Bishop Curry on fire at royal wedding

LAST Saturday, I visited my mom in Matroosfontein bearing gifts of comfort food and Woolies goodies.

By Thursday, I had accepted that I would not be present at the royal wedding. Even if an invitation arrived by special courier it would still be too late.

To complicate matters further, my Turkish barber, Mümtaz, was preoccupied with the pwasa (the fast in Ramadaan). Understandably, he is delicate about threading eyebrows and doing the ear-hair and nose wax plug procedures on an empty stomach.

And the brother can’t take the royals, especially Prince Philip. His hands go all shaky when members of the House of Windsor are mentioned. Mümtaz has a particular way of saying the old man’s name. It sounds like “Phipp”.

His issues with Britain date back to the days of The Ottoman Empire when Turkey leased Cyprus to the UK in 1878. The Brits kept it for a long time.

So while land claims were in process along the M5 behind Parkwood Estate, we watched on television a wedding awash with all the insignia of the privileged and powerful.

But we also witnessed the subliminal insurgency of the dispossessed of history.

I would have loved Doria to have accompanied her daughter down the aisle, a Wakanda moment in waiting. The dreadlocked, noseringed, yoga teacher was lovely to behold. Serene and royal.

The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason drew us into sighting distance of the sacred as he played Sicilienne.

My mother and I joined the royal wedding congregation singing with gusto Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer. The Kingdom Choir slowly grooved us through Ben E King’s classic Stand By Me. This song was part of the soundtrack of the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

You will understand, with these signifiers of the suffering, resisting and sometimes overcoming part of our humanity, how I was moved to a temporary let-bygones-bebygones moment, murmuring my way through God save our gracious queen. Although the only queen I ever would have committed to save was dear Freddie Mercury, our brother from Zanzibar.

It all worked: Curry’s rap about slavery., the cello dude, The Lord Bless You and Keep You by John Rutter; the all-black choir strutting through an Etta James-styled Amen, the diversity of the prayers and the prayees.

It was liturgy at its best. And proudly Anglican.

The Holy Spirit, Oh she was strong and present in the St George’s Chapel as Michael Curry went from kriste-kerrie mild to Holy Jesus hot to take-me-to-the-river sizzling vindaloo. He was on fire for Jesus and it was a joy to see him burn.

He represented us of the Motherland and the diaspora in a pride-evoking manner. And in all our Holy Spirit beauty. Especially us Afro-Anglicans.

The bishop, oh the irony of it all, representing almost 2 million American Episcopalians would have been deeply aware of his nonvoting “observer” status within the Anglican communion. This decision, taken in January 2016, was based on the Episcopal Church’s acceptance of same-sex marriage.

Curry is clear about the place of LGBT people in the church: “God didn’t make anyone to be a secondclass citizen… He says, ‘Come unto me all of you.’ He didn’t limit love. The dude, he got it.”

We are lit and wonderfully woke on this, my brother.

History unfolds in unanticipated ways. Its changing reality is often veiled by the ignorance and fear that blinds our hearts and minds. We ache for normality. And youngish love, promenaded in the exalted atmosphere of a medieval, Gothic style chapel, reminds us that tenderness always triumphs.

One can declare this night that life is good despite the obvious fact that evil seduces us into believing that it ain’t. Life is good because we can be silly. And laugh.

And love as we sometimes scheme that life is a Mills and Boon novel as when a brown-skinned sista makes a red-haired bloke look foolish just at the thought at what he was about to receive.