This was a secular event and I wondered what to
expect. Arriving a couple of minutes late, I found a hall full of people either
clapping their hands or waving them in the air to ‘Dynamite’ by Korean boy-band
BTS which I can fairly say fell well outside the parameters of anything I might
have anticipated. The new Mayor’s keynotes for his year of office are ‘positivity’
and ‘inclusion’, and you can’t deny that his inaugural event expressed that, as
we progressed through two local amateur choirs doing turns (though it struck me
that ‘I Want to Dance With Somebody’ is actually quite a melancholy piece of
work), funny children’s portraits of the Mayor projected on the wall, and
culminating in Fatboy Slim. More clapping and handwaving: it curiously reminded
me of evangelical worship, which shows how close that is to the wider culture.
I will have to reflect on that.
The Mayor’s promises to serve his community, and ours
to help him do so, said everything that needed saying. Life’s not all ha-ha
hee-hee, though, I couldn’t help myself thinking as I was showered in all that
community loveliness, in which it seemed absolutely required that we have a
mild titter every minute we weren’t listening to someone sing, and without
tremendous self-restraint I can see myself delivering a very jaundiced homily
indeed when the Borough gathers at the church a couple of weeks from now!
No comments:
Post a Comment