Virtual Methodist

Monday night of this year’s 4 Corners Festival took us to a favourite haunt, the Duncairn Arts Centre on the Antrim Road, where a packed house gathered for "Naming Belfast", to hear Father Martin Magill and Dr Paul Tempan take us around the 4 corners of Belfast and down through the years to explore our city by way of the sometimes surprising stories behind its street names. The origin of this event is that because Martin, one of the 4 Corners Festival founders, doesn't own a TV, he needs to find other ways of switching off, and his latest “hobby” has been researching the street names that he has come across when criss-crossing this the city. This has resulted in the development of a Belfast Street names website belfaststreetnames.com that was launched at last years Imagine! Festival in the Linenhall Library. For the 4 Corners event he and his collaborator Dr. Tempan, were ably assisted by Linda Ervine who delved into the too frequently forgotten Gaelic history of some o...

When we booked Dr. Lorna Gold as our opening keynote speaker for this year's festival, with its theme of "Home?", it was because 2025 marks the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si', the challenging encyclical by Pope Francis, where he invites us all to take better care of our shared home, the earth...  Given that Lorna writes extensively on global economic, social and environmental issues just , has been involved with the global "Laudato Si'" Movement from its inception and is an inspiring speaker, we were delighted when she agreed, especially when she agreed to both speak in depth at our evening event at Jennymount Methodist and to be our speaker earlier that day in our live Radio Ulster Morning Service from John the Evangelist Parish Church. Our delight was doubled when two days before she spoke it was announced that she had actually been appointed as the new Executive Director of the worldwide Laudato Si' Movement in a special private audience with Pop...

Three weeks ago, Knockbreda Community Garden, an initiative of Cornerstone Methodist Church on Rosetta Road in south east Belfast, hosted two groups of visitors as part of this year’s 4 Corners Festival. The previous morning, as part of the Radio Ulster Service from St. John’s Parish in west Belfast, I interviewed Jillyna Hines, a leader in the project: DAVID: Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about the project and the event tomorrow… JILLAYNA:   Hello David, my name is Jillayna Hines and I work for the Methodist church alongside my husband David, looking at ways to invest and support the community around where we call home. A few years back, a small team of us from the local area started to dream about a community garden and now, nearly 5 years later, we are delighted to host an event in the festival, taking a tour of interested folk around our raised beds, our wildlife pond and into the orchard – there will be storytelling, poetry, songs and maybe a few worms to ...

On Wednesday evening at Fitzroy Presbyterian we had a small celebration to say thank you to the small team of fabulous volunteers who make the 4 Corners Festival possible. To deliver a festival like 4 Corners (and the common consensus is that this year’s festival was a possibly the best in its 13 year history), teamwork and collaboration is essential. Not only between the directors, planning committee and volunteers wearing the ubiquitous teal hoodies, who pull everything together, but also the various host organisations, funders, performers, contributors and a few key partner organisations. Members of some of the latter, like YWAM and Focolare, are part of our faithful front of house volunteer team, while others like Peace Players, Play it by Ear and Westcourt Camera Club essentially deliver entire events, and have effectively become firm fixtures in the programme before the first planning meeting of each cycle (which starts again next week). They have each demonstrated t...

In my last post about the 4 Corners Festival I made reference brief reference to Tyree Patton, the UU Masters Journalism student hosting our evening with "Blue Light's" creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson... She did a superb job, despite her nervousness at having a number of seasoned journalists as well as the two on stage with her...  What I should have done, before recommending that you look up her interview on catch up was to issue a HUGE SPOILER ALERT!!! A key plot point was repeatedly referred to in the interview, and the subsequent Q&A, so if you haven't seen the first series yet, do yourself a major favour and go watch Series 1 before both the interview and Series 2 appears within the next month or so, with the BBC releasing photos and cast from it over the past weekend. As Patterson and Lawn say in the interview, there is no shortage of cop shows on TV, and Northern Ireland produces more than its fair share with "The Fall", "Line of Du...

