Tony Chapman-Art Music Writing

25-12-15
… went to the English Reform Church in middle of Amsterdam last night … really beautiful building … joined about 2,000 people, queuing outside for the Christmas Eve Carol service. We slowly went in through a small door. Inside: high vaulted ceiling and real organ playing.

The singing made the decorated rafters shake… it was tumultuous, especially the last verse of the last carol…”born this happy morn”…”Oh, Come all ye faithful”… the whole people and building and organ sang as if riding a giant wave together … a spiritual, ecstatic experience. Unforgettable.

,.. and then everyone filed out through another small door and the Minister shook hands with, looked deep into the eyes of, and said “Happy Christmas” to : every single person as they passed him, one by one, through the small door … a phenomenal feat!

I re-evaluated Christ’s (Gods?) teachings … they were / are, mostly pretty cool, and, still are, really cool and unconventional… and a challenge to the status quo…

… I like them and I mostly live by them … all these years later when I don’t even go to church …

… Later, that evening, I watched , on TV the bishops in their finery .., and realised, Jesus didn’t wear finery, only the everyday robes of the time, like everyone else back then. In fact he wasn’t financially rich or anything … and he didn’t even ask to be worshipped…

.., after that it gets more complicated of course … like everything in life…

… but overall 1 think the stories Jesus told were and still are pretty awesome…

… Oh, and by the way, I think during the “mysterious” missing years, between Jesus’s childhood and when he arrived  on the scene, aged around 30, meaning business, he lived with the Gnostics in one of their communes, in the desert … this makes perfect sense, it would have given him the context, the medium, the ideas, the form through which his (God’s, the Universe’s, his Subconscious, whatever you choose to call it), could work its original and paradigm shifting magic!

… so, there … that’s what I think, ’cause I read a book about the Gnostics of his time, who had these communes in the desert near him where they processed all sorts of ideas that were coming from the East , China, India and so on, with the silk and other goodies ..
So it makes complete sense … no-one works or lives in a vacuum (read ” Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon), not Einstein, not Leonardo Da Vinci, and not Jesus. It doesn’t make him (or God in him ) any less awesome! it just shows he had a cultural context … his wonderful words didn’t come completely out of thin air! so, there, that’s what I reckon, 🙂 and I’ m sure he doesn’t mind me thinking that….. and also by the way , while I’m at it… I think everyone has a need the go beyond there everyday reality occasionally (ie. a need for some sort of “spirituality”), I do it through a very simple meditation form (my own), l just sit still, with my eyes closed for half an hour and let my thoughts do what they want . .. I don’t try and control them , I let them process everything they want to process … in the last few seconds of that half an hour all my tension drops away and its really like a profound re-birth. Amazing. (that’ s actually my secret … why people mostly like me … don’t tell anyone…  🙂 .

Other people find this rising above everyday reality through religion (very complicated , and fraught with dillema’s and difficulties for everyone in my opinion. Other people find it through drugs or alcohol. However you do it … it has to be done.

l think: simple, no tricks or hi-falluting ritualistic, esoteric, cliquey, rarefied, chosen ones, complications, just simple . sit still, upright, eyes closed, and meditate ( for half an hour, twice a day if possible ) and we would have paradise on earth

well that’s what I think . So there. 🙂

and I read another book about Saint Thomas’s gospel … fascinating stuff!..