|
 |
|
|
|
|
"There are moments when I keep my opinions out of the press but not out of songs." -- Bono, 2004 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"There are moments when I keep my opinions out of the press but not out of songs." -- Bono, 2004 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
Like a Song: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
@U2,
December 01, 2008
[Ed. note: This is the 28th in a series of personal essays by the @U2 staff about songs and/or albums that have had great meaning or impact in our lives.]
 I should probably point out that this isn't so much an essay as a story, a story of how one song more than any other shaped and influenced who I am, resonating and speaking to me on a level that no song has ever done before, and probably ever will. It starts out, perhaps unsurprisingly, with Bono. He was the one who introduced to me the idea that a song could truly define your existence. In his case, it was "Mofo." "That song is my life," he once remarked. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" is, without a doubt, mine. This is largely because it has started me out on and been a soundtrack to what has turned out to be the most significant journey I have ever made: one of the spirit. Spirituality and religion is not a subject that I approach with any degree of ease. Growing up in an environment that for the most part was devoutly secular, my journey from unbelief to faith is one that I'm only happy to talk about in situations where it feels appropriate. Too often I'm worried about coming across as preachy or over-zealous, which is certainly not my intent here or anywhere else. "I Still Haven't Found..." is simply a song that I feel comes with a story that demands to be told, one that I'm confident in saying would not have happened at any point if not for U2. I'll start by rectifying a lie. The first U2 album I ever owned was October, and that was not, as I've frequently told other fans, because it was simply the only one I'd heard of at the time. I was more than aware that there were better-known (and admittedly better-sounding) U2 albums in existence. What made me go out and buy it before All That You Can't Leave Behind or Achtung Baby was that I'd heard how overtly spiritual the album's content was. I couldn't even explain to myself why it was that I felt so intrigued. At the time I was only 13, and for the preceding three or four years religion had played a relatively minor role in my life. Although I was baptised a Catholic, my parents only really adhered to the rituals of Catholicism out of reverence for tradition rather than any genuine sense of religiosity. As my mother's brief flirtation with making us regular church-goers ended when I was probably no older than 9, there was no way I could lay claim to having had any profound religious experiences, or, at least, none that I could remember. Yet from that point on, as my obsession with U2 grew and my collection of their records began to increase, I was starting to find it hard not to notice the biblical imagery in much of their lyrics. It would shock me to hear Bono suddenly cry out "Jesus can you take the time/to throw a drowning man a line?" or "I waited patiently for the Lord/He inclined and heard my cry." Yet it was during Christmas 2002 that the jewel in the crown of my collection came in the form of The Joshua Tree. Out of all the songs on the album, the one that I played the most quickly became "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." The song touched me like nothing else ever had. I had heard it many times previously, yet it was only now that the full beauty and richness of it got to me, somehow tapping into that sense of unfulfilled yearning for spiritual satisfaction that had been awoken in me via October: "I still haven't found what I'm looking for, I still haven't found what I'm looking for." Such earnestness made me feel uncomfortable...and at the same time strangely vulnerable. It was as though the band was coming from a place where I couldn't go, articulating an experience of something that I couldn't grasp. They had something that I didn't, something that seemed to make them feel such immense pain and anguish yet also reach the heights of the purest joy and ecstasy at the same time. I felt too embarrassed to admit even to myself that it was something I was starting to want as well. Things started to change in the years that followed. It was a slow process, but my life began to be shaped more and more by the influences I was absorbing from U2. My attempt to get my hands on every book that Bono mentioned having read lead to my re-discovering a love for reading; trawling through U2 fan-fiction Web sites inspired me to begin writing; a desire to emulate the Edge made me persevere with playing the guitar. But perhaps most of all, the band's outspokenness on matters of faith and social justice caused me to try to become more politically literate and also more open to ideas about religion and spirituality. The latter topic became something of an obsession. Over the next six years, my reading matter consisted almost entirely of books about religion and faith, from authors that Bono had