Love in Colour

How to a fruitful life…

Bear much fruit… and become my disciples’ (John 15 :5,8)

Reading a passage from John’s gospel yesterday, I only noticed these words, half way through verse five in chapter fifteen of John’s gospel, for the first time really- about “bearing much fruit” yes, but then at end of verse 8 Jesus speaks of “becoming disciples”. Surely, as we are already in chapter fifteen here, Jesus is speaking to disciples who have been with him through thick and thin already? Aren’t they already his disciples?

In fact, it is an active word he uses here. Another translation reads ‘showing yourselves to be my disciples’. It is by doing something they reveal themselves to be his disciples.

So as modern day disciples, how do we do this today? What does it mean to ‘bear much fruit?’ ‘Becoming disciples?’ How do we show it? How do we be it?

Just as then, so now- By participating- as we participate in the creation story, by being creative ourselves, in other words, ‘bearing fruit’ so we each ‘become’ what we are ‘called’ to be. Each fruit has a seed to create another fruit, as do we.

You may think you have nothing much to give or to do. Not true, we are all unique and have something to offer, ask and you will receive is this promise. No one else can do what you can do.

So start by asking yourself, well, what talents have I been given? What talents can I grow and develop? Like fruit, allow to ripen and be shared in my life?

If you are a performer, singing and writing, or an artist, drawing and painting to the glory of Gospel, this can be your way of ‘bearing much fruit’. But there are other ways. Spending quality time with others, active listening and story telling. Walking in the woods and mapping the way, creating a meal, or painting a scene, making a puzzle, or solving a beautiful mathematical equation, playing a game, outdoors or indoors, or inventing your own games, just using your imagination.

There are many, many ways we bear fruit.

Spending time with one another, cooking, shared meals and shared conversations, shared experiences, spending time over coffee or watching a sunset, or sitting by a river or somewhere quiet to regroup. Watching a film or show together or making a film or play yourselves.

We have disconnected our creative pursuits from the “Creator of all things”, but they do not need to be disconnected.

Our talents were not designed to be disconnected. We were not designed to be disconnected, we were designed to be tribes, races, families working together, doing life together, bearing fruit together - recreating life, together.

At one of the most difficult times of my life, when I felt rejected by those I thought and believed loved me, when vows made to me were broken and it broke me inside too, I decided to use the gifts - the gifts of song and songwriting that God had given me, to write songs of sorrow, but also of hope in what felt like a bleak time.

It was a time when all I had to give at that moment was my ‘free creative gifts’ but it was enough. It was the gifts I had been given by God, to share, and everything else had been stripped back from me. At that moment I found myself on my knees in prayer and instead of despairing, a feeling of a deep sense of peace and inner freedom and hope whelled up within me. I found myself full of praise, defiant praise, whilst the devil tried to strip me and stop me- giving it all back to God, who was in any case was the initial giver, made me free to fully be me. I became unafraid.

I stopped worrying about what others might think about me and what I created- if they’d like it. I just didn’t care anymore and I just kept creating, fear, gave way to love- and creativity, as seeking the “perfect love of god” cast out the fear that had held me bound and back for so long. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought of me, or my work, only God. It was freedom, true, deep, freedom and I wanted to share it with others. The sounds, the poems, the words I wrote began to become about letting the light in…

The songs I wrote at that time were not therefore about death and despair, or even primarily about heart ache and heart loss, despite my circumstances, for the most part I wrote defiantly about life and love and hope and how we can find light even in the darkest of places. Like the Psalmist David, who was surrounded on every side, aware of his own sin, longing to walk closer to God, but drew from each song he wrote, a defiant note of praise to God, I came back to the realisation that I too break vows, I too sin and I too need forgiveness on a daily basis and from that place of repentance, recognising humility as the key to deep joy - a deep desire to get right with God.

From that moment of abandonment in life, God was able to break in with his mercy and love and show me life- lead me towards hope and forgiveness and help me move forwards towards the light.

In fact, my very strap line now comes from that album’s title- “Letting the light in..” I had to do that then, I need to do that now, daily.

We are all broken, living in a broken world and in need of a daily dose of forgiveness and forgiven-ness.

I had forgotten, over the years, as the CD sat gathering dust in a box, forgotten that title for the old original album until I rediscovered a box of those old CD’s clearing out our home.

I had just used it subconsciously when a close friend, Tammy, suggested I should have a signature strap line as she had on her emails. Thinking it was a good idea the phrase - long buried - resurrected itself into my consciousness and popped back into my head. It seemed the right one, the perfect summary - summing up what my desire in life is- to let more of God’s love and light in…to both myself and my parishioners and those I meet along life’s Way. In fact, as someone pointed out to me, my very name, Helen, taken from the Greek root word “Helios” which means ‘sun’ and the name Helēnē It means ‘torch’, ‘shining light’ or ‘bright’. So it seems appropriate as I travel back now from Athens after a wonderfully sunny and special summer holiday with my family…to a wedding of one of our old Moorings’ alumni allowing the light to shine in on their marriage and hope for the future together, that I just rediscovered in the box of my old CD’s that the title was, ‘Letting the light in…’

Then it hit me- I am using it now as my strap line because it is prophetic title, for prophetic songs!

