Cue drum-roll as I announce the final entry in the Distinctly Welcoming iPod list of songs to reflect on our multifaith society. This has been a tricky one. I've wanted to say something about being motivated by love not fear so toyed with sharing John Martyn's "Don't wannna know about evil (only wanna know about love)". It has the remarkably prescient lines, "waiting for the planes to tumble, waiting for the towns to fall" (written back in the early '70's) but returns to a determination to avoid hate and live in love. The trouble is, I'm coupling my Christmas preparation with Maggi Dawn's Advent readings and Sufjan Stevens' incredible box-set of Christmas songs: witty, ironic, beautiful and touched with transcendence. So, I'm going with Sufjan Stevens' title track to his album Seven Swans, which has all of those.
Stevens seems to be an incredibly eccentric peddler of Americana, utterly wired into the pysche of God-fearing suburbia. In his pared down, master-story-teller mode, we're given the merest brush-strokes of a garden bonfire that suddenly changes as the family's mood, unaccountably, is jolted by fear. Sufjan looks up in the sky and sees Seven Swans and from an intimation of mortality, he sees a sign from God: "I hear a voice in my mind, "I will try, I will try"". The voice speaks again, just saying, "I am Lord, I am Lord".
As the song reaches a climax, Sufjan gives himself up to a God "who will take you, If you run, he will chase you, cause He is the Lord". It's a psalm for a suburbia paralysed by fear. There's plenty of fear around these days, much of it unwarranted, much that ought to be put into the perspective of a world where a majority of our children go to bed hungry. But let's look for signs of God at work; signs in the ordinary and in the everyday, signs in the stranger, signs in the pain. Rev Dr David Marshall has posed a wonderful question to the church in his Grove booklet on Islam and Christianity: "what might the church become through its encounter with Islam?"....what might the church become, as it endeavours to stay faithful in a society of other faiths, secularists, agnostics, spiritual searchers? Who can I become as I engage in love with my neighbour, "the other"?
...."Seven swans, seven swans, seven swans". Read the signs, banish fear, embrace love.
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