Soundtrack of My Life - Dear God

This Holy Week on the blog we’re taking a listen down memory lane … or the soundtrack of my life. (See Sunday’s post for an introduction). Simply put, I find that certain songs define certain moments in my life.

Seeing as it is Holy Week, it seems appropriate somehow to write about a song that always draws me back to my room on Upper Main in Stewart Dorm circa 1990 … “Dear God” by XTC.

Dear God, sorry to disturb you
but I feel that I should be heard loud and clear
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears
and all the people that you made in your image
see them fighting in the street
cause they can’t make opinions meet about God
I can’t believe in you

Back in the day, I considered myself a recovering Catholic. After 12 years of Catholic school, I’d stopped going to church. I found myself increasingly frustrated with a male-dominated church that focused on sexual morality, while the world was falling apart around us. The Catholic Church didn’t seem particularly relevant to modern life, and so I left.

I went 3,000 miles across the country to the Pacific Northwest where religion didn’t seem to be much of an issue. It was easy to be non-religious at Lewis & Clark, which while I was there was named the #1 school where God is not by US News & World Report—or something like that. Meanwhile, I watched the 1st Gulf War from the large screen tv in my dorm lounge (man that makes me feel old) , marched with 10,000 others through downtown Portland and stayed up all night in my dorm room debating what the political landscape would look like in a post-cold war world and lamenting all the horrible things being done in our name. Suffering it seemed was all around. And while I still believed in God, I had a hard time figuring out how it was that God “let it all happen.” Hence the affinity of my 18 year old self with this song.

20 years later—now I REALLY feel old!—of course, I’m a nun. Funny how that happened! While I’m still deeply concerned with the existence of suffering in the world, I’m no longer mad at a God that “lets it all happen.” Most of the time anyway. Not that I’ve figured it all out, but it just seems to a 38 year old me that suffering simply is—in many cases caused by other people—but that God is there with us in the midst of it all. Ready to listen to our complaints. Ready for us even not to believe. Hoping we’ll reach out to our brothers and sisters and act in solidarity for justice.