BHM #4: BOB MARLEY MANIFESTS LIGHTNING AT THE ONE LOVE FESTIVAL, 1978

One of the choir girls in my childhood church caught the Holy Spirit during service for the first time. “It was burning,” she said surprised to be chosen and touched by hot fire stubbornly invisible and eternally curious.

The Holy Spirit moves like a minister of smoke through the congregation, the church, touching people for random and obscure reasons / igniting them into physical firework.

“It ain’t nothing to be scared of,” the church pianist assured her.

She had seen its work as much as I, but for me it remained a frightening mystery. The Holy Spirit is summoned by prayer, drumming, devotion. Curious and inscrutable, it sends receivers into uncontainable screams, triggering grandmothers into running laps around the nave, hopping, gesturing as if electrocuted, chittering untranslatable language.

As I watch Bob Marley in concert, I remember these church moments. I claim to understand, yet I don’t.

How one loses oneself to the ritual of music; especially music sacred and trance inducing; How music pulls us into a spiritual world of sound and motion; a understanding that resists being logically understood.

A circuit of energy moves and supercharges whatever it touches with a heat hotter than love, hotter than fire, hotter than faith itself.

Our body is an alphabet to build prayer, our voice conduit for the inner monologue of God, God’s gibberish gospel and miracle language of manifestation.

Once, my mother featured in a miracle; she ushered my drug-addled cousin to the church altar, turning him over to God.

And as she walked back up the aisle, him on his knees at the pulpit behind her—She balled her fists as if under seizure and threw her body away to the air sailing flinging screaming. She was someone else, somewhere else — plugged in to a socket and filled with fire, sparking with tears.

Church folks nickname this: Getting Happy. To observe it is to see a joy that cannot be held.

I observed this in Bob Marley who opens his spirit on stage and agrees to disappear into the conduit of music

into the ocean of cheering fans rising and falling in the tsunami of soundwaves / glory to the summoning power of the drum and bass.

His body boneless / a tuning fork vibrating / his hurricane locks spinning

There is nothing to fear when touched by sacred fire, she’d said.

It is unexpected intimacy; close and hungry and survivable for so long as you don’t grab at it, attempt to hold the burn.

Marley appears beyond any fear of immolation. Watch him walk through a curtain of flame coolly unbothered and take a bow.

During the One Love concert at National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica 1978,

The Wailers commence to Jammin; dressed as for a spiritual ritual, they make out with their woodwind instruments, flirt and tongue them until the air quivers.

Marley swirls and swings while the backup singers frame him with their voices.

Then he begins to preach. His words spontaneous: “We got to be together” he says, or rather something says through him. The stadium becomes ordained under Marley’s hopping authority. He begins channeling instructions: “Shake hands. Show the people. We gonna unite.”

His words approach and move through him like curious children, innocent birds climbing the updraft of music.

He appears possessed; “I’m not so good at talking but I hope you understand what I’m trying to say.” His body speaks.

Marley brings to his vibrating altar-stage leaders of two opposing groups:

Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica and Edward Seaga of the Jamaican Labour Party.

“Just to shake hands…Just to show the people.” Marley says. Something within him lifts, becoming urgent. “We gonna unite. We gonna make it right.”

And his voice begins rising, in a panic as one’s voice might rise to an approaching cliff. It is a voice aimed at pulling God’s attention. And God responds.

At the apex of this rising energy, as Marley shakes and leaps into the air, the entire sky ignites and lightning screams harmony.

He becomes a dervish, the music swirling and pumping. The sky dancing along with electricity sparking between clouds.

Bob Marley — holy and ministerial, preaching The Word to The World– grasps both men’s hands and holds them together above his head. A marriage. Speak now and forever hold Peace.

“The moon is right over my head,” Bob sings beneath the light of God, weeping stars, the holy spirit swirling in ecstatic dervish. “And I give my love instead.” Lightning writes a transcript.

Love falls in a monsoon.