Brexit, Xenophobia and Blind Willie Johnson

“Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right“

Brexit. The UK referendum on its membership of the European Union has caused a huge amount of division and ill feeling, and we are in the middle of the fall out – the pound is tumbling, markets are reacting badly to the uncertain about what will happen and political parties are tearing themselves apart.

A small majority of people in the UK – and these, for the most part in England, rather than Scotland and Northern Ireland – voted for the change, and one of the issues that many people felt very exercised about was that of immigration. The EU allows for free passage of people between all the member states. “Britain is in the grip of an immigration crisis,” said Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the “Leave” campaign. The UK is at “breaking point,” he claimed, all the fault of the EU. Great Britain, he says, has “frankly become unrecognizable” and looks “like a foreign land.”

Although this xenophobia clearly played on the minds of voters in what are clearly anxious times, Farage’s immigrant fear-mongering is badly flawed. First, it is quite clear, and now admitted after the vote by the Leave Campaign itself, that withdrawing from the EU is unlikely to reduce immigrant numbers in the UK.

Secondly, the evidence shows the benefits of immigration to the UK economy:

• According to research by University College London, European immigrants who arrived in the UK since 2000 contributed around £205bn to the economy between 2001 and 2011.
• Not only that, they also rewarded the country with valuable human capital and vital skills that would have cost the UK £6.8bn in education.
• Earlier this year, nursing leaders warned the government that if lower-earning non-EU workers were to be deported, the shortage of nurses in the UK could worsen and the NHS would have to spend millions on recruitment.
• In terms of the UK’s benefits system, immigrants arriving in the UK after 2000 were43% less likely than UK-born workers to receive state benefits and were 7% less likely to live in social housing.
• Immigrants from the European Economic Area paid 34% more in tax than they took out.

And yet Farage and the other leaders of the Leave campaign were able to play on the latent xenophobia which exists in the UK, as it does in virtually every other country in the world. And it’s interesting – and extremely disturbing – that since the vote to leave the EU, we have seen instance after instance of ugly racist abuse around England both in terms of graffiti on buildings and personal abuse.

Sadly there is the same race-baiting rhetoric coming from would-be presidential candidate, Donald Trump. “People are pouring across our borders unabated,” he says. He’s on record saying that the Mexicans that are coming into the US are killers, criminals and rapists, and that he wants to ban all Muslims from the US. Similar rhetoric, similar xenophobia.

Whole every country wants to have a proper immigration policy, and the world refugee crisis, caused largely by war, is not an easy problem to solve, but we seem to be sliding away from the values of neighbourliness, civility and openness that have often been part of life in the US and the UK. I’ve found it interesting, as I’ve travelled around the world and met people in desperate poverty – that it’s these very same people who have so very little, that are the most generous. They’ll share what very little food they have with you. They’ll welcome you into their tiny homes.

Maybe that’s why we get this theme appearing in the blues – amongst blues singers and communities who had very little, and yet were prepared to share what they had with others. Take Blind Willie Johnson, who lived a life of extreme hardship and penury – he might have expected nothing less as a black blind man in the early decades of the 20^th century. But check out his Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right, recorded in 1930 with backing vocals by Willie B. Harris on Columbia.

“Careful of how you treat a stranger, Careful of how you turn him away.”

At the end of the day, Willie Johnson says, “All of us here are strangers, None of us have no home.” There but for the grace of God…

And then there’s the classic Careless Love, recorded by a host of singers. “Don’t you never, drive a stranger from your door…it might be your brother or your sister, you’ll never know.”

There’s the nub of it right there – we’re all brothers and sisters. Our common humanity demands we take care of each other, demands compassion – never mind the fact that the immigrant might actually be bringing our society something beneficial.

