Distinctly Welcoming

Distinctly Welcoming iPod - No.1 "Seven Swans"

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.

Distinctly Welcoming iPod No. 3 - "Step Right Up" and "Chocolate Jesus", Tom Waits

Another excursion into popular culture for lessons in engaging with our multicultural society, this time from that balladeer of the low life, the romantic of the all-night bar whose crackling voice is as diamond-edged as his lyrics are cutting, witty and wise. Tom Waits has written two songs that, for me, provide a neat challenge to the pervading god of consumerism: "Step Right Up" and "Chocolate Jesus". In our fear and bewilderment at the pushing of the Christian faith to the fringes of the West and the rise in other religions, it is easy to forget the single most powerful force around and its corrosive effect on all of us, and especially our youth: materialism.

"Step Right Up" is a hilarious and relentless litany of selling slogans, "That's right it fillets, it chops, it dices, it slices, Never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn....You can live in it, live in it, laugh in it, love in it, Swim in it, sleep in it....It's a friend, it's a companion, It's the only product you'll ever need". Check it out, smile, wince and be that more cynical about the lies we take on board every day, without realising that "The large print giveth, And the small print taketh away". This seeps into the very fabric of our church culture and that's where "Chocolate Jesus" comes in.

Tom Waits' "church" is his local candy store where they sell a chocolate Jesus, "the only thing that can pick me up": "It's best to wrap your saviour up in cellophane He flows like the big muddy river But that's ok Pour him over ice cream for a nice parfait". It's cynical, it's barbed and it ought to challenge the church in an age when we so often domesticate Jesus so that "He's good enough for me, Make me feel good inside". In a consumerist age, is the Christian faith just one of a number of options out there to keep us comfortable, prop us up, provide our therapeutic kick away from the pain of life? Or is Jesus our radical Lord, challenging all other deities, brands and allegiances? Sing on Tom Waits, prophet of the twilight zone. If we are to seriously engage as a church with our multifaith context, we need to name some of the idols first: "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away".

Distinctly Welcoming iPod - No. 4 "Go to Sleep"

In teaching on a Christian engagement in our multifaith world, I love to point to that old curmudgeon Jeremiah. Somehow, this prophet, who is perhaps the great archetype of Christ in his suffering on behalf of the city, holds together an uncompromising sense of what it means to be a follower of God (wholehearted worship evidenced in acts of justice and mercy) with a vocation to the people to be a blessing to all. So, in Jeremiah 29, when the fate that he has prophesied to his cost is sealed and the Babylonians have finally taken over the holy city of Jerusalem, he writes to the Israelites that have been carried into exile in Babylon. The essence of the prophecy is that they are to be a blessing to the people of that city and that their own future is dependent on the way that they bless those that worship other gods in this strange city. It's a message for our time. In Radiohead's blistering "Go to Sleep" you get the usual opaque lyrics but I see this song as being the culmination of the album: a satire of those that would carry on regardless, as if nothing need change. In Radiohead's vision, rampant globalisation and ecological meltdown are continuing apace but the powers that be would prefer that "We don't really want a monster taking over", "We don't want the loonies takin' over". What are the monsters? For some, its Islam, for others its secular humanism. Maybe we should just recognise that we're now strangers in an alien land and take our worship more seriously and recognise our vocation to bless all peoples. If you don't know the song, see the video here on Youtube, and you get the additional Jeremiah style image of that prophet's own vocation to tear down and destroy, to plant and to build. What may need tearing down are so many of the church's cherished pretensions to hold the ring of privilege. And if the video doesn't grab you, just enjoy the freewheeling guitar solo at the end: lament and protest for the 21st Century.

Distinctly Welcoming iPod - No. 5 "Rock El Casbah"

I've planned to bring a lighter touch in this blog to Christian reflections on our multifaith world so as part of that, I'm going to present the "Top 5 songs on the Distinctly Welcoming iPod". These will be songs that give us some insights into the religious diversity we find ourselves in. First up is Rachid Taha's incredible reworking of The Clash's "Rock the Casbah". The original punk classic was written in response to the banning of punk records in Saudi Arabia: "Now the king told the boogie men you have to let that raga drop". The chorus hits and the music still holds sway even though "Sharif don't like it". So the jet pilots are sent in on the minarets: "He thinks its not kosher Fundamentally he can't take it You know he really hates it." Hearing these words spoken in Arabic by an Algerian who has spoken out against the marginalisation of North African communities by the secularist French state is startling. Rachid Taha is somehow subverting a diatribe against religious fundamentalism to make a more nuanced statement about the imperialistic West, whose jet planes now circle the minarets of the Middle East. At the same time, he is celebrating the music and culture of the West and advocating an artistic freedom that would be unimaginable in Saudi Arabia. And then you remember Algeria, where free democratic elections were annulled because the "wrong party" won (the Islamists) and wonder whether Taha is also wanting to say something about privileged elites crushing the voices of those in the casbahs of Algiers.

Confused? You should be. This song exemplifies something of the religious, political and cultural borrowing that makes conversation about faith so problematic. Simplistic polarities that seek to divide the world into monolithic compartments no longer work. What is the reality on the ground? Where are the people in all our generalisations?  Listen to the thrilling voice of Rachid Taha, hear his passion and  you might make a start  here.