Virtual Methodist

Today’s #LentArt is the piece I also used as the thumbnail for today’s online Circuit Service available on South & Central Belfast Methodist’s YouTube Channel, and I shamelessly am using material from that service as the basis of this slightly longer blog post today. So for those of you who have heard/read this before in different forms forgive me. But first a brief comment regarding the piece of art itself which is "The raising of Lazarus" by John Reilly from the Methodist Church Modern Art Collection. It caught my attention, not only because I am very familiar with the collection itself, but also because it both echoes some ancient renderings of this scene, but is also unashamedly contemporary in focus, and the swirl within which all the action takes place is reminiscent of the global and personal whirlwind that covid-19 has created. For today’s service we shortened the prescribed gospel passage that this illustrates and Barry and Claire Forde delivered it as a dialo...

Here's the second of the monologues I'm using for the Maundy Thursday event at EBM. It's based on the anointing of Jesus at Bethany. Now the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were only two days away, and the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some sly way to arrest Jesus and kill him. "But not during the Feast," they said, "or the people may riot."  While he was in Bethany , reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head. Mark 14:1-3 (ANIV) I had been keeping that perfume for my wedding day… It was the most expensive thing I owned… even the jar itself was worth more than my other possessions… But the perfume sealed inside it had been brought from the far east… the mountains at the edge of the earth… Pure nard… the very best that my brother could buy f...

OK... You've probably worked out by now that I love Karine Polwart's new album "Traces" . I'm with others who believe that she is one of Britain's finest songwriters , and in this album she has produced some of her very best work... It has taken a number of years gestation so I'm glad the wait was worth it. She weaves personal memories with political protest through powerful poetic lyrics delivered in her unashamedly Stirlingshire accent. The album begins with evocations of childhood games on the coastal dunes of Aberdeenshire, in "Cover Your Eyes", a protest against Donald Trump's redevelopment of the Aberdeenshire dunes of the Menie Estate to produce his International Golf Links . This has current local echoes in the controversy around the proposed Runkerry Golf Course on the Causeway coast, as does the poignant last song, "Half a Mile" that I referred to yesterday . It reflects on the abduction and murder in 1982 of Susan Maxwe...