‽istis ponders getting away (weekending November 11th
2023)
This week ‽istis had the very good fortune to get away – for a few
days, for a ‘singing holiday’ in a wonderful country manor house[i].
Familiar and new songs. Working hard to get to grips with
individual lines and then putting them together. The aim – harmonious blending
where the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. Great music,
fine food and very good company and an evening’s ‘concert’ where the ‘turns’ brought
cheers, tears, laughter and applause – for courage, ‘found’ voices, home made
songs, authentic and heartfelt renditions (and the odd ‘spoof’ act!).
One verse, the serious verse from a largely humorous ‘holiday-specific’
song having its first (and, perhaps by public demand, only) performance – went like
this:
‘And
in these desperate, troubling times
Hate and war we hope will cease,
But perhaps we’ve made a brief
sanctuary,
A small haven of joy and peace.’
The
news was both missed and not missed and for two or three days our primary
immediate reality was each other (a disparate group of people with very wide and
diverse experience) and the music, with songs that spoke of:
- ‘We
who believe in freedom cannot rest’[ii]
- ‘Can
you hear the thunder, I wanna look for cover, I wanna find shelter’[iii]
- ‘If I
was a blackbird, could whistle and sing, I’d follow the vessel my true love sails in’[iv]
- ‘All
we who represent the cherubim’[v]
- ‘Grateful,
I’m grateful.’[vi]
- ‘By
night we hasten in darkness, to seek for the living water’[vii]
- ‘In
the first light of the breaking dawn… I will be there. May you be free, free as
the wind.’[viii]
- ‘So
rough we are floundering, so calm we are waving. In a boat we’ve not chosen,
seek a port.’
- ‘…with
stranger and neighbour. Welcome in to this house. The storm it is rising. Come
away in all the exiles dissenting, all you battered and broken, all you
motherless children. We’ll hold back the wind. Come away in.’[ix]
- 'This is my prayer for peace' by Nick Prater (with the word 'peace' sung in Ukrainian, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew)
·
…and
much, much more…
Now back, and the week is ending but the news sounds pretty much as it was at the week’s beginning - as if we had never been away: high winds; reality show comings and goings; Christmas adverts landing or missing the mark; hate matches, peace marches; terrorist atrocities, self-defence exercised; crimes committed, war rules[x] upheld or broken; many, many, many children dead; innocence massacred… Meanwhile, the lifestyle pages for the Saturday and Sunday supplements are no-doubt being prepared - they may or may not include features on homelessness…[xi]
So, ‽istis is grateful for the wonderful break: battery recharged,
soul lifted, spirit raised - yet is left pondering those who could not and cannot
get away:
·
The surrounded and trapped, minoritized, bullied, assaulted,
abused because of identity, race or religion, being considered ‘different’
·
The enslaved, transported, indentured, wage-slaved – then and now
·
The children and adults controlled and abused - coercively, covertly
or overtly, through neglect or deliberate, wilful, malicious abuse
·
The people who may find themselves living on the street – unable to
get away from the impact of trauma and its legacy, from the voices in their
heads, from utterly entrenched and destructive patterns of thought and behaviour,
from all-gripping addiction, from coping mechanisms that have taken over and turned
against them…
·
The soldiers, conscripted, in the trenches, sprawled on the wire, lifeless
in the mud - who faced enemy fire or execution by their peers for desertion
or cowardice on the orders of senior officers…[xii]
·
The civilians including the many, many, many children killed - their innocence massacred - throughout the pitiful,
pathetic, far from heroic story of conflicts, wars and battles (with or without
‘rules’)…
And words from what could be part of a November litany and lament might fill the two-minute silence or mingle with the tears and cries across the world
both through time and right now: lest we forget; remember, remember; never
again…
And yet
again ‽istis wonders whether just perhaps, possibly, maybe we could take two minutes to imagine
that things could be different and then find a way to sing, or better still, act them in to being‽
©‽istis
NB: further reflections and comments linked to this week’s theme
and past blog entries to be found on X/Twitter: replies, retweets (which don’t
necessarily indicate approval, sometimes the very opposite!) and ‘likes’:
@Pistis_wonders. X/Twitter ‘follows’ and respectful comment and dialogue
welcome...
[i] Where
we reckon the cost ended up being about a half ‘per person per night’ of the
cost of a room in a well-known large chain of purply inns…
[ii]
From ‘Ella’s Song’ by Bernice Johnson Reagon of ‘Sweet Honey in the Rocks’
[iii] ‘Thunder’
by Roxanne Smith
[iv] ‘If
I was a Blackbird’, arranged by Paul Sartin
[v] ‘The
Cherubic Hymn’ by P.I.Tchaikovsky
[vi] ‘Grateful’
by John Mark Harrison.
[vii] ‘De
Noche Iremos’, a chant form the Taizé community, by Jacques Berthier
[viii]
‘First Light’ by Jane Harris
[ix]
From ‘Come Away in’ Karine Polwart.
[x] We’ve
devised a set of rules for war!?!?!?!? Or should that be: ‽‽‽‽‽‽ And the case for the value of an ‘interrobang’
may have been made, yet again.
[xi] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/suella-braverman-row-tories-tent-homeless-street-lifestyle-choice-b1118610.html
Suella Braverman, still Home Secretary at time of typing, but the ‘full
confidence’ bell may be tolling…
