We are approaching the 26th anniversary of the release of the iconic U2 album The Joshua Tree. It was released on March 9, 1987.
That album has had a long-term effect on me. Several of the songs have lyrics that I cannot shake.
But the song, more than any other on the album, that has stuck with me is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for.”
Today, we read Psalm 88 together after breakfast. I’m sure I’ve read it before, but I don’t recall doing so. The psalm is one very bleak bit of literature. The psalmist doesn’t end with any uplifting words at all; God doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight or in hearing. Yet, the poet calls out:1
But I—to you, Yhwh, I have cried for help; in the morning my plea comes to meet you. Why, Yhwh, do you spurn me, hide your face from me? I have been weak and dying since youth; I have carried your terrors, I am at a loss. Your great fury has overwhelmed me; your dreadful deeds have destroyed me. They have encircled me like water all day; they have surrounded me altogether. You have put loved one and neighbor at a distance from me, my acquaintances . . . darkness. . . .
John Goldingay’s translation of the last line trails off, since the Hebrew makes little sense and the versions are little help: any English translation is a guess; and he suggests that it is perhaps intentionally incoherent. Are you ever incoherent? I am.
Some Christians have responded to this psalm as simply a “negative example”: here’s what happens to you if you don’t turn from your sin, or some such (nonsense). As Goldingay notes, “It is extraordinary that this person keeps praying at all, and the psalm is an expression of extraordinary faith.”2 We might like to assume that “of course God answered this person; we just don’t know how or when.” But do we? As Walter Brueggemann notes, “God is not always on call.”3
To keep calling into the silence is an act of faith.
We start life with calling out for our needs to be met. At first, they’re relatively simple: food, warmth (being hugged/held), cleanliness, sleep, activity. As we grow, they become more complex and more cerebral, in addition to those initial basics. We want to be loved; we want to find meaning in what we do; and we begin to see that others are as needy as we are, so we long for justice and righteousness in our relationships, in our families, in our communities, in our world. And it doesn’t take long to notice, even as children, that those longings, those yearnings, frequently are blocked or unachievable or just stomped out of us.
We are all looking for something, even someone. We may find bits and pieces of what we’re looking for; and sometimes we glimpse even more than we knew before of what we’re looking for. Our “looking for” grows. (It’d be so much simpler were this not true.)
So: despite finding lots of things, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. For the psalmist, as he approaches death, he thinks that he’ll die in the state of “not-having-found.”
Bono’s song can cover a lot of ground. For me, it’s covered all sorts of things, at different times and in various circumstances. In fact, there are few times when it’s not been in my head.
What to do with that? with that on-going and shifting/growing longing, yearning?
One option is to kill it, in one way or another. “You want too much” (so don’t want so much). “Just trust God; all good things come to them who trust him” (and the corollary: if you don’t get those good things, there’s something wrong with you). “You want the wrong things” (again: there’s something wrong with you).
The much better option is to allow my yearnings to live, even to grow. This seems, for me, to require two things. (1) Grief: I have to permit myself to grieve (for myself, for those around me) the things that I yearn for; I have to acknowledge that the world is a terrible place, in many ways (and that I’m a contributor to that awfulness). (2) Prayer: I have to join the psalmist, on days when I don’t see anything but bleakness. I need to gripe and whine to God about all that I don’t see God doing. I want God to end some things. I want God to fix/correct/straighten out many other things.
I continue to call out into the silence.
Part of this little meditation was prompted by Psalm 88, and then by Malcolm Guites comments for Friday of the first week of Lent, and then by Merna’s note to me that she’d seen a reference to a new(? 6 months old) recording of the great U2 song by “Playing for Change,” a group that has done quite a few wonderful round-the-world compilation performances; we highly recommend it. In general, check them out (on youtube.com) for other songs, too.
In this case, the original co-producer of The Joshua Tree, Daniel Lanois, joins the “Playing for Change” troupe for the performance. You can watch/listen to it here: "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Look for." In this case, what is looked for is persons swallowed up by evil in all its forms.
The translation is by John Goldingay in his Psalms commentary, volume 2, p. 643.
Psalms commentary, volume 2, p. 659.
W. Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, p. 79.
Jim, amazing to see someone like you looking to the U2 song. Someone who essentially had one adult job for his entire career, one partner, one place of residence, seemed to enjoy the life he's chosen, for most of your lifetime. There are lots of people who change all those features of those regularly in search of something different, but not you. For you to resonate to the U2 song is interesting and worth deep thought. thanks for sharing.