Love is ...

We had our final Advent Night Prayer with a reflection at St Andrew's this evening. 

The reflection was on the theme of love. I started with 1 Corinthians 13, we then listened to 'Love' by Victoria Williams before I read my 'Love is ...' meditation:

Love is …

Love is saying yes to God without knowing what that choice entails.

Love is waiting for your man to realise that what you have said is true and to support you.

Love is enduring the arch looks and snide comments from those who know you are bearing a child conceived out of wedlock.

Love is support from your cousin, your child leaping in your womb, and your magnifying God.

Love is enduring the discomfort of travel to your husband’s hometown when you are close to full-term.

Love is accepting a stable when there is no room at the inn.

Love is laying your new-born child in a manger when there are no extended family around to support you.

Love is being welcoming when shepherds unexpectedly arrive in the night soon after you’ve given birth.

Love is treasuring all their words and pondering them in your heart.

Love is giving your child the name an angel requested.

Love is fleeing to another country knowing that the life of your new-born child is under threat.

Love is making a life to bring up your child separated from friends and family.

Love is saying yes to God without knowing what that choice would entail

and it is that choice which creates a cannonball of love that,

from that first Christmas ever onwards,

explodes love throughout the Universe and in us.


We ended with the following version of 'Love divine, all love's excelling':

Hymnology - Love divine, all love's excelling.

Rediscoveries and new discoveries

In a week of rest I've been taking time to enjoy the following:

Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus say they: 

'have always been concerned with the sacred or — perhaps more accurately — the loss of the sacred. We are searching for its echoes and traces which are scattered and hidden in surprising and forgotten places.

We have spoken in the past about the theology of Icons in the Eastern Church. They are fragments of a restored creation; elements of nature that have been transfigured to create images of heavenly glory. We are not claiming that our music in any way realizes this ideal, but it is an idea that has influenced us almost from the inception of RAIJ. It has been an even more explicit inspiration for this album and its title, Beauty Will Save the World, which is a quote from Dostoevsky, a writer steeped in the Orthodox tradition.

In the Western tradition, art is illustrative and beauty is an aesthetic concept whereas to the Eastern Church art is sacramental and beauty is the pursuit of divine truth, so questions about the sacred and the beautiful necessarily converge.' (NPR)

'Victoria Williams - Happy Come Home' is a film by D A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus of the storytelling, improvising, tree-hugging, spellbinding talent that is Victoria Williams.

Pennebaker explains that: 'David Geffen asked us to make a short video portrait of Victoria Williams, whose first record he was about to release. He wanted radio stations to see what she looked like. So we took her back home to Louisiana and made a half-hour film with her that we loved.'

The remainder of the film can be found here, here and here.

Grant Alden writes in 'No Depression' that: 'Victoria’s records and concerts are like one imagines church should be. They are open and honest and celebratory, full of delight and respect, able to sweep black clouds to the side with a soft breath.' 

Long Hot Summers - The Story Of The Style Council: Documentary about the band that Paul Weller formed after The Jam split up in 1982, with insight from key members, collaborators and fans. 'When Paul Weller announced The Style Council's arrival in March 1983, he'd come a very long way. In fact, at the age of just 24, he was already a musical veteran with six albums and nine Top 10 singles under his belt with The Jam. As their leader he had become a deity-like figure and for his fans, The Jam's split was unimaginable. But creatively restless and of inquisitive mind, Paul jettisoned them at their height to form a collective with an eventual core line-up of Paul with Mick Talbot, Dee C Lee and Steve White. Over four albums and 17 singles, The Style Council made a stand and became the standard bearers of progressive soulful pop and social comment. This is their story.'

Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right - In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today.

In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race. In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading.

Our Lady Peace: When Mark Van Doren, the American poet and teacher, wrote his famous work, "Our Lady Peace" in 1943, he couldn't have imagined the concept of rock'n'roll, let alone that a Canadian rock group would adopt his title for their name. 'Our Lady Peace were one of the quintessential bands of the 1990s alternative boom. The group shared qualities with many of its guitar-driven contemporaries, such as angsty power chords and propulsive beats. But front person Raine Maida's iconic jolts from chest voice to falsetto singing and enigmatic, labyrinthine lyrics helped set the group apart from the pack.'

Some of the above are rediscoveries and others new discoveries.

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The Revolutionary Army of The Infant Jesus - Bright Field.

Music from a tumultuous year

Music from a tumultuous year - some sourced from 'Best music of the worst year':

Mavis Staples shared a new collaboration with Jeff Tweedy, “All in It Together,” with all proceeds from the track going to charity. “The song speaks to what we’re going through now — everyone is in this together, whether you like it or not,” Staples said in a statement. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have, what race or sex you are, where you live…it can still touch you. It’s hit so many people in our country and around the world in such a horrible way and I just hope this song can bring a little light to the darkness. We will get through this but, we’re going to have to do it together. If this song is able to bring any happiness or relief to anyone out there in even the smallest way, I wanted to make sure that I helped to do that.”

