Robert Parr of Brighton tells how a track by Grace Slick impacted his life.

Grace Slick

It was at the beginning of 1981. I had just moved after spending some months in a not very nice bedsit; and also after splitting up with a girlfriend. I was very glad to be in a new place, and just round the corner was a church I'd heard of - a swiftly growing charismatic group, only recently formed from people who had left other churches - someone at work was a member and some other people I slightly knew. I went along one Sunday.

The service commenced with an hour's congregation-led worship; I was rather overwhelmed, experiencing the same feelings I had had as a depressed teenager attending a huge Fountain Trust meeting. I stayed to the end mainly because I couldn't get out; but then, as I was going, someone said hallo to me.

I didn't immediately recognise them, but they turned out to be a young couple, friends of a friend, with whom I'd lost contact about the same time I'd started living with my recent girlfriend. (I'd stopped going to church then too.) I'll call the people Dave and Jane. They struck me then as very well suited to each other - and seemed very pleased to see me again.

Jane visited me only a few days later. She brought some of her poems, which impressed me greatly. I began going to the church regularly: the fact that I had moved almost next door, knew people who went, and had bumped into Dave and Jane all combined to make it feel 'right'. And what also impressed me was that Jane and Dave seemed to have an almost perfect Christian relationship, particularly as compared to my own, recently failed one.

But I soon discovered that things weren't quite so perfect between them. Jane felt dissatisfied and cramped both by the church and also by her relationship with Dave - in fact they were in the process of breaking up after being engaged for a year. She discussed this with me, and I think her honesty was part of her attraction: we began going out. Sort of. It was a tacit, unspoken sort of thing, and the whole situation was rather uncomfortable and blurred - I probably saw more of Dave than I did of her.

I began helping with the refurbishment work at the church, which I enjoyed: the building was fascinating, a large rambling church from the previous century containing a tangle of dusty rooms filled with strange lumber, and a cavernous hall where an ancient organ presided. And I joined the church, although I wasn't entirely certain I wanted to. Jane began coming back less and less frequently, and I became more dissatisfied: I found the jargon irksome and disagreed with aspects of the teaching. Relations with my house group leader became strained; and when those wishing to join the church were expected to sign a form agreeing to submit to the elders I felt rebellious.

I realise now, of course, what I was doing: I thought if I joined the church, ie, did what God wanted, then He would sort things out between me and Jane; but I didn't realise this at the time. Some people tried, ineptly and intrusively, to counsel me (about commitment -they didn't know about Jane), but I wouldn't listen. I stopped going to house group; I wanted to leave the church, but felt this would be wrong. Commitment, shepherding and authority were very big words at the time. The tension became quite acute.

Then I went to Greenbelt festival. I had been once before with a friend, with a Young Peoples Fellowship from Burgess Hill; and on the spur of the moment we decided to go with them again. At the festival we put our tent up next to the others. Paul and I had brought a cassette player and some tapes - in particular a tape of 'Manhole' by Grace Slick. We went to concerts and seminars, but the real impact of the weekend came from those tapes -especially the song "Jay". We listened to it, rewound it, listened to it again - and then again. We listened to it until the batteries ran down and the tape began to slur and growl -and still we listened. It seemed to say everything.

One side of the LP consists of one long track: it was this that held us. I've no idea why it's called "Jay", and I've no idea whether Grace Slick has any kind of Christian faith, but that track seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, to be about the Holy Spirit. In fact, I don't think one could imagine a more lyrical or passionate expression of the text "The wind blows where it will: you do not know where it comes from nor where it goes." "If he wants to...follow the sound of the wind...as it blows, let him go, let him go... Don't tie him down he wants to run, give him the sun... and if you see, ah, you think I'm just about to leave, you can follow me - but I'm already gone."

I wanted very much to leave the church - just to get away. That weekend, struggling through an invisible barrier of guilt, and emerging, I decided. I left the church shortly afterwards.

Well, that's the experience, and in a sense I still don't know what to make of it: leaving the church didn't solve the problem of Jane, in fact it left it thoroughly unsolved - but it did give me some space in which to think. At the time I decided that that church, while seeking greater freedom (in one sense) had become, paradoxically, far more intrusive and coercive on a feeling level than many a traditional church - where one's personal conscience is a matter between oneself and God. I now go to a Church of England, a mildly evangelical, friendly church, which suits me a lot better. And I can see now that a lot of the difficulties I had were the result of the sort of person I was - that my feelings about the church were confused and tangled with my feelings about Jane, which in turn were based on an idealised picture of her relationship with Dave, which I'd become involved in, and in which I needed to believe in order to compensate for my own failed relationship... Anyway, that's how I was

"JAY"
by Grace Slick
Sometimes it's easy to believe it
Sun may be the warmest thing he's found
He just starts playing
Then he says to me
Ready your body for love
There is no gravity here
Look up: the roof is gone

And the long hand moves right on by the hour
Look up: the roof is gone
Spanish wind keeps telling me
How it feels to sing free
It keeps blowing away
And it's showing me
Another way to listen
And if you hear, if you hear
The wind is singing like someone singing for your love
The more it sings, the more you know
Horn with strings, and time will show you
Show you freedom

If it sounds good when you hear it
If it looks good when you see it
If he feels like a good man
When you touch him, when you come near him
I keep thinking about the way you keep appearing in my ear