Young people these days... The theme for this year's 4 Corners Festival was "Our Stories: Towards a Culture of Hope." However, if there is to be any hope for this city, province and indeed world of ours the weight of that will fall on the shoulders of the younger generations. And it is a weighty responsibility, because their elders, of which I   am one, have left them a whole range of challenges. Globally we have used and abused the world's resources, messed up the climate and allowed its wealth to be accumulated in the hands of a few mega-rich tycoons, increasing the gap between rich and poor, pump-priming miscellaneous conflicts, fuelling migration, political and religious extremism and the breakdown of trust in democracy. In this part of the world we have allowed the political and social capital generated by the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement to be eroded... Politicians have been more interested in electoral maths than the budgetary kind... Reconciliation has ...

Elma Walsh Photo courtesy of Neil Craigan At the beginning of this year's 4 Corners Festival I sought to process what was happening with daily blog posts/journals. But come Tuesday night/Wednesday morning my good intentions started to unravel... There have been a number of significant challenges behind the scenes to negotiate this year, and given other frustrations with my "day job" on Tuesday, by the time that I got to the evening event my energy levels were beginning to flag a little... But within a short period of time my challenges and grumbles were put into stark perspective by the attitude of and story told by Elma Walsh, mother of the subject of the event "DONAL WALSH: A STORY OF HOPE..." I (like, I suspect, many across Belfast), was not very familiar with the story of Donal, a Kerry teenager who came to prominence through his writings while battling what turned out to be terminal cancer, subsequently appearing on Brendan O’Connor’s ‘The Saturday Night Sh...

  Bishop Alan Abernethy &  Jim Deeds photo courtesy of Neil Craigan Who “discovered” America? Columbus? Amerigo Vespucci? Sir Henry Sinclair of Orkney? Chinese admiral Zheng? Leif Erikson? Brendan the Navigator? (Ask Professor Google that question some time and descend into a deep and distracting rabbit hole...) Or perhaps some unknown hunter gatherer crossing the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska sometime shortly after the last ice age, pursuing their next meal? The thing is, despite the mythology that has grown up around each of the named individuals above, and our espousal of their credentials, often dependent on own ethnicity and background, the landmass that we know as America has been there since before human beings walked this planet or sailed its seas. That is true of “Jesus in the Other.” Christ has never been our exclusive possession, whoever we may be. The missiological myth of “taking Jesus” to others, be they people in the “new” world, ripe for conversion...

Clare Hayns (photo by Neil Craigan) The story behind the beginning of the 4 Corners Festival has been oft told – of Rev Steve Stockman and Father Martin Magill having that unexpected but transformative coffee where both confessed feeling somewhat lost outside their own corner of this small but chronically divided (geographically, politically, theologically) city. What is not often told is the story of how the somewhat shambolic, shoebox under the bed, scrounge for free venues and performers festival of the first few years, became the (still somewhat shambolic), but properly funded and administered festival that is now in its 13th year. This is in many ways down to two women. The first is the irreplaceable Megan Boyd, our festival administrator, who is rarely to be found at the front of an event, but who works quietly, throughout the year to make sure that the laughter-filled planning meetings are translated into an actual, properly funded, promoted and safe (at least in terms of health...

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! Last Thursday I had the honour of being invited to deliver the “Selkirk Grace” at the beginning of the Linen Quarter’s Burns Supper in the salubrious surroundings of the Grand Central Hotel in the heart of Belfast. I did not don a kilt for the occasion. No-one needs to be subjected to the sight of my legs before a meal... Instead I donned a newly purchased tartan bow tie, as my wife, who is from from Burns country, would not let me out of the house without some nod to her homeland... However, it was a “Tyrone” tartan, with a nod to my own family’s origins (who knew that Tyrone had a tartan?) Among the various bits of Burns poetry quoted, in the original or in “English” translation the above quote was sadly not included. It is from the last verse of Burns poem “To a Louse”, where the author sees this “ugly, creepan, blastet wonner” on a fine lady’s bonnet at church, and thinks that if she could see it herself, she might...

