Exciting! This week St Albans was trending on Social Media. How often does that happen? Last time it was the Great Hole of Fontmell Close.  But this week  the Abbey Organ Scholar Nicholas Freestone was a YouTube sensation with his superstar-scaled tribute to the late great David Bowie.  

There were so many tributes to Bowie it’s perhaps  surprising this one stood out.

Was it the incongruity? The ponderous, dignified beast of the Abbey Organ pouring out the strains of the lithe, ethereal  sprite that was Bowie? The organ represents everything Bowie is not, but Nicholas made the great beast kneel down and pay homage. Perhaps that was made people cry when they heard it?

Some would have been horrified that the church should be implicated in a world-famous tribute to that famously anti-establishment figure. Nothing in Bowie’s life chimed with what the Church traditionally teaches. Or so it would seem.

But at a deeper level, everything his work and life espoused resonates with that of Jesus.  He championed the marginalised, the other, the unlikely, the lost. He picked us by the glory of his music and his egalitarian glamour and made us all heroes. Everyone could participate, everyone could share the limelight, while recognising that Ziggy came from somewhere else.

Bowie spoke to our deep need to be lifted up to something beyond, outside, different, but to do this humbly, beautifully, graciously. Like Nicholas’ organ tribute. We can all be proud and can all be part of that.