But Willie Johnson goes further, particularly speaking to those of us who are Jesus followers. “Well Christ came down as stranger, He didn’t have no home.” Jesus became a refugee – exiled to Egypt as a child – and was at times all but homeless – “foxes have holes, the birds of the air nests, but the Son of Man nowhere to lay his head.” Is it possible to be a follower of this Christ and not reach out in compassion to the immigrant, especially if he or she has been dispossessed, made a refugee by war or danger?

The words of an early disciple come to mind: But if a person has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need and that person doesn’t care – how can the love of God remain in him? (1 John 3:17)

 

 

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Mavis Staples – inspiring, uplifting, joyous.

Mavis Staples is a youthful 76. She says, “It puts a wonder on your mind. I’m losing all of my friends, and you really wonder how much longer you have, and how it will be when you leave. But whenever I have to go, I feel like I’m ready. I feel like I have lived a wonderful life.”

This joie de vivre comes through in spades in the new documentary about her life, Mavis!, which if you’re not lucky enough to see in a movie theatre, you can download from itunes. Mavis! is an hour and a half of sheer joy, taking you through Mavis Staples’ career from the 1950s until now. And what a career, from singing gospel in her family’s band to their becoming civil rights icons with the freedom songs of the 60s, to funky soul in the 70s, to two albums with Prince in the 80s, and of late 3 excellent rootsy, bluesy, stripped back albums produced lovingly by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedie.

The Staples Singers led by the indomitable Pops Staples and featuring Mavis’s charisma and amazing voice moved against the tide of gospel singing in the 60s under the influence of Martin Luther King Jr. whom Pops admired greatly. They began to sing protest and freedom songs, like Why (Am I Treated So Bad), where other gospel groups wanted to stick with the more spiritual stuff. The truth is, of course, that the freedom material is every bit as spiritual as the “spiritual.” Faith without works is dead, as someone put it a long time ago.

Staples still sings these political songs.  “They’re still relevant. You know, sometimes I can watch the news on the television and I feel like I’m back in the 60s,” she says. MLK Song on her new album, Livin’ On  A High Note is based on a Martin Luther King speech she remembers hearing: “In the march for peace / Tell them I played the drum / When I have to meet my day.”

Livin’ On A High Note, her 13^th solo album, is terrific, typically Mavis and, like the film, joyous. She told her songwriters, “I want something joyful. I want to stop making people cry. I’ve been making people cry all my life. The songs I sing, the freedom songs and my gospel songs — I know I’ve been inspiring and uplifting people. But now I want to reach them in a joyful way.”

And what a great panel of songwriters she has – a testimony to the respect in which Mavis Staples is held. They include Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Merrill Garbus (Tune-Yards), Nick Cave, Neko Case, Ben Harper and M. Ward.

One song I find very intriguing is Nick Cave’s contribution, Jesus, Lay Down Beside Down Me. The song is interesting from a theological point of view. We tend to think of God – rightly – as the one who looks after us, cares for us, loves us. This song inverts things and invites us to think about us caring for God, for Jesus. “Jesus, lay down beside me, lay down and rest your troubled mind…lay down your worries,” it says, trying to get us to a perspective other than our own. What is the world like from the perspective of the divine? “The truth has fallen on deaf ears, Lord…And the flowers of your love, Lord, refuse to seed, In a world full of greed.”

It reminds us a bit of those doleful verses in John’s gospel, chapter 1, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.” In a world where everyone is more concerned about getting more than their fair share, and truth is whatever you want it to be, and Jesus is irrelevant, can we imagine a God’s eye view of things?

“Are you in need?” sings Mavis to the Lord. It reminds me a little of the old John Wesley hymn, O God of Good The Unfathomed Sea, where Wesley says, “yet self sufficient as Thou art, thou dost desire my worthless heart.” Somehow, incredible though it may seem, God – self-sufficient, eternal, omnipotent – desires human love in return for his love. And Nick Cave’s song somehow seems to me to capture this. Love is never a one-way street where one party does all the giving and one all the taking. So perhaps Cave is onto something here, making us think about our part in a relationship with God – real love given, with a care and concern for the other. It starts to take the divine-human relationship away from a sterile belief system into the realm of something real, tangible, alive.

