olaH

"You wear guilt, like shackles on your feet, like a halo in reverse."  Those were the words to a Depeche Mode song from more than 20 years ago when they were still in their heyday.  Because of my age, or lack thereof in this case, I only caught the very end of the decade-long Depeche Mode train as it began to fade away in the early 1990s.  After all, Depeche Mode has always been and will likely continue to be inextricably linked to the 1980s.

I did rather like them for quite some time afterward but these lyrics made much more sense to me in recent years than they did in the 1990s when the Depeche Mode craze was still a fairly recent memory.  Part of that is simply because I was younger and less mature back then.  Part of that is also because of my conversion, thus making me more inclined to notice the meaning behind lyrics such as these.

Mourning need not be done when there's nothing to mourn.  Fasting or other forms of suffering or self-sacrifice should not be in vain.  They should be done out of humility and not for show.  They should be done to help us focus on God and to make the lives of those around us better and not just for the sole purpose of making our own lives worse.  If we make our own lives worse just for the sake of it, then it is merely another form of vanity - like shackles on our feet, like a halo in reverse...

Matthew 9: 14-15