodox Jesus'. So much of the debate on controversial issues in the Church seems to revolve around different understandings of orthodoxy but Jesus was unorthodox - right from the start, as Toscana noted, growing up in a family set-up that was very far from being a nuclear family. 

I revisit the Gallery and appreciate a little more fully the comic book/strip focus of this show. Leunig is whimsical and wise while Smith is clear and challenging. Green remains opaquely personal while Lia has innocent humour.

Things pick up at mainstage with a great set of sensitive folk songs from Roddy Woomble and a barnstorming set from the Proclaimers. Roddy Woomble’s ‘Work Like You Can’ strikes me as a celebration of ordinary existence, something I need affirmed currently, while the Proclaimers sang:

“Thought that God had failed me
Thought my prayers were useless
Thought that he would never give the chance for me to praise him

Thought the book was written
Thought the game had ended
Thought the song was sung and I could never sing another

Thought my faith was misplaced
Thought my back was broken
Broken by a weight that I was never fit to carry

Thought I knew this city
Thought I knew all about it
And then one night I went to Morningside and you were waiting

I met you.”

Following that inspiration, I experience a measure of peace via the Taize Service and Aradhna in Eden and write the following:

Absence is not void.

Absence fills vacuum with live memory;

a present aching.

Silence is not still.

Silence simply tunes our hearing to other sounds;

noise abounds.

Peace is not passive.

Peace requires active relations,

if hands are to be shaken.

Do not a-void absence.

Hear the sounds of silence.

Actively create peace.

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Roddy Woomble - Work Like You Can.

My Greenbelt 2012 journal (1)

Friday 24^th August

I arrive at Greenbelt this year feeling frustrated due to the relentless nature of ministry combined with a sense that my ministry was not delivering all that it could – perhaps wanting more than I or the situations can deliver, perhaps that I am operating across too many fronts. I had left home later than anticipated, as usual trying to cover all bases at the last minute and then feeling frustrated that I’m behind schedule. On the way I toy with the phrase, ‘When will the culmination come?’, as I’m driving and begin to express some of what I’m feeling in some initial unsatisfactory lines of poetry:

There is no end, no culmination, no completion - like an ever

flowing stream or a cat which never tires of stroking, your people

age and fail and demand unless I cry, ‘No more, no more,’ and die.

When will the culmination come? When needs are met?

When work ceases? When demands are done? There is always more

therefore no respite, rest or resolution. Where is joy - where am I –

in sacrifice and self-giving?

I arrive and the fluid, flowing lines of Aradhna’s Soul Space worship wash over me while trying to absorb the complexities of the programme. Beyond hearing Bruce Cockburn tonight, there are few must attends for me this year. I decide to wander and experience the site initially but can’t settle to absorb and take anything in. Even viewing the Gallery – Michael Leunig, Simone Lia, Si Smith and Anthony Green – I can’t initially connect despite the obvious accessibility and humour of much of the work. Instead I go to see friends in G-Source and the Marketplace where I receive encouraging news on Near Neighbours, info about a South London exhibition, news of a friend’s family and changes to 12Baskets’ operation (the publisher of my 'Mark of the Cross' meditations).

Then comes an awesome gig from Bruce Cockburn who makes his solo acoustic chime and ring with rhythm and lead. There is no sense here that a solo artist cannot command and fill the main stage. He plays a good selection of early to mid career openers before moving on to a selection from Small Source of Comfort. The crowd call for early ‘Christian’ songs but Cockburn can pull great material from the hat of any period. He talks about no pictures of God being possible before singing ‘Boundless’. ‘You can call me Rose’ is both a highlight and, he says, a gift. The standout line for me and, perhaps, one with personal spiritual significance is, ‘If I loose my grip, will I take flight?’

My poem is perhaps beginning to clarify and now looks like this:

There is no culmination, no end

to need or greed, no resolution.

The need for someone to dim the lights

never ceases. Human selfishness

calls out for love without limits;

love as an ever flowing stream,

the tap turned full on.

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Bruce Cockburn - Strange Waters.