The relationship, given the nature of God, can never be equal. The dependence ultimately will be us upon God. And yet God’s love calls for love in return and love can never be simple dependence; it must be active if it is to mean anything. As St. Augustine once said, ‘To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.”

When Mavis Staples first heard the words of Cave’s song, she said “Woah. I’m going to comfort Jesus instead of him comforting me.” Perhaps they’re both on to something.

 

Lucinda Williams – Just a little more faith & grace

Lucinda Williams has been in a rich vein of form of late. Each of her last two albums, Blessed and Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone I was convinced was her best work to date. Now we have The Ghosts of Highway 20, which Paste Magazine said, “hits the gut, the soul and the grey matter.”

At 63, her song writing is penetrating, visceral. It acknowledges pain and suffering, love lost, bereavement, hard times and memory stolen, but rails at it and fights and crawls its way through it to a place, not just of survival, but of redemption. As she sings in Place In My Heart,  “I’m pretty strong when I admit it. You might be surprised at what I can manage, so don’t you ever forget.”

In The Ghosts of Highway 20 we have Williams’s second double album in two years, fourteen songs of mature, life-tarnished reflection, delivered flawlessly by her band along with the atmospheric guitar work of Bill Frizell and Val McCallum, and Greg Leisz on pedal steel. And, of course, Williams’ own characteristically world-weary, aching voice, as ever beautifully phrased, raging, urgent or cracking, as the song requires.

The final two songs of the album are Americana hymns, which bring it to an appropriate cathartic close, after the previous searching twelve songs. If There’s A Heaven has strong echoes of Hank Williams and touchingly laments the recent passing of Williams’ father, Miller Williams. Apparently Miller used to talk of the time that he met Hank Williams just before his daughter was born, and then as it happens, Miller died on January 1, the same day of the year as Hank had. So, as Lucinda Williams’ husband Tom Overby said, “it’s very fitting that this song would arrive – as if it was a gift from Hank himself.”

The song is unashamedly about death – something that has become a taboo subject in our culture. “When you’re done, and your run is finally through…when you cross over to the other side…[when] you are cold and cannot stand…when you leave me here to grieve in pain and despair” – are stark lyrics for sure. Anyone of us who has lost people we love know the starkness and the pain of this parting, of being “bereft,” literally deprived of the other person.

“I’ve seen the face of hell,” says Williams, speaking of past heartache and troubles, and wants to know “if there’s a heaven out there.”

The final song of the album, Faith and Grace, brings something of an answer to the question.

“Just a little more faith and grace, To help me run this race, That’s all, that’s all, all I need.”

The song broadens life’s pain beyond bereavement to include burdens that are “hard to bear,” and times when “every door is locked,” and “no one will help me.” How do we cope at such times? How do we bear it? Williams answers, “I know I can make the call, I know God will hear.”

But we can’t see the heaven that’s out there beyond death, we can’t see the other side of our troubles at times, and for sure we can’t see God. That’s why we need “a little more faith and grace,” to find the assurance that “He will always hear you knock,” and to know that “You will always be standing right, When you’re standing on the rock.”

Williams here echoes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. “Ask,” says Jesus, “and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” If we can find the faith to believe that, then we become like the people at the end of the Sermon, of whom Jesus said “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built their house on rock.”

 

But, Williams has it right – when the time of trouble comes, we need a little more faith and grace, so we can stand on a rock, rather than be blown away by it all. And Williams’ final refrain as the song plays out is telling: “Get right with God,” she intones over and over, echoing a song from her album Essence. Right there is the point where faith begins and where we begin to find the grace we need.

Thanksgiving – Whatcha Gonna Do?

I listened last week to a version of a Bob Dylan song recorded recently by Tim Easton and the McCrary Sisters to raise awareness and support for the Nashville Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter and addiction recovery centre. The song is Whatcha Gonna Do and this is a really fine new version.

