What is this thing we know as the holy?
In my earlier life, I knew it to be the other- something away from me, that was certainly not me. I could not be it, nor was I able to be in it, not even with the promises made by substitutionary attonment. It would take more than that to make me acceptable. Nevertheless, I spent a long time trying to conjure up holy spaces with music. I was a ‘worship leader’. It was a serious, central calling on my life- it was my identitiy and almost all of my spiritual striving. I was good at it.
Then I started a journey away from those non-litutgical (yet still very litutgical) worship services, towards a totally different kind of spirituality. I started to see that thing that we call Holy in very different ways- it was not other, it was truest centre – even the truest centre of me. It was not removed, it was always present. It was not repelled by my brokenness, it was compelled by it. It was not somewhere else, it was right here.
The clues were always there- remember those words recorded as being spoken by Mary, the mother of Jesus about being a poor thing lifted into the love and glory of God? How the high were being made low and the low high?
Not long ago, most ‘worship music’ triggered me. It took me back to a place of striving towards that other holiness- the one that I could never attain. It is with deep joy now – the sort that makes me weep – that I listen to the music of The Many, whose music we are grateful to share through this lent journey. Let this wash over you;
