pentecost
I have had a special request. I've been asked by a member of my congregation to sing in Chapel. Not just the usal evensong responses, but one of my own songs, complete with guitar, piano or whatever I need to make it work.
You'd think that would be an obvious thing for me to do. I've been a singer and musician all my life – I sang before I could talk, learned guitar and piano from the age of 5, did my first paying gig at 14 and never looked back. Until I changed career, of course.
But I've been working in Cambridge Chapels for 8 years now, singing evensong, but never singing the blues. Although I still play music elsewhere, I never play in church. It's the context – how do you play acoustic blues in a Chapel that only ever hears choral music? I did it once when I was an ordinand, not in a College Chapel but in a parish church, and discovered that 75% of the congregation ignorantly assumed the music was "bad" because it was modern and involved a guitar.
I think my current congregation is a bit more open minded than that! But in any case, one of the points I want to draw out tomorrow about spirit and inspiration is the way that the listener becomes part of the inspiration: the way you listen to someone not only draws out what they do, it actually puts something in to what they do. And this is the dynamic of inspiration. The player, the performer, is not the sole source of inspiration.
So this time I think I have been persuaded. I've dug out a song from my BBC religion catalogue, and given it some practice this week. Tomorrow I shall sing in my Chapel.
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author musician theologian
Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
This is Maggi’s bestselling book of daily readings for each day of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Advent is the beginning of the Church year, and marks the anticipation of the coming Messiah. These readings explore how beginnings and endings in our own lives are illuminated by the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming.
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