Being a bit of  Dylan fan, I’d heard the song before (on The Bootleg Series Volume 9: The Witmark Demos), but had rather forgotten it. It’s a version of an old spiritual, which asks the sobering question “Oh my Lord, what shall I do…when death comes a-creeping in the room.” Something I guess most of us would prefer not to think about too closely.

I then stumbled upon an excellent post by Sean Curnyn in The Cinch Review from 2014, who points out that Dylan has recorded several versions of the song. The one covered by Tim Easton was in fact the Witmark Demo version, the latest of three versions. Curnyn goes through the lyrical changes in each Dylan version, and prefers the version where the questions posed by each verse of the song are as follows:

First verse: Tell me what you’re gonna do when death comes creepin’ in your door

Second verse: Tell me what you’re gonna do when the devil calls your cards

Third verse: Tell me what you’re gonna do when the shadow comes into your room

Fourth verse: Tell me what you’re gonna do when your water turns to wine

Previously Dylan had had the 4^th verse question as Tell me what you’re gonna do when death comes knockin’ on your door.

This he finds interesting because there is a deliberate change here from contemplating the disasters of life – death, misfortune and evil, the “shadow.” Whether we like it or not, we all, sooner or later, have to face the shadow, or “the devil” (be it the consequences of our own foolish actions or, ill-treatment by others) and, last of all, death, of those we care about and, inevitably, our own. The ancient wisdom writers of Israel thought carefully about these sort of questions, when they wrote about “walking through the valley of the shadow of death,” and wondered where to go “in the day of trouble.” Their conclusion was that the only safe refuge was in “the Lord.”

Important as these questions are, Dylan takes us a step further when he asks “what you’re gonna do when your water turns to wine?” recalling, probably very deliberately, the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned the water into wine. What happens when something good happens, when something turns out, perhaps surprisingly, to be a blessing, when you encounter a moment of grace, when, perhaps, it seems like a miracle? How do we respond? Do we take it for granted? Do we enjoy the moment and then rush on to whatever’s next? Do we think it’s our right?

Or do we pause and be thankful? Gratitude is a powerful thing. Research shows that choosing to focus on good things makes you feel better than focusing on bad things, and that choosing gratitude can also bring out the best in those around us. It doesn’t just happen, however – we need to cultivate “interior gratitude,” the practice of giving thanks privately, and along with that, “exterior gratitude,” publically expressing our gratitude.  Someone has suggested writing two short emails each morning to friends, family or colleagues, thanking them for what they do – I’m gonna give that one a try.

It’s said that truly happy people find ways to give thanks for the little, insignificant things that happen in life – in this thanksgiving week, Dylan’s question is pertinent: asks “what you’re gonna do when your water turns to wine?”

Whatcha gonna do?

Hard Times Come Again No More

Walter Trout, in his recent hard hitting song Brother’s Keeper, highlights the compassion of Jesus for the poor and downtrodden: “Jesus said to feed the hungry, Jesus said to help the poor.” The problem, says Trout, “Some of those so-called Christians, they don’t believe in that no more.” Fair enough, Walter, we get the point – some sort of heavenly-minded, individualistic, Jesus-makes-me-feel-better sort of faith cuts no ice in today’s world, where the difference between the haves and the have-nots is getting greater all the time.

But, to be fair, there are an awful lot of Christians who are rolling up their sleeves and getting involved with their communities and the wider world – sometime to their great cost.

Take Joan Cheever, for example. Joan is a former legal journalist, an attorney and founder of the Chow Train, a non-profit mobile food service which provides restaurant-quality meals for food insecure and homeless people in San Antonio. Since 2005, Cheever has been serving three-course hot meals for up to 125 needy people in various locations in the city several times a week.

