I am sitting in a B&B with the odd name of Petra in Galway,
Ireland and listening to U2’s October on headphones. This is the first time I
have intentionally listened to music since leaving Seattle two weeks ago. That
may be a “record” for me…pardon the pun, I’ve been travelling a while and words
and sounds feel different to me than they did two weeks ago. U2 makes so much
sense in this landscape, and not just because they are an Irish rock band. In
their early work—Boy and October in particular—there is a deep longing for the spiritual,
a reaching for communion that is resonating deeply in me at the moment. This
music has been part of all but the first decade of my life, and it continues to
be a soundtrack to my physical, mental and spiritual search. My physical,
mental and spiritual yearning. Gospel for the barely adolescent and the
middle-aged.
I’m in Ireland and I’m searching.
Searching for something I can’t define. Is that perhaps
the true impetus for travel, for exploration? (Not for “vacationing,” a term
that implies the need to vacate. It could be used in a quasi-Zen sense, I
suppose, but it mostly makes me think of zombies. Blank. Bleak blook void.) I
fell into this trip by happenstance, by lucky accident, but that doesn’t make
it any less necessary. As I’ve stumbled into middle-age these last couple of
years, I’ve had to fight a dangerous sense of ennui. My life is mostly
predictable, safe and well-defined. There are most certainly benefits to this. I
do not take stability lightly, and I’ve worked damned hard for that stability.
Yet I’ve found it increasingly hard to challenge myself on a fundamental level
and I’ve just not been able to shake the feeling that I’m dangerously close to
becoming what I never wanted to be—bloated, full of empty gestures and unable
to touch the spark that makes the heart race. Travel, with its potential to
forget everything about the normal daily routine and draw up a new plan every
day, has come into my life at an opportune moment. I’ve desperately needed to
see things from a different angle.
U2 was the second important band in my life and the first
I discovered on my own. The Doors, the first important band, were handed to me
by an older brother and belonged to a different era that was long gone by the
time I heard them. U2 was mine, a band of my world, before R.E.M., Metallica,
Guns N’ Roses, Sonic Youth and all the other important bands that I
subsequently discovered. I was barely into my double-digits and still very much
a devout Catholic altar boy when I found U2. Their music did not exclude either
experience as so much rock does. Most rock—the best rock—offers itself as a
substitute for religion. Early U2 is about the boy searching for God, innocence
and the first kisses of experience set to some of the most beautiful guitar
chimes these ears have ever heard. Several years later, when I left Catholicism
behind, their music helped me deal with my doubts and questioning. U2’s music
has never been explicitly about religion as much as the search for divine, for
meaning in the daily troubles of the world and the vastness of the sky. Who
among us does not want to experience that moment of ecstasy that great music
can bring? At the same time, U2 has always felt more inclusive to me than the
other music I like, which is very often defined by what it is not.
I’m in Galway, Ireland. I am thinking about a part of my
life I haven’t thought about in decades.
I’m connecting with my Catholic upbringing in this
amazing country. Not the dogma and politics and patriarchal bullshit that
eventually caused me to hate the church—though I’ve mellowed some, I still
harbor an intense anger at those aspects. Let me be completely honest though: I
don’t want to deal with those here. They are long travelled roads that I’m
tired of, that are suitable for debate in other contexts but I’m in a different
space at the moment. What I’m connecting with right now is the part of me that
loved being an altar boy. I loved the mystery of the sacrament and the
reverence of ritual. The very silence of reverence installed a sense of awe in
me, connecting me with a deeper experience of life. I thought, in those years,
that I might be a priest. Later I would learn what priests too often are
(human, and sometimes poor examples thereof) and later the hormones would kick
in as the boy becomes the adolescent. These things, along with a critical examination
of what I believe and, from that perspective, the inability of the church to view
crucial parts of its teachings as metaphors as well as its stubborn lack of
progression drove me away for good. Before that, though? Reverence and mystery
and awe. Something I’ve felt stepping into some of the amazing churches in Ireland,
something I’ve missed so much in this context. I walk into a church and I want
to kneel, even though I don’t believe. The old reflexes run deep. I bow my head
and I breathe. I could cry. Atheist me in a church with tears running down my
cheeks.
When Bono sings of the fire in him during “Fire” he may
be referring to the speaking in tongues of his youthful religious experience
but for me his passion and the charging, chaotic sound of the band sound like
nothing but the very essence of creativity. That is, expressing something both
other and completely personal. Losing yourself entirely in the moment of sound
so that the heart is laid bare. This U2 sings the songs that makes young men
testify and young boys cry. U2 has been a church for me to step in when I need
that building around me. Theirs is not a silent reverence but it is reverence
nonetheless. This, then, is one of the ways I pray. Atheists need a spiritual
practice too.
U2 is also the magical boyhood years shared with my
oldest, dearest and best friend. How we dreamed and created and shared the secrets
and mysteries back then! What is it, this glorious shared experience that comes
alive every time I hear these records? It is comic books, The Real Monopoly,
Kool-Aid, NES, Stephen King and Alien. It is treehouses, setting fires in the
woods and stealing Playboys and Penthouses. It is making up rock band names,
drawing album covers, writing lyrics and airbanding in the junk yard atop
rusted cars as the summer trees watched. It is Something Wicked This Way Comes.
That I’ve been blessed to have such a person in my life is something that I do
not ever take for granted. Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall but our friendship
lives on. How I wish he were here right now so we might talk of so many things
in the pubs and on the streets of Ireland.
“JE-RU-SA-LEM!” Any other band singing this exclamation
would leave me indifferent at best. But U2—who were once not famous—sing with a
conviction on October that reacts in me as gospel music likely reacts for many
others. This is dislocated music, desperate to communicate, fire on the tongue.
Strangers in a strange land. With a shout. Throwing bricks through windows. I
am in my church right now. The churches here are more beautiful than any in the
United States but it will still be the church of sound that calls to me.
Before leaving on this trip I told myself to be open to
whatever experience it would be, to not go in with any preconceived notions
which are the enemy of travel and exploration. Little did I suspect this would
lead to me thinking about—and connecting with—my spiritual roots like this.
Travelling, for me, is not simply about what I saw. I have no list with
checkboxes that I must mark off on a trip. Pictures will be taken and pictures
are just fine but probably not something I’ll ever look at again. How much will
be different when I go back to “real” life? How much have I changed? Things are
not static, and the answer one day is different the next. This trip has opened
up so much in me and I will be a long time processing it. You find pieces of
yourself in the strangest of places.
I am in Ireland. I am not the same.
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