Now, here’s a thing – Gerry Marsden died last week aged 78. Never heard of him? Well, he was the ‘Gerry’ of ‘Gerry and the Pacemakers’ part of the 60’s ‘Merseybeat’ boom that culminated in the Beatles.
Anyhow, Gerry Marsden was best known for singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ (hereafter YNWA), although older readers may also remember ‘Ferry Across the Mersey’ and other songs. YNWA is strongly associated with Liverpool Football Club and it is Gerry Marsden’s version that is played before every home game at Anfield, gaining special resonance after the Hillsborough disaster which caused 96 deaths and over 700 injuries. (Everton play the theme tune from the old TV series ‘Z Cars’!)
In fact, despite its Liverpool associations, YNWA was written by the American song-writing team of Rogers and Hammerstein and is the finale to the musical ‘Carousel’ (in which a dead carnival worker returns to earth to help his family who he let down badly when alive).
YNWA is a song that engenders warm feelings and a good spirit, not just for people from Liverpool or just for football fans (it is often sung at matches all around the world, especially at times and places where tragedy has struck in some form or another.) However it is in reality a song that peddles false hope. Let’s look at the words:
When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don't be afraid of the dark
At the end of a storm
There's a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone
You'll never walk alone
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone
You'll never walk alone
It’s hard not to swell with emotion when it is sung by a crowd of 60,000 or more. But the question I always want to ask is why? Why walk on with hope in your heart? Why will you never walk alone? It can be applied in the sense of ‘we are a community and ‘we are together’ but does it apply in any wider sense – who will walk with us and how and why will we never walk alone? The show Carousel suggests (I think) that it is because we are connected to those who have come before us and after us. I prefer what the Apostle Paul says in 2 Timothy 1.12 – ‘That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.’