The problem for Joan, however, is that she’s just been cited by San Antonio police officers for feeding the homeless in Maverick Park and faces a potential fine of £2,000. She argues with the officers that she should be allowed to continue sharing her food because it is a valid expression of her faith under the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. One of the police officers replied, “Ma’am, if you want to pray, go to church.”  Joan’s retort was jam-packed with good theology: “This is how I pray,” she said, “when I cook this food and deliver it to the people who are less fortunate.”

As the author of 1 John says, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” Joan Cheever knows the answer to that.

How come the police have suddenly become aggression to Cheever after all these years? It seems this is merely the latest incident in a series of homeless crackdowns by police. It seems the city wants its homeless population out of sight, out of mind, and acts of compassion are being viewed as encouraging the “problem.” The authorities would prefer their Christians to have a quietest faith, which doesn’t interfere with business and politics, which sticks to church buildings and prayer meetings and doesn’t cause any fuss.

The problem is, if Christian faith is domesticated and becomes confined to church buildings and starts to revolve around the faithful themselves, it loses touch with Jesus and the New Testament. Jesus expected his followers to be feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and spending time with the sick, those in prison and poor immigrants (check it out – Matthew 25). Joan Cheever’s got it exactly right – this is the essence of prayer.

Let’s hope common sense and compassion prevail when Joan gets her day in court.

Desolation Blues

James Cone said that “The blues are about black life and the sheer earth and gut capacity to survive in an extreme situation of oppression.” Yes, of course the blues are entertainment, music to dance to and usually, as Son House said, are about what happens between a man and a woman. But we can’t get away from the fact that the blues originated in the context of the suffering and discrimination suffered by black Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century. Blind Willie Johnson, blinded as a child, and who died a pauper in 1945 after living in the ruins of his burnt-down house, expresses a deep-rooted sorrow in “Lord I Just Can’t Keep from Crying”:

When my heart’s full of sorrow and my eyes are filled with tears

Lord, I just can’t keep from crying sometimes.

The blues express the mourning of a people. They are what the Bible call a lament.

This isn’t something you hear about too often in our churches – we prefer happier, more joyful expressions of faith. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s got to be an opportunity to give voice to the sorrow and fear and distress that is part of the experience of life. Those of us who live in North America or Europe have relatively stress-free lives for the most part; the majority of the world, living in poverty, suffering from war, subject to food and health insecurity have much more to be anxious about. But all of us, rich or poor, at some time or another have to go through difficulty – as I’ve been reminded recently by readers of this blog or of my book – ill-health, family problems, job or money worries, sometimes life-threatening, frightening, painful.

Old Testament specialist Water Brueggemann says that “the practice of lament is a sine qua non for believing people who embrace need and vulnerability in the presence of God.” Lament, he says, needs to be “a permanent theological practice.” All of us, at one time or another are feel vulnerable, are in need and, like Willie Johnson, “just can’t keep from crying.” And giving expression to that vulnerability, as Brueggemann reminds us is part of our humanity and part of our relationship with a loving God. It’s OK to cry out in despair and pain. Because, if there’s anything that Good Friday reminds us of, it’s that the very nature of God is expressed in weakness and suffering and pain.

Good Friday is the day when Christians remember the suffering and execution of Jesus the Messiah. The church calendar knows this past week as Holy Week, and sees it as a chance for Jesus followers to reflect on the significance of the last week of Jesus’s life as he goes to Jerusalem, falls foul of his enemies and is then captured, tortured and executed. It’s a grim story, seemingly at odds with the joy and hope that is characteristic of most of the New Testament and which marks a lot of Christian worship.

After the story of the Passover celebration by Jesus and his disciples in Mark 14, the group are said to “sing a hymn,” before headed out to the Mount of Olives and the terrible train of events that was to ensue. I wonder what they sang? Was it a song of triumph and expectation? I suspect it would have been a Psalm, Israel’s hymn book. The Psalms are a great resource in times of trouble, helping to express both the sorrow and fear that we feel, but at the same time a trust in God. As the story moves on, it gets to that point of Jesus’s utter desolation and sense of abandonment, when he cries from the cross, quoting Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

That sense of utter hopelessness gets to the heart of human experience. It reminds me of one of the slave songs remembered from anti-bellum days, which eventually resurfaces in the spirit of the blues:

Oh Lord! Oh My Lord!