All those tracks, recorded over twenty years ago, lovingly mixed in a little studio called “The Cowshed”, (before the hand lotion and other products had even been thought about) were about letting light in at a very dark time of my life.

The album was produced by the very brilliant jazz and 80’s session singer, with a cult following in his own right, Ian Shaw, whose masterful encouragement at getting me to do layer upon layer of B.V.’s myself, over the live band tracks, gave it a rich edge.

So that little album, which was then picked up by Decca records as part of Universal group, just after their success with Jamie Callum, meant I went from sleeping on my sister’s sofa bed, to getting my own place in trendy Bethnal Green, a large airy flat in a block appropriately named ‘Minstrel Court’.

Before my life in the UK had really started, I suddenly had a career. But, as with record labels so often, they don’t want you to manage yourself- they brought in the “Professionals”, so that we went from the centre page of The Sunday Times’ culture’s next big thing and faces on the back of every bus- when I ran my own label - LoudMouthMusic Ltd- to being the ‘next year’s project for Universal and Decca because they had already spent their marketing budget for that year on something else. The album was ‘put on hold’. So, the fruits that album might have born, got ‘shelved’ for another release date, the title of the album changed, some jazz numbers added in and the album remixed and our band “Honeyriders” replaced our old album as the title of it. The new and shiny one wasn’t bad and used a very good production team- but it hadn’t the old raw energy of the first album which we recorded in a week by simply ‘cracking on!’- as I liked to say to the band. That year we won the “best newcomer” at the ‘Marlborough Jazz Festival’ and we were asked to perform in Ireland and around the country. I was just about to fly off to Cannes to represent UK talent before Britain’s got talent had even been invented!

But meanwhile, that summer, just before I flew out- with hopes riding high- I met James, fell in love and turned my devotions to him rather than the band- so when we married, I turned my attention away from touring and bands, to family and home building. To fostering love with real people, in real time and anchoring myself in that.

My kids joked that I had ‘given up being a pop star to marry dad’ and may be I had. But this brings me back to fruit. What is the purpose of fruit? To nourish and feed those around us. Fruit that isn’t given away, withers on the vine. I had focused on lasting fruit; family, friendships, faith. I never regretted it.

I’ve anchored myself to home ever since and watched it gloriously flourish and grow and me along with it. The family, our friendships and future generations coming in and bringing more in with them. The wedding we went to this weekend was just one more piece of that fruit, the folk we had introduced them to meant they worked hard got on the housing ladder got married in the place of their dreams. So wonderful to see. All their hard working and effort paying off.

I trained as a priest, parking my music on the shelf for the moment, though still singing praises and leading worship both classical and popular in the churches where I worked. Then exploring “Theosis” which was my father’s own theological obsession and his wonderful reflections on it. I started to lecture on his beloved Jesus prayer which illustrated and enabled Theosis so beautifully, I found I was using my theology degree and training after all to guide and shepherd others towards the living presence of Christ. So to then go on and study a Masters at Ridley Hall here in Cambridge with Malcom Guite’s guidance on piety and poetry and write sermons, lectures and poems, to still speak around the world, to still record and hopefully encourage others to let the light in. I really feel have lost nothing simply gained in life. I’m planning to sing at a place called the cedars in New York on November 13th, with the wonderful Sophia accompanying me on harp- I’ve never stopped singing and writing songs, it’s really just who are you writing for? Yourself glorification or reflection of the creator’s allowing his light to shine and through that bringing others towards that eternal and everlasting light themselves…

So life far from contracting life, when we offer it back to God, to Jesus as a servant, well it expands and bears fruit beyond our wildest imagination.

Just look at the disciples, yes they mostly died young, yes they didn’t fully grasp all that lay ahead. But they loved Jesus, they followed him and they knew life is not just about the here and now but about eternity- how we serve our creator. Yes they were mostly simply fishermen from Galilee , but god used them to build an empire for eternity. Yes they could have stayed safe in their village, anonymous and now long forgotten- simply stayed fishermen, but they chose to follow the way of the cross, which is the way of love, life and self sacrifice, a way that leads to hope and light and to fish for people. They chose to be a light and they still bear fruit to this day through their stories.

We are too easily distracted by the temporal and use our gifts for our own narrow aims but life is so much higher and brighter and bigger than that. God has a plan for your life that is so much bigger than yours.

