Fix us

On Palm Sunday the guest vicar on BBC Wiltshire’s Sunday morning programme will be yours truly. It’s only taken me 10 years to get invited—clearly we’ve gone quietly under the radar recently here at the Abbey. Anyway, as we’ll be busy with an outdoor Holy Communion here on Palm Sunday morning, we recorded my short segments last week. As well as the general conversation flagging up our Easter Eve service in partnership with BBC Wiltshire (don’t forget to get your ticket), I also had to provide a ‘thought for the day’ and select a piece of music. The ‘thought for the day’ was easy; I have way too many thoughts every day before breakfast and simply needed to extract an intelligible one, if available. But selecting one favourite piece of music — don’t they realise how difficult that is for a musician?

My operatic alter ego kicked in, and, although I didn’t for one moment think they’d play one of my old CDs, I thought they might play a track from an old colleague and I could do a bit of former glory basking. ‘No opera’ they said.

That just left me 6 or 7 centuries of classical music to choose from. The Abbey choir know that I have my favourites, and my not favourites, but, just as I was  about to select some JS Bach or Olivier Messaien, and lose Radio Wiltshire most of its audience, I heard the words ‘nothing classical, we want contemporary pop please.’ OK. Now the most joy I’ve had with contemporary pop recently, by a long way, was a live performance of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana. But for some reason I couldn’t get the Palm Sunday imagery and ‘the hottest spot north of Havana’ to work together in my brain; it was all going dancing donkeys. So I went for Coldplay’s Fix You.

I am sure Coldplay had absolutely no intention of this, but I always hear a lot of Holy Week in Fix You. It’s a redemptive song. The cry ‘Hosanna’, save us, is a heartfelt cry from broken humanity, and God’s captive people, to be ‘fixed.’  Coldplay’s lyrics ‘tears come streaming down your face when you lose something you cannot replace’ always suggest to me the devastation of Mary Magdalene at the loss of Christ, ‘Mary stood outside the tomb crying…’ (John 20:10) And the guitars, just over 2 minutes in, are for me the sunrise on Resurrection morning—Christ appearing to Mary and simply calling out her name. The Messiah is come, He knows us by name, and God’s  great plan for humanity is unveiled—He will fix us.