I was reading the other night, so I put some YouTube music videos on.
First up was Choir, Choir, Choir at Massey Hall for a Neil Young tribute.
Sounds a little like the kingdom of God.
Next up was a series of videos from Playing for Change, beginning with The Weight.
One of the things I really like about Playing for Change is the multiple voices. It's not one soloist or band; one country; one type of instrument; one nationality; one language.
Sounds a little like the kingdom of God.
- everyone participates
- everyone has a unique role that is shared with others no matter what their particular giftedness
- everyone is needed
The folk singer Pete Seeger never simply "performed a concert"; he viewed the audience as a choir and always encouraged people to join in, using songs as a way to bind people to a cause. He would say, "Participation. That's what's going to save the human race". All of his events were an "invitation to sing."
In one of the best examples of this, Pete Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain in the 1970s. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More than a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger.
As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete looked at the list, which looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs.
Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, “I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs.” He grinned at the crowd and said, “So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about you singing them.”
He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years. What could the government do? Arrest a hundred thousand singers? It had been beaten by a few banjo chords and the voices of many people singing songs of freedom.
Comments