Categories: uncategorized
Date: 17 April 2006 08:37:01
I apologise once more for lateness of this blog, but this is the first time I've been near a computer for a while.
On Good Friday I trekked over to Manchester with Katie and James (people from Church) for the Manchester passion. After some inital confusion we found the right square in Manchester. The idea behind this particular passion play was to combine music from the Manchester scene with the story of Christ's death and resurrection. Since worship of an invisible deity and a love of indie music both feature heavily in my lifestyle, this sounded like a very good idea and for the most part it worked very well. Jesus ate his last supper of a chip butty (or kebab I couldn't tell) from a takeaway van accompanied by Joy Division's "Love will tear us apart", Judas betrayed him to Morrisey's "Heaven knows I'm miserable now" as he accepted his thirty pieces of silver. I think Mary got the worst songs - "Search for a hero" by M People and bizarrely considering he is from Stoke, Robbie Williams' "Angels" (probably for the mums in the crowd).
The audience were encouraged to participate in the proceedings by shouting out for Barabass to be freed and Jesus to be crucifed (both led by an auto-cue which also supplied the lyrics to the songs), and a giant glowing cross was led by a procession through the crowd. One thing that did irk me slightly was the roving reporter interviewing people in the cross procession about what Good Friday meant for them. I was actually quite pleased that they interviewed a range of people (including a Muslim and an agostic (I think)) but the reporter always cut them off rather rapidy if they sounded like they had anything insightful to say - although this was probably due to time constraints.