大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Haydon Spenceley

I love jazz!

Good morning.

I love jazz. It is so diverse, so full of wonder. It is, often, too so full of performances of enormous technical skill, but which simultaneously saunter along on sumptuous and sinuous grooves which are providers of tremendous joy. There鈥檚 something truly right about finding the back-beat in a tune and riding the wave of a phrase all the way to the top of a crescendo. The trouble is that if it is not found, all too often the same glorious genre of music can sound like a jumbled, even sometimes atonal or cacophonous mess. Through it all, there鈥檚 always the one, that first beat of the bar, root chord or first note in the scale, that when it is found or returned to, enables everything to start making sense again.

I grew up listening to the British rock of the 90s, bands like Oasis, Kula Shaker and Supergrass. In these last years, something of the slightly less clear, more improvised and uncertain nature of jazz has really started to appeal to me. I think life is a bit like the shift from rock to jazz. We start out looking for certainty and aren鈥檛 quite sure what to do when we don鈥檛 find it, surprised that it really is true that the wind blows where it blows and we鈥檙e not as in control of it as we might have first thought. It鈥檚 a comfort to me in these times that I can look to God and know that he has been calming storms for some time and hasn鈥檛 given up yet.

Lord, help me to trust you in the storms today and to help others through theirs too.

Amen