The Blues at Advent.

I had a 'moment' this week. 

It's Advent and I like to play Advent hymns on the piano at home. However, as I sat down innocently one evening, the words 'Oh don't play any more hymns PLEASE' brought me up short. 'Can't you play Blues or something?' was the plea. So I thought: is it possible to get too religious?

Look around the house and you will see religious books, religious pictures on the wall (of my study at least), religious hymn books, worship music strewn across the floor and not a small number of tea lights. Not that tea lights are a sign of being religious necessarily but...

I'm not sure how it happened but over the last seven years I seem to have read an awful lot of religious books (Trinity, church history, pastoral theology, the sacraments, mission and evangelism, preaching, spirituality, theological reflection, leadership) and listened to a lot of religious music (Taize, Iona, New Wine, choral). On the other hand, novels, poetry and all sorts of other creative experiences have probably suffered. At the risk of separating sacred and secular, which is always a bad idea, I think I just want to live a little more...

If creativity is stifled I'll become a bore and worse than that, my spirituality will probably suffer too. 

So we didn't have Advent hymns this week. Instead I played along to All Blues from Kind of Blue by the legendary Miles Davis; discovered it was Harry Nilsson, not The Beautiful South who first sang Everybody's Talkin' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzEY6ZqkuE and went out with my camera into the very cold and frosty Advent countryside. 

Which didn't make me feel blue at all. 

On the contrary.