This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball.
This has been a great last month for me with a new album by Imelda May and Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday (which doesn’t seem to have cheered him up at all). Then, this week one of my best bands, Crowded House, released ‘Dreamers are Waiting’. The problem with this album is that it makes me want to listen to the whole back catalogue stretching into the mid-1980s.
The title itself is evocative. Every generation needs dreamers – people who can see beyond the immediate challenges and imagine a different world in the future; people who don’t agree that we just have to accept the way the world is now, but envisages something better. And, as the album title suggests, dreamers have to have the patience to wait and work for that future, not just stamp their feet when they don’t get immediate satisfaction.
One of the songs on the album goes even deeper. ‘Love isn’t hard at all’ is a beautiful song, but – and maybe this was the intention – the sentiment struck me as wrong. Love is hard. To love someone means to put them and their interests first. The Beatles knew that “you can’t buy me love” – it’s a relationship to be struck, not a commodity to be acquired.
Actually, the song goes on to get it right. “It feels like love isn’t hard at all” – I get that. When all is well or romance is high, loving feels easy. But, love demands more than sentiment or casual ease … as anyone who has ever loved another person knows all too well. Love is costly; love, as the Apostle Paul reminds us in a letter often read at weddings, “is patient, love is kind, … is not envious or boastful or arrogant, … it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
So, to go full circle, love lies at the heart of patient dreaming, too. Love draws us into a place of openness and vulnerability, a place where others might ridicule us or call us naive for our longing for mercy.
In other words, love hurts, but is worth the cost. So, I’m going to dream on and learn to wait.
June 8, 2021 at 10:22 am
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one”, Imagine…. seems so far and distant the words and ideas John Lennon expressed, one world, one people. Seems to me there is a great battle taking place and most not aware of it, between the politics of division and the politics of belonging. A symptom of the former is radicalisation. Waking today to news from my home city of London, Ontario, a very quiet, unremarkable place, in what is mainly a very tolerant, peaceful country, a terrorist incident with four members of a Muslim family murdered by a young man whom police managed to stop as he neared London’s mosque. What more violence did he have in mind? How can be filled with so much hatred? Nowhere is immune to becoming embroiled in division. Love is hard and costs, yes. Intolerance, hatred is harder and costs a lot more, though maybe at the start it does not feel that way. I hope the dreamers find their collective voice soon.
June 8, 2021 at 10:41 am
A lot of wisdom here from Carl Sagan. Is it that hard to give peace a chance?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8
June 8, 2021 at 5:27 pm
On the strength of your recommendation we enjoyed an Imelda May gig a few years back, I’ve given time to ‘Rough & Rowdy Ways’, read some good books (‘Sleepwalking’ stands out in the memory – WW1), & now you tell me I’ve got to learn to dream … & to wait!
June 9, 2021 at 11:19 am
Life’s tough, Steve!
June 9, 2021 at 12:35 pm
Reblogged this on Andrew James.