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Perhaps we don’t know what the beloved kingdom looks like until we’re thrown into it. So it was, walking down the iced streets of Richmond, Virginia, after the blizzards of late January. Sirens cut through the night: it was for the monks. A group of twenty-four Theravada Buddhists, along with their dog, Aloka, were walking 2,300 miles from Fort Worth to Washington DC to awaken the seeds of peace.
Bolton Friends run a regular ‘Talks and Thoughts’ Zoom programme every week. Participation is open to anyone. In January, I was invited to present a session on Lent.
Let me start with an introduction to the blues. Founded in a deep art, born and abused in the weight of the slave trade’s oppression, the blues is a profoundly ‘hard’ music, despite its form and structure being formally simple. ‘Hard’ as in ‘hardship’, its searing sorrow-songs, spirituals and field hollers are the soundtrack of a terrible elegy. And ‘hard’ as in ‘hard to play with any kind of authenticity’. On paper the score reads in a plain twelve-bar format – the irony being, if a musician only ‘plays the structure’ they completely fail to play the blues. One way or another, the blues and its people have suffered grave inadequacies, both in capture and release. Singing the blues without a fever is like meditating on beauty without acknowledging the ugliness of suffering. The blues is not about keys and notes, it’s nearer to pain and hunger.
This was our second Meeting in the month (see 6 March), but was the first attempt at a blended Meeting.
Concealed in your sleeve,
not ‘Pater noster qui es in caelis…’ but
‘Our Father who art in heaven’,
and, for those English words,
they chained you to a post,
kindled a fire and people
crowded round to watch
and hear and smell
you and your heresy
reduced to ash.
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