15 April

Presence, what does it mean? Here's Freddie Mercury just saying hello to an audience (sorry that FB keeps causing sound and vision to go out of sync). This is presence, it electrifies a situation. Anybody could just say 'hello', only rare people can turn that into an event. An event is something new and unexpected, that produces an upwelling of joy and surprise. Some lessons at school, with a bad teacher, are just lessons. A great lesson is an event. Any tiny part of life can be turned into an event. Events are where the eternal meets the finite. Religion began as a method of producing presence - events. Of electrifying each moment, that electricity *is* 'God'. Then religion got hijacked by people who thought it was about God being some separate being, up in the sky, handing down moral laws. Eternity and mortality were split in two, God occupied eternity, we occupied finite time. But God is where those two meet. Good teachers, speakers, sportspeople, or whoever, can all show us 'God', if they turn what they do into events. And one of my main passions for Queen isn't the music - which is great - but this presence Mercury had, in everything he did. He would electrify every room he was in, in everything he did.