Oh My Good Lord! Keep me from sinkin’ down . . .

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen . . .

I’m bowed down with a burden of woe

O who will deliver po’ me?

Good Friday is a dark day, for sure. But it’s one where we get to see the participation of God himself in human pain and despair. It’s where we see God in Jesus sharing our pain, crying our lament, bearing our burden. And that’s something all of us need to know at one time or another.

Of course, as the old preacher said, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s comin’.” Good Friday’s not the end of the story.

It’s 2015 and we are talking about black and white skin. Why?

I went to see the movie Selma recently. It was quite simply outstanding – utterly engrossing, but also inspiring and challenging. The movie works at a number of levels, including giving us a fascinating insight into Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but simply in terms of reminding us of the brutal racism that gave rise to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s in the US, it is a film that everybody should see.

Not least because racism has clearly not gone away, not in the United States and not in Europe. Just this past week, a French man returning home from work was abused by a group of visiting English football fans on the French Metro. He was bundled off the train and assaulted verbally with racist chanting. The incident was caught on a mobile phone video and then widely distributed. The victim, Souleymane, who doesn’t want his surname known, said, “It’s 2015 and we are talking about black and white skin. Why?”

Why indeed. Yet racism continues to dog our societies. In a telling article in the Guardian, Chris Arnade recounts: “A week after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I walked into my old hometown bar in central Florida to hear, “Well if a nigger can be president, then I can have another drink. Give me a whiskey straight up.” Only one day in the town and I thought, “Damn the south.””

Ms Arnade works in Wall Street in New York City, but recognizes that even there, “the poor side of town in New York is still almost entirely dark skinned.” She makes the point that America celebrates the stories of self-made blacks and Hispanics, the ones who make it, to enable people to forget the others who are not able to overcome the long odds and everything stacked against them in neighborhoods racked by poverty, unemployment, crime and drugs.

“Gone,” she says, “is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood. It has been replaced by a subtler version.” But maybe it’s not so subtle – Black Demographics suggests  that over 28% of black families are living in poverty, compared to around 12% percent across all races, that blacks are three times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than whites and they constitute 38% of the prison population whilst only accounting for 13% of the population. And that’s before we start discussing recent events in Ferguson or New York City.

The song that plays out during the credits for Selma is Glory performed by Common and John Legend. It’s spine-tingling, as it looks forward to a day without racism and injustice:

One day, when the glory comes
It will be ours, it will be ours
Oh, one day, when the war is one

Intriguingly its says, “One son died, his spirit is revisitin’ us,” clearly a reference to Martin Luther King and his continuing inspiration in the continuing struggle against racism. It’s equally applicable, though, in this context to Jesus, who said “blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice,” and died at the hands of the oppressive regime of his day, to bring in a new day of peace and justice. His spirit is available to inspire and empower all those who would walk in his way of peace and in the pursuit of justice.

I was greatly taken by the words of Martin Luther King in one of his Selma speeches:

“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for the truth.”

These are, in fact, words inspired by King’s understanding of the Bible, of Jesus. David Oyelowo who plays King so convincingly in the movie says of King, “This was a man driven by his spiritual convictions. Anyone who has seen those speeches can tell there is something flowing through this man other than just intellect. There is a deep spiritual drive within him to see all peoples experience justice…I share his faith, in terms of being a Christian myself, so I know what it is to be taken up by something else other than your own intellectual thoughts.”

King’s words are a challenge to all of us, of faith or no faith – in a world full of injustice, how are you and I going to stand up for justice, for truth, for what is right?