Surely God Was a Lover – Invitation

Paul Kelly

It’s been some while since my first post on my idea to run a project based on the spirituality of the songs penned by the Australian musician, poet, storyteller, prophet and muse Paul Kelly. The project would reflect upon the music of Paul Kelly and to use his music, poetry and prose to search for and reflect on an authentic Australian theology, or for those of you who hate the word “theology” an authentic Australian spirituality.

I had wanted to return to this earlier, but alas Christmas and the camping season in the region where I work and live have taken up most of my time and I’m only getting back on top of things now.

The response from many people was that this sounds like something they’d like to participate in and that it’d be great to have a time-line and some guidelines.

Instead of a year-long project, I’m considering a project that would be focused over a month with a different song being the focus of every day.  I’m thinking that after finishing a month’s worth of posts we may look at upping the reflections to 40 songs and perhaps putting together a lenten reflection for people to reflect on in 2011.

Anyhow, here are some thoughts on guidelines and deadlines, if you’d like to participate please let me know.

a) Deadline.

I’d like to use the month of June to post the reflections onto www.alternativehymnal.com

The deadline for submissions will be 23:59 on the 15th of May 2010

But if you’re anything like me it may be good to get it done as soon as you can and email it in early.

b) Guidelines.

I’m not wanting to put too many guidelines onto whatever you may be willing to write.

If people could write a reflection that is a minimum of 250 words (without the lyrics), with no set maximum for those who may wish to write lots more.  Reflections are to be typed into a text document, or into an email as plain text, I’ll accept word documents, but they’re sometimes hard to transfer to a blog format.  If you’d like to include an image with your post please email that to me as well with the completed reflection, please make sure that all images are ok for publication on a blog (creative commons is preferred).

Reflections can be connected to scripture (Christian or otherwise), or to Australian spirituality or on how the person connects to the music spiritually, or even as to why they believe this song is a spiritual one or not. they can be deep, comedic, simple, honest, or fun.

People can write as many reflections on as many songs as they would like to, if I end up with more than 30 reflections I’ll stretch the posts through July as well.

I’m not concerned as to who writes on what songs, if there are double-ups that’d be ok, it’d be interesting to read how different people engage with the same song, but if people can email me their chosen song(s) I’ll put up a list of people’s names and song titles on blog.digitalorthodoxy.com that will keep track of what songs are being reflected on.

Songs are to be penned and/or sung by Paul Kelly, so that leaves open songs that he may have written for others and songs that may have been penned by someone for him or in collaboration with him.

Please write your name and contact details and if you are happy for them to be published online, I’m more than happy to link to people’s blogs/websites if requested.

Thankyou for your support and ideas that many of you have already offered.

Please do consider passing this onto others who you think may be interested in participating, if you’re running a course on sociology for ministry perhaps one could invite students to participate (*cough* Steve *cough*) or if people in your community share a connection to his music and may like to write please invite them to contribute.