On Lockdown Songs Nashville heroes Buddy and Julie Miller collected nine topical songs, beginning with Public Service Song #1: Stay Home, that they wrote and recorded during the tumultuous year that has consumed all our lives. This collection includes the beautiful The Last Bridge You Will Cross (For John Lewis).

Michael McDermott's What In The World delivers a propulsive punch that reflects anger and passion hurtles out of the starting gate as Subterranean Homesick Blues meets We Didn’t Start The Fire. He rattles off lyrics about a new world order with “walls along the border/Kids in cages/Executive orders/Welfare for billionaires/People hungry everywhere”, dropping in references to James Joyce, Paul Revere, the President and Iron Eyes Cody, as he presciently declares “Dark days coming for the U.S.A.”.

H.E.R., "I Can't Breathe." Backed by a spare beat and atmospheric choir, the 23-year-old R&B star sings with a soulfully aching, yearning voice and adds potent spoken-word passages about generations of pain, fear and anxiety.

Sounds of Blackness, "Sick and Tired." After five decades of preaching positivity, the Twin Cities ensemble got fired up post-George Floyd, adapting civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer's classic 1964 refrain into the fiercest, most powerful song in their repertoire. This horn-blasted, gospel-infused call to action is the perfect sound coming from Minneapolis in 2020.

Mickey Guyton, "Black Like Me." Sonically, this piano ballad could fit seamlessly on contemporary country radio. Her heartbreak is about being different in a small town and in Nashville. "If you think we live in the land of the free," the Black country vocalist croons with pain in her voice, "you should try to be Black like me."

Rosanne Cash, "Crawl Into the Promised Land." The oft-outspoken singer-songwriter serves up a haunting, hopeful, swampy acoustic blues anthem. "Deliver me from tweets and lies/ and purify me in the sun," she sings.

Lucinda Williams, "Man Without a Soul." With its warbly, slashing guitar, this slow-burn blues tears into a certain president without mentioning his name. The song has more dignity and soul than its target.

Jim White made a video for The Divided States of America, the final song from his new album, Misfit's Jubilee: "I'm typically not the political type but these times we're riding out here, they're anything but typical. At this moment in our collective history it makes sense that voices normally content to remain silent should be lifted in outrage, howling, exhorting our minds and hearts to focus on a singular goal---higher ground for all, not just the rich folks."

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Jim White - The Divided States Of America.. 

ArtWay Meditation: Deborah Thompsett

My latest visual meditation for ArtWay has just been published. This meditation is on Deborah Tompsett's A Thousand Bottles of Tears. I conclude the meditation by saying:

'Deborah began by seeking a vessel to hold our tears of sorrow and joy, our shouts of pain and grief, our questions and thanksgivings. As Williams and Etzioni state, now that our loved one is gone, we can't cry hard enough for that person to hear us now. Nevertheless our tears, as Washington Irving remarked, are not a mark of weakness, but of power: ‘They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.’ That is why there is ‘a sacredness in tears’, a sacredness that is captured and held in this installation. ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee.’

A Thousand Bottles of Tears won the The Chaiya Art Awards 2018. The Awards proved hugely popular, with over 450 entries and more than 2,700 exhibition visitors. Awards founder Katrina Moss says, in an interview with me, also published by ArtWay, ‘I set up the project to uncover and promote gifted artists looking to explore spirituality, faith and social change through their creativity. It was a delight to see that fulfilled in the artwork we received in 2018.’

The Chaiya Art Awards is open to any artist and covers all mediums including painting, drawing sculpture, ceramics, glass, textiles, mixed media, photography and video. Entrants are invited to be authentic and daring as they respond to the theme ‘God is …’. There are other cash prizes as well as the main £10,000 award, including £1,000 for the Public’s Choice from the gallery exhibition. A new category for Community Groups, who can submit a collaborative piece, has also been introduced.

The culmination will be an exhibition over Easter 2020 at London’s prestigious gallery@oxo. Consisting of all shortlisted entrants it will run from 10 to 19 April 2020.

My other ArtWay meditations include work by María Inés Aguirre, Giampaolo Babetto, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Alexander de Cadenet, Christopher Clack, Marlene Dumas, Terry Ffyffe, Antoni Gaudi, Nicola Green, Maciej Hoffman, Giacomo Manzù, Michael Pendry, Maurice Novarina, Regan O'Callaghan, Ana Maria Pacheco, John Piper, Albert Servaes, Henry Shelton and Anna Sikorska.

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The Williams Brothers - Can't Cry Hard Enough.