Issue 69 - The Pilgrim - March 2018 - The newspaper of the Archdiocese of Southwark

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Feature The Pilgrim March 2018 A pop band with a mes Cherrie and Hal at St Ursula’s Convent School in Greenwich. Cherrie Anderson, one half of the pop band Ooberfuse, from Woolwich, explains how her faith drives her music Ooberfuse is a musical collaboration between myself and Hal St John. Our music is inspired by our Catholic faith. We combine Eastern influences with contemporary Western pop, Ooberfuse is unafraid to deep-sea dive into the deepest oceans of human emotions to colour-up drab contemporary life. Our songs are audio footprints left behind by people impelled towards invisible things. The band is driven by the conviction that music speaks from a place ordinarily foreclosed. That place is deeply buried and overlaid. But once it speaks its name transformations occur. Our journey as a band is one that is driven and marked by faith and hope. We never really fully know what lies ahead and so we step out in faith each time we are given opportunities to share our music. Through music we have been able to visit many places and meet people we would not ordinarily meet. As a band, it has been said that one of Ooberfuse’s strengths is our live performance, having played hundreds of gigs all over the world. In 2011 we played at World Youth Day in Madrid – in front of a live audience of two million, and in Rio de Janeiro, where we performed the official English version of the WYD anthem. We recently toured the UK’s top universities as part of a showcase curated by BBC Radio 1’s Huw Stephens. It was great to visit around 24 universities all over the UK sharing our music with them. One of our most memorable trips was when we travelled to northern Iraq in 2015. We saw transformation most vividly in a displacement camp on the dusty plains of Nineveh. Isis, where months earlier had chased Mosul Christians from their homes. Hundreds and thousands of people were cowering in improvised tents with nothing of their former lives surviving. Ooberfuse took a message of hope to refugee camps in northern Iraq. We stood in the midst of this human tragedy with a song of hope, a guitar and a battery-operated amplifier. Children, marked by terrible traumas, gathered around, curious at who we were. Some looked on from a distance unsure; others audaciously touched the volume-controls of the amplifier. All had seen horrors too unspeakable to say. Yet these horrors told their stories from the hollowed eyes and wary glances that tracked our every move. The moment the song began to play the oppressive mood in the camp began gradually to lift, dispersing like darkened rain clouds. Children, curious at first, pulled their friends, baby brothers, older sisters, in closer. Faces drawn in suffering started to smile. Light flickered and then shone out in overclouded eyes. For a brief moment hope rose up against the odds to strengthen frightened hearts. We performed our song We are One. We also made a video of it at the UN’s Bakhira Camp and Mar Elia camp. The song features Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil reciting the Lords Prayer in Aramaic. Our music aims for these precious moments of transformation. When the ordinary is taken up into the divine embrace then magic happens. Page 6
The Pilgrim March 2018 Feature sage of faith and hope When normality returns it returns purged of its sting. The drudgery of the everyday becomes sufferable with the memory that God walks there accompanying us through the mist. A few years ago one of the most devastating typhoons struck Tacloban in the Philippines. I was born in Tacloban and many of my relatives living there were affected. When I heard of the disaster, I wrote a song called Mercy. Mercy tries to emphasise that, in spite of the worst tragedies, God’s eternal mercy and compassion will sustain us through the darkest hour. Mercy was the official international anthem of Pope Francis’ Mercy Mission to Tacloban. It was also played when Pope Francis was in Manila as part of the largest Mass in modern history, where around five million people were present. It was incredible moving and humbling to be part of the Mercy Mission in the Philippines. We left Tacloban with a resolve that we will share the message of mercy and compassion wherever and whenever we can. More recently we teamed up with Cafod on their “Power to be” campaign. By dismantling the obstacles that lie in our pathway, we are able to be the person God had in mind when he created us. Environmental damage is becoming the single largest impediment to realising the dream, planted in all of our hearts, to be what we are. Cafod tell many heroic stories of people from around the world defying environmental limitations to live out the dreams of their destinies. Cafod wanted us to tell these stories to school children in the hope that if their hearts were moved they would in turn become agents of change in their particular networks. Engaging young minds with the question of climate change is a tall order particularly in a plush Greenwich suburb. We started with a live performance of This Little Light. It quickly became obvious the children were not happy being cast as the band’s captive audience. When we turned it upside down and said we would be their audience an electrifying current of electricity surged through the classroom. Children fought over pens to put down in rhyming words their personal worries and concerns about environmental devastation. They then took to the stage to perform their rhymes over pulsing beats pumped out from the band’s drum machine. The classroom erupted into whoops and shouts of approval. Hearts were moved in mysterious ways connected by an invisible chord of solidarity with their less privileged peers. The hallmark of faith for the band comes from Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Conviction and faith is at the heart of everything we do. We hope to bless others with the gifts with which we have been blessed but we do not expect everyone to get or even approve of where we are coming from. n Our latest album The Odd Ones is identified as a “key release” by the premier UK music industry’s publication Music Week and features We Are One – the track we performed in Iraq. Cherrie in Tacloban in the Philippines, where she grew up.” Oberfuse’s song ‘Mercy’ was played at the Mass celebrated by Pope Francis in Manila, Philippines. THE SOUTHWARK SEMINARY FUND 48 Dale Road, Purley, CR8 2EF Tel: (020) 8660 3815 Please help train our future priests by contributing to the cost of educating our students at St John’s Seminary Wonersh. The Diocese have 21 students in training at a cost of £20,000 per student each year. The Southwark Seminary Fund augments the annual Ecclesiastical Education Collection. Please send your donation/legacy either through your parish priest or directly to Rev Father Christopher Keen at Purley. Page 7
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Issue 69 - The Pilgrim - March 2018 - The newspaper of the Archdiocese of Southwark

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