21st Century Life

 

Doug writes: I notice that St Andrews, in our Team Ministry, blogged each day last week about John Lennon, remembering what would have been his 80^th birthday. It’s a good idea, and I recommend the newly remixed compilation of Lennon songs entitled “Gimme Some Truth”. The title track is incisive, a classic among Lennon’s most radical songs – not for the faint-hearted, but how relevant to the next few days in the U.S. if he had been able to live peacefully in New York’s Dakota Apartments. It’s not about imagining a better world so much as direct confrontation.

 

As the new millennium dawned I would have rather liked to have played, early on 1 January, a different classic from the same era (for Jo’s sake I didn’t!). The track would have been the King Crimson track “21^st Century Schizoid Man”. It is the lead-in track from their first (best?) album “In the Court of the Crimson King”, just reissued. The album is largely about war, a Crimson King being one stained with blood. The first track begins deceptively quietly, tempting you to turn up the volume, then crashes in with an incredibly heavy riff. The distorted vocals refer to so many of the things which we experience today – medical staff without sufficient supplies, greed, hunger, innocent people bombed. No wonder one can end up feeling like the striking face on the cover.

 

The album proceeds with a quieter track about how we can find our words and feelings ignored, speaking of disillusion with the way things are. It segues into “Epitaph”, which makes a similar point to John Lennon’s observations about peace and politicians – though a couple of years before that. It asserts that ultimately the writer’s epitaph will be “confusion”. I imagine we can all identify with that as we look at the world around us. Maybe it is enough to make us all schizoid.

 

We have just filmed a minimalist Remembrance Day ceremony at the Hertfordshire Regimental memorial in All Saints, with a wreath laying by Keith Cockman. We looked afresh at the vast number of names of those who died in the first World War. It is hard to make sense of such violence wreaked across our globe, and equally hard to understand why we have not learned ways of avoiding such terrible conflicts. Confusion continues.

 

At the memorial we vowed to remember the fallen, and added the Kohima Epitaph: When you go home, Tell them of us and say, “For your tomorrow, We gave our today”. We need to remember the many people who died, and the pain and death that can follow from aggression, confrontation and poor international cooperation. May our own lives reflect a love of peace and hope, of caring for others, for in this 21^st century the ways of Jesus have surely never been more relevant.