Fading Away

The air temperature outside the van hovered around 91 degrees Fahrenheit even though it was nine o’clock in the evening and dark thunderclouds were creeping over the sky.  The highway stretching out in front of us was mostly empty as we drove home last night.  I put a CD in the player - U2 the best of 1980 – 1990 and I began to sing along as I drove.  

This is what I do when I drive. It keeps me awake and makes the drive seem shorter and most of the time it amuses my wife.  She claims that she likes it when I sing.  And most of the time my kids tolerate it.  At least I think they tolerate it; I can’t see them rolling their eyes in the back seat. But last night as we drove home through the heat and insect swarms smashing themselves against the windshield, I could hear my family singing along with me (and Bono). 

I’m not exactly the sentimental type, but I had one of those moments as I heard my kids in the back seat singing “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…”  You know those moments, right?  One of those proud and happy father moments, the kind of moment that is impossible to capture or describe.  I won’t say that I was teary-eyed, but it was something like that.

And had that been the end it would have been, as the Passover song says, Dayenu – it would have been enough.  But there was more.

The CD continued to play through Sunday Bloody Sunday and then Bad my kids were less familiar with the lyrics for these songs so they stopped singing, but I continued listening.  And that’s when I heard something I’d never heard before.

I’ve been listening to U2 since I was just a bit older than my daughter is now, for 20 some years now… (I’m old, aren’t I?)  And there, in the car as we drove through the surprising heat of a Minnesota summer evening I heard the song Bad in a way that nearly broke me open.

Bad is the 7^th track from U2’s 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire.  It is a song about addiction and watching someone who is suffering and wanting to intervene for them.

If you twist and turn away

If you tear yourself in two again

If I could, yes I would

If I could, I would

Let it go

Surrender

Dislocate

If I could throw this

Lifeless lifeline to the wind

Leave this heart of clay

See you walk, walk away

Into the night

And through the rain

Into the half-light

And through the flame

And as the Edge played those guitar arpeggios over and over and over again with the driving shuffle of Larry Mullen junior’s drumming and Adam Clayton’s bass, and as the intensity of the song was building and the highway was rolling away behind us, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t Bono singing.  It was Jesus.

If I could through myself

Set your spirit free

I'd lead your heart away

See you break, break away

Into the light

And to the day

To let it go
And so to fade away
To let it go
And so to fade away

This desperation

Dislocation

Separation

Condemnation

Revelation

In temptation

Isolation

Desolation

Let it go

In the car at 65 miles an hour through the heat and fading light with the kids beginning to fall asleep in the back seat and my wife sitting next me I had one of those moments, the kind that mystics through the ages have tried to describe.

I'm wide awake

I'm wide awake

Wide awake

I'm not sleeping

Oh, no, no, no