This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought with Fearne Cotton on the Zoe Ball Show on BBC Radio 2:
You know what it’s like when you get a song running round the inside of your head and you can’t stop it? Well, I’ve got one and it’s driving me a bit mad. It could be worse, I suppose – it could be something like an obscure national anthem – but this one is a hymn. It’s one everyone knows – it’s ‘Amazing Grace’.
I think what’s happened is that I heard a writer talking about it on the radio and it triggered something. I have known ‘Amazing Grace’ since I was a kid – a slave trader’s discovery that life could be different and that he didn’t have to be trapped in guilt for ever. Anyway, hearing it mentioned on the radio prompted me to go to the flicks and see the film of Aretha Franklin stirring hearts and souls (including a very young Mick Jagger) at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles in 1972. It is an intense experience and wonderful music.
Grace is a word that, apart from being a popular girl’s name again, sounds religious. That’s because it is. For Christians it speaks of forgiveness and freedom – offered by a God who has no illusions or fantasies about human messiness or failure, but crosses it all out with a love and mercy you can only call outrageously reckless. In a world in which everything seems calculated or quantified – even love and affection: what will I get out of it if I put this amount into it? – how do we account for the unpurchasable, unearnable, unmanipulable love of one who breaks the bonds of guilt and fear and shines the light of newness into the darkness of loss? The Beatles hit on a similar idea when they sang “Can’t buy me love”.
Amazing Grace. ‘Slightly interesting grace’ wouldn’t have worked, would it?
