Day 74 - Welcome to the Black Parade

Today’s idea is one I have sat on for far too long. It may be a little unconventional, in fact it may be the most unconventional thing I have ever written, which is really saying something believe me. Today I want to talk about what we can learn from the song Welcome to the Black Parade by the band My Chemical Romance.

First things first, go and listen to the song. YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, whatever floats your music streaming boat.

How was it? Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea I’ll grant you, but I hope you managed to make it all the way through at least once. Keep that window/tab/app open as you might like to listen to the little snippets of it as we go through.

I hope that you have recognised from listening to it that it is not a ‘happy’ song. It is a song about struggles, about death and about loss. I hope, however, that you didn’t get too caught up in all the despair and miss the hope, even if it was missed by the Daily Mail who labelled the band a ‘suicide cult’ in their usual balanced and measured manner.

It’s true that the lyrics do touch on some very difficult issues. They feature ideas about mortality and finding the strength to persist through the difficult times. However, what I find when reading them is they make an interesting comparison to the Bible.

Now go with me on this, I promise I mean no heresy when I say that the Bible, on the whole is not a ‘happy’ book. As is often joked, we kill off the main character from season 2 halfway through the season. The disciples experience hatred and prejudice, in the Old Testament, the various tribes spend a significant amount of time razing each other’s cities to the ground. God literally floods the entire world, wiping out life. This is not the plot lines of a child-friendly book, these are the plot lines of a Stephen King novel! And yet, there is so much hope. The resurrection of Jesus, the flames above the heads of the disciples as they sit, hiding from persecution. The blind being able to see, the lame being able to walk, the promise of eternal life, the prophecy of Jesus! I think sometimes we can be afraid to admit that the Bible is not always hopeful, 100% of the time. And that is only natural. On a Sunday morning, we don’t want to hear the dark, depressing stuff. That’s not why we go to church, that’s why we open the News app on our phones! But, as with good and evil, we cannot have the true hopeful message of the Bible without acknowledging the shortcomings, the despair and the death.

Similarly, Welcome to the Black Parade is a song, fundamentally, about the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity and difficulty. The repeated refrain throughout is that ‘We’ll carry on’ and that is what Christians have been doing for thousands of years, through persecution, through hardship, through times of being outlawed. As Congregationalists and Protestants as a whole we have a long and sordid history of being excluded, isolated and even killed for our beliefs and yet here we are, 51 years after the founding of the Congregational Federation, 350+ years after the Act of Uniformity, 2000 years since the birth of Jesus and still we are carrying on!

The singer acknowledges that ‘though you’re dead and gone, believe me, your memory will carry on.’ And surely that is what we, as Christians do as followers of Jesus. Although he may be waiting for us in heaven, and we’re told he’ll return one day, the memory of what he did for us while on Earth is immortalised through the Bible and, hopefully, through the actions of each and every one of us. Right at the beginning of the song, the memory recounts how the father asked his son whether he would ‘be the saviour of the broken, the beaten and the damned.’ We all know that Jesus did not come to be with the righteous, He came to be with the sinner and the outcast – the beaten, the broken and the damned. Of course, this does not mean we shouldn’t strive to be the righteous, it only serves to prove that this acknowledgement of the darker side of human-nature is baked into the Biblical texts.

I could go on and one day perhaps I will. But I hope you can see, from the evangelic messaging in ‘let’s shout it loud and clear’ to the stubbornness of ‘defiant to the end’ and the faithful ‘the world will never take my heart’, this song serves as an unintentional rallying cry to all of us out there who know the power of God and the love He has ready for each one of us. So go out there, acknowledge the despair in the Bible, revel in the hope, listen to the rest of the album and, at the end, shout to anyone who tells you ‘no’ that we will ‘carry on’ for God.

Harry Booton