Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith. It will be just as you wish.” And right then her daughter was healed. (Matthew 15:28)
I’m not sure this would be considered a New Year’s resolution, but I saw a few “Top 10 Albums of 2018” lists at the beginning of January and, wondering if my kids get tired of only listening to songs from the 1980s while riding in the car, thought it was time to expand my musical horizons. I committed to listening to three different top 10 lists (two from the podcast/radio program Sound Opinions and one from Rolling Stone) and would listen to every song on every album, no matter whether I’m a fan of that genre or not.
Some of the albums were revelations (The Beths, noname) and some were, well, albums that I’ll only listen to once. There was one song, though, that totally took me by surprise. IDLES is a British punk band and their album “Joy as an Act of Resistance” made one of the lists. The first few songs were pretty intense and I wasn’t sure I’d listen to it more than once, but then the song “June” came on and the lyrics stopped me cold:
Dreams can be so cruel sometimes/I swear I kissed your crying eyes/Dreams can be so cruel sometimes/I swear I kissed your crying eyes
A stillborn was still born/I am a father/A stillborn was still born/I am a father
Was he singing about grief? A quick internet search confirmed what I thought I was hearing. Joe Talbot is the lead singer of IDLES and he and his partner gave birth to a stillborn daughter in the summer of 2017. In an article he said, “It’s quite a telling sign of what I’m writing about, which is carrying the shame of grief and feeling like you’re a burden because you’re feeling so dysfunctional and angry at the universe for something that you have no control over. People often have a strange embarrassment for just feeling pain.” He went on to share some of the freshest insights on grief that I’ve read in a while. The song can only be described as lament.
What struck me about listening to the song and reading about the band is that I had to confess that I had jumped to some conclusions about IDLES. I don’t have a lot of experience listening to punk, but my stereotype was that the only emotion a typical punk band experienced was anger. I should have known better, of course, but our brains (and hearts) sometimes find it easier to stereotype.
I don’t know if the members of IDLES have faith lives. I do know they’re not immune to the human emotions that we all feel. How often do we see someone and assume we know their story and the breadth of their emotions? Jesus, of course, constantly turned assumptions upside down and, like his interaction with the Syro-Phoenician woman in Matthew 15:21-28, also was open to surprise and transformation. As per usual, I need to spend less time jumping to conclusions and more time opening myself to the daily holy surprises that others provide.