The Weight of Living

In case you haven’t noticed, I am slightly obsessed with Bastille at the moment. I’ve really liked a couple of their songs for a while now, but after my friend gave me a CD with their entire album, I realized how much I loved all their stuff. What do I like about Bastille? Well, the music is excellent and their lyrics seem to capture something very real and poignant about life.

There’s an albatross around your neck,
All the things you’ve said,
and the things you’ve done,
Can you carry it with no regrets,
Can you stand the person you’ve become,
Ooh there’s a light

This one, The Weight of Living Pt 1, is one of my favorites. It references The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In this poem the mariner shoots the albatross which his crewmates believed had brought them good luck. They are angry at the mariner for killing the bird, and as punishment he is forced to wear the dead albatross around his neck. Making a long story short, the other sailors die, and the mariner is left the sole survivor, still with the albatross hanging about him. He is eventually rescued, but is forced to wander the earth for the rest of his life, telling his story to others as a warning.

Just as the albatross represented the mariner’s guilt, we tend to carry the burden of our past. Our life up to this moment has shaped who we are now, for good or bad. That can be quite the weight to bear. We can’t remake ourselves new, we can’t deny that our past has defined us. But the question is, as the song says, “Can you stand the person you’ve become?” Can you accept who your past has made you? We can’t change the past, but we have the choice to let it pull us down or use the weight to grow stronger. We can let the past determine our future, or use the past to make wiser decisions about our future. We can repeat the past or make the future better. We all carry an albatross. But what do we do with it?

And as Christians our guilt has been forgiven. We want to hold onto our sins and try to make things better ourselves. We take an odd delight in burdening ourselves rather than accepting the mercy of God. The guilt of our past has been removed. We no longer carry it. We’ve been liberated by God’s grace. There is no longer condemnation. Now in a sense we must still carry our albatross, for there is no escaping the consequences of our past. Our actions and our decisions will impact us, we can’t just erase everything that’s happened. So we carry the consequences, but not the guilt. So for me, the weight of living is the reality of our existence as fallen creatures. We are sinners living in a sinful world, and so there will be a weight to our living. We bear the ramifications of Adam’s fall and our own depravity. But rather than living and dying to eternal condemnation, we look forward to an eternity with no weight of sin. This is only our journey, and indeed, we sometimes feel the burden of our condition heavily, but we are going to a better place. The ultimate price for our sin has been borne by the Lord Himself so we can be completely and totally freed from this weight. What we experience is but a minute fraction of the intensity of judgement that Christ suffered for us. And because of Christ’s work on our behalf, we look forward to the total liberation from our sin that we will have someday.

In the words of Spurgeon, “Christian, the hot day of weariness lasts not for ever; the sun is nearing the horizon; it shall rise again with a brighter day than thou hast ever seen upon a land where they serve God day and night, and yet  rest from their labours. Here, rest is but partial, there, it is  perfect….There…the eye undimmed, the voice unfaltering, the heart unwavering, and the immortal being is wholly absorbed in infinite delight…when mortality shall be swallowed up of life, and the Eternal Sabbath shall begin.”