Today is an important day... It's my wife Sally's birthday. So that's a given. On her birthday she and (through her influence) I always look out for snowdrops appearing. With warmer winters they have been appearing earlier and earlier over recent years, and so they have been out in our garden, and all over my facebook feed for weeks now. So their appearance on Sally's birthday doesn't really have the same significance any more. They previously were signs of the coming spring - the very embodiment of hope in fragile floral form. Now, because of their appearance coming earlier and earlier, the more pessimistic among us might see them as a sign of the coming climate catastrophe that humanity has brought upon itself. However, this morning I took the attached picture of a small clump of snowdrops that I always look out for under our front hedge, which has an apple tree growing through it, right at the gate, beside the busy main road. I noticed that they were out yesterda...

Some people look to different films, plays or TV programmes for "comfort viewing" or "insights onto the human condition." I, and all right thinking English-speaking people turn to "The West Wing", that peerless political fantasy created by Aaron Sorkin. I've probably watched it 9-10 times, although I haven't gone near it since the end of lockdown. But over the Iwerkend I found myself thinking about a line from the superb "Shutdown" episode, which, appropriately enough given the state of the Northern Ireland Assembly at present, portrays a stand-off between the President and the Speaker of the House that results in a complete government shutdown. In the middle of all this the folksy Vice President Bob Russell says cynically about the President's strategy: "You know what they call a leader with no followers? Just a guy taking a walk." As is often the case with Sorkin's best lines, this dictum had been circulati...

"Where two or three are gathered together there is always one with a broken heart." So said Joseph Parker, a former 19th century minister in London's City Temple. I read that quotation in the little book by one of my late Methodist heroes, Sydney Callaghan "Good Grief." It was first published in 1990 just before I started training for ministry, during which time Sydney was one of my tutors. My own copy of the book, dog-eared though it was, went walkabout when I lent it to someone, and I was delighted when Sydney's widow gave me a copy of the 1999 revised edition by local publisher Colourpoint a few years back. For various reasons I am re-reading it at present, and it is interesting to note some of the changes in social mores and conventions that form the backdrop to any attempt to wrestle with grief, not least that people in Northern Ireland today are a lot more willing to talk about their grief than they were when Sydney was first writing, and e...

The 4 Corners Festival 2023 started in earnest yesterday with its theme of "Dreams: Visions for Belfast" with a nod both to Martin Luther King Jnr's "I have a dream" speech 60 uears ago this year and the hopes and dreams wrapped up on the Good Friday Agreement 25 years ago, as well as the many Biblical dreamers alluded to by Julieann Moran in Skainos last night. But throughout the festival this year we are also staging a photographic exhibition at Artcetera Studios in Rosemary Street, looking at the issue of homelessness. As exhibition coordinator Cormac McArt says "No-one dreams of being homeless" and yet it is a problem that affects people from all backgrounds and all 4 corners of our city and beyond, both in terms of the insidious hidden homelessness that is increasingly affecting families and children, and the more obvious street sleeping, with people literally dying on our streets at a rate akin to those dying due to our "Troubles." Over...

One of the week-long events at this year's 4 Corner's Festival is "Never in my Wildest Dreams", a photo exhibition  at the Artcetera Centre in Rosemary Street. It is an exploration of  homelessness in our city and beyond by  Westcourt Centre's Camera Club. A few weeks ago, someone, who sees 4 Corners as primarily a peace and reconciliation festival, asked, "What has homelessness got to do with reconciliation?"  On one level the answer is that homelessness is something that affects people from all corners, and indeed sectors of our city, and whilst its most obvious form is most evident in the increasing numbers of rough sleepers of the city centre, "hidden homelessness" is a feature across every postcode. But it is more than that. If we are to talk about a city really at peace with itself, then it should be real peace... Biblical shalom, which as Martin Luther King Jnr. repeatedly stated, is not just absence of violence (and those who are homel...