The fishermen could just have fished for fish- but instead they led others to Jesus and are remembered by millions every year, each saint’s day and their stories retold every year to us all- they became fishers of people as Jesus predicted they would, simply by following Him.

As a young girl, I’m sure the distractions of the world would have been too much for me- my gifts would have been short lived and all about me - as it was (quite frankly) for some of my friends now still in that world- the weight of fame is heavy to bear. Now I am not saying you can’t do both, but it is harder. Much harder.

However, instead, I turned to my family, I invested in people and home and place and figure that had made all the difference. ‘The road less travelled by’ became my motto. It has remained so ever since. However things have been, we can always turn back to christ and start now again. Start planting seeds now, in those around you, seeds of love. Seeds of hope, Seeds of life and light.

The seeds of my songs are still there, planted long ago and when I dusted off my old CD, imagine my surprise with the words of the cover song, ‘Colour’ - its theme felt modern. It is about faith, in a world of machines. I realised with a sense of excitement perhaps that it was not meant to be a hit then, but a hit now. It is a prophetic track, the theme “feeling like a machine”- almost human, but not pppppquite- lacking - what? A soul? A faith? A hope in the eternal? Is what AI lacks.

‘Blood down to the bone thicker than lead, poppppsurface alive cellularly dead…’ it’s now how we are when without faith, without a soul. Dead.

The word ‘colour’ in the context of the song is signifying a faith- a belief in more than what is seen- which is more than two dimensional- which is how CS Lewis brilliantly depicts a life in heaven versus a life in hell, in his book ‘The Great Divorce’. It is going from a grey, drab existence of hell, cut off from community and life in suburban streets living further and further away from your neighbour, to the full techni-colour reality of heaven and harmony and beauty and the reality of all creation singing praises to the creator- even the leaves of the trees!There is a bus ready to take you every day to heaven, but not everyone gets on. Some are too busy arguing at the bottom- including theological discussions on the meaning of life! Some get on, but decide to get off before it leaves, worried about what is to come or feeling they’ve left something behind...

Nowadays, we have become so much more about ‘experiences’ and capturing a moment, rather than actually living in that moment- too busy looking at our phones, to look up.

‘Colour’ was written by me over twenty-five years before the advent of AI, before the smart phone, before we started to rely on ChatGBT and photograph our meals rather than just eat them, before Facebook or TikTok or instagram- before even Youtube had got going. So as we realise machines can do somethings better than we can, there are things they cannot do. They cannot be moral... they cannot build communities. They can help us- they are good servants, but they are bad masters. We must not let them master us, for they do not have souls. We must be the ones to not simply ask the questions, but the right questions and give them the right answers, in order for them to preserve the right answers for the next generation and the one behind and beyond that.

The moral, ethical, answers for the future generations to live and thrive by. For the AI robot they cannot “create” internally, they are parasites on actual creativity and our ideas - because they do not have a soul. So we need to sew seeds now for them about human flourishing and how we achieve it- so they can help us bear fruit that will last. It is we who need to give AI a moral and ethical version, if we are not to end up in darkness- we need to sew seeds that let the light in now, and we need to do it today.

‘Colour’ is a song about this faith, it is a song about soul- deep truths- life- and it is a song for now. A prophetic song. A song with the warning seen and sewn in for life. It is not simply about black and grey, but colour- and seeds of that colour must be sewn and formed by us, to bear lasting fruit for the future.

As the human race, we need to reclaim our creative arts as a defiant, deafening cry, against the passive passing on of our gifts.

We must not allow them to “wither on the vine” and see the great truth behind all things revealed to us in the life of Christ that we are known and loved and gloriously made.

You are unique and your voice needs to be heard- perhaps your gift isn’t ‘song’, but whatever it is- as you allow the light in - the light of Christ’s love for you, who from the cross shouted the final defiant cry to death, ‘it is finished’… Death is finished, Jesus wants to share risen life with you and with me starting now, today.

Don’t let things happen ‘to you’ but create, create, create!

Choose life now, a daily choice against just being sucked into the machine.

Do not walk into life now as if dead- come to life, bear fruit, fruit that will last- and start by allowing the light of Christ to show you your gifts and your talents, do not believe the lie of the enemy that you have none. Or even that you can ask AI to do it all for you - there is a joy in creating something ourselves- even imperfectly, as every finger painting toddler will tell you. There is a joy in expressing ourselves and so many new creative ideas come out of mistakes we make - post it notes, crem brûlée, Eton mess- to name but three! We all are created in God’s image, every one.

Allow the love of the father in heaven to transform your faith from something small, a small seed, into a full vine, that can and will grow over a lifetime, as we spend a lifetime becoming and discovering what being disciples of Jesus today together means for each of us and collectively together as we connect- not just through WiFi only -but in person- seek others out- allow mistakes to happen and turn into something good and in it all and through it all, look to love well and … …be blessed!