name-checked, like Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, and Philip Yancey, to many he hadn't. I also tried as best I could to get close to what the band themselves thought about faith, reading and re-reading any article or interview with them where the subject was broached. What had started out as a lingering interest had become a desperate quest for meaning. Not a day seemed to go by when I didn't ponder the big questions: Was there a God? Were the claims made by any of the world's religions true? And if so, why was the world the way it was? And yet no matter how much I read, watched, talked or thought about these questions, something wasn't clicking. I seemed terminally unable to suspend my rationale, to make the leap of faith that belief in God required. I also felt that even if U2's approach to matters of the spirit felt non-threatening, I was beginning to realise how much I disagreed with a lot of the rules and dogmas of many organised belief systems, particularly within Christianity. Although I admired the genius of a man like C.S. Lewis, I was repulsed by what I saw as his bigoted and primitive attitudes toward homosexuality, women and other religions. News also seemed to be forever hitting the headlines about religious extremism: Christian fundamentalists using the Bible to justify war, the bombing of abortion clinics and capital punishment; Catholic priests discouraging condom use, helping AIDS to flare up across Africa; Muslim fanatics blowing up schools, just because they contained the children of people who were antipathetic to their views. Because of all this, I couldn't help feeling that religion was little more than a cause of discord, division and violence. But this didn't stop the yearning I had for some sort of belief. Despite the abhorrent elements that seemed characteristic of many established religious structures, I envied the sense of certainty and stability that many who existed within them seemed to have. I focused more and more on Bono's sayings about faith in an attempt to convince myself that there was a way to reconcile my suspicion of organised religion with a desire to believe in God. Yet I still couldn't shake off the sense that to believe would mean that I would inevitably have to embrace many of the elements of religion that I found despicable. I felt conflicted, and one song seemed to sum up my predicament: "I still haven't found what I'm looking for, I still haven't found what I'm looking for." Things took a considerably different turn in September 2007, when I moved to London to begin life as a university student. The world I became exposed to was beyond anything I had ever known. I was fascinated by people's stories and experiences of places I had never visited, and loved the way the atmosphere was so politically charged, with every viewpoint and opinion fiercely argued about and debated. My friends and I would often congregate in our rooms from late at night until the early hours of the morning to argue about questions relating to Life, the Universe and Everything; and more often than not, religion was a topic of intense debate. As I often do when I'm going through change or uncertainty, I had started to listen intently again to the series of interviews that Bono gave to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner back in 2005, which were serialised as podcasts. The first of these, in which Bono talks candidly about his early experiences with religion, I had frequently listened to whenever I felt in need of direction or guidance. Yet it was in my first year of university that I felt his words seeming to relate the most to what I was going through. Only a few weeks in, a friend invited me along to a meeting of the university Christian Union. Having no idea what to expect, I went along to see what it was like. As things progressed, it became increasingly bizarre how, according to his words in Rolling Stone, much of my experiences with the group seemed to emulate those that Bono had had with the Shalom group when he was my age. I didn't feel at all threatened at the first meeting; on the contrary, the people there seemed to exactly match Bono's description: "...they were passionate, they were funny, and they seemed to have no material desires in the world whatsoever." I was also elated when the leaders of the group, two people in the year above me called Richard and Lynne, agreed to meet up with me regularly in private to discuss matters of the spirit. Slowly, as the two dismantled many of my doubts about the big questions relating to faith, I started to feel more of their ideas and teachings getting through to me. It was finally in March 2008 that I made the choice. Sitting in the bedroom of my friend Owen, who was a Muslim convert, late at night, we spent hours discussing matters of religion. As I felt more and more of what he was saying starting to click with me, I felt a sense of awakening that I'd never felt before. One of the big questions that had been bothering me -- that of which religion was the right one to choose -- suddenly seemed irrelevant; what mattered was which one was right for me. As I left his room and headed back down to mine at about 4 a.m., I realised that something fundamental had changed. If ever there was a time to make a leap of faith, it was now. So I leapt. Initially, my spiritual mentors were overjoyed that I'd finally embraced Christianity. However, that joy turned to friction when it transpired that the cheery, friendly exterior that I'd been exposed to at first was a facade. Just as the people Bono had known in the Shalom group had initially pretended that his, Larry and Edge's involvement in U2 didn't bother them when in fact it did to a huge degree, my friends in the Christian Union turned out to not be so comfortable with my refusal to believe that homosexuals, women who aspired to positions of leadership within the Church, and those of other faiths were destined to burn in hell. The Christian Union meetings became increasingly uncomfortable as I felt under pressure to believe the view of the Scriptures that they were dictating. Unwilling to conform, I tried to distance myself. And yet I couldn't escape without the feeling that they were right and I was somehow wrong. I couldn't relate to the strident sense of certainty so many of them seemed to display. How could they be so sure of something that they couldn't see, hear or touch physically? Yet whenever I'd aired such doubts within these circles, I had for the first time known what it was to feel people regard you, to quote Bono, "as though you were some kind of exotic plant." I also clung to his words about the disdainful attitude of the Shalom group to his involvement with U2, which seemed to perfectly articulate my feelings about my Christian Union friends' attitudes to issues like homosexuality and other faiths: "I just couldn't see how it equated to the God I believed in. I just didn't buy it." I still don't. As I was mired in uncertainty, one song now more than ever came into the void left by the very people I couldn't help feeling should have been supporting me and a God I couldn't be entirely sure hadn't abandoned me. "I have climbed the highest mountains I have run through the fields Only to be with you Only to be with you I have run, I have crawled I have scaled these city walls These city walls Only to be with you But I still haven't found what I'm looking for." I had felt that everything I had sacrificed and strived for in order to be near to God was at risk of being lost, all because I just couldn't overcome the immense doubts I had, not only concerning how he wanted those of us on Earth to conduct our lives, but also whether he even existed at all. "You broke the bonds And you loosed the chains Carried the cross And my shame All my shame You know I believe it But I still haven't found what I'm looking for." I knew I could say with confidence that I believed it. But I was already starting to feel as though I'd made a mistake. Yet throughout this time, the song became a source of solace, and my decision to finally completely sever my ties with the Christian Union, and with the evangelical fundamentalist movement as a whole, was cemented when I realised how much they truly matched Bono's description of the Shalom: "There were some good people...but it was a rejection of the world. And I think even then, we realised that you can't escape the world, particularly not in small, intense religious meetings, which can be even more corrupt and more bent in terms of the pressures they exert on people than the outside forces." I knew at this point that I needed sanity. It was over the summer, as feuds within the Anglican Church in Britain raged over the ordination of homosexuals and female bishops, that a curate in Oxford pointed me in the direction of a man who was the head chaplain at Kings College in London. As we became friends and he assuaged me of many of my doubts, I realised that it was possible to be a part of a religious group that refused to pass judgment on anyone, regardless of their faith, gender or sexual orientation. We still meet regularly to discuss matters of the spirit, and it's been among him and many other people in the Kings Chaplaincy group that I've found a whole different mindset, one that encourages tolerance, debate and discourse, prioritises social justice, and ultimately lacks the wide-eyed fanatical zeal of the fundamentalists at my own university. It seems that I've found what Bono never did: a church I could receive in. The doubts are still there. Yet the most important thing I think I've learned is how important doubt is. Bono perhaps most astutely expressed it when he said "The life of a true believer is one of a more uphill struggle...where things are illuminated along the way." Without that struggle, I'm all too aware of how easy it would be to lose sight of this life in an effort to get to the next one (if it even exists). Certainty, I realise, is what makes people extremists, from the fundamentalists in a student group to the fanatics who are prepared to blow themselves up in the name of their religion. As a great man I've referenced more than a few times here put it, "A faith needs a doubt." Yet something else he said has served as a constant reminder to me of that: "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." I probably never will. © @U2/Fry, 2008.
|
|
|
||||||
|
||||||||
