Learning Mumford & Sons or Did I Just Go To Church?!

“Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires!
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”  –MacBeth

I’m very late to the party with this, I know, but bear with me anyway.  While I’ve been listening to Mumford & Sons for a while, I haven’t really listened to them until recently.  Not with the same passionate, slightly obsessive vigor with which I treat Kings of Leon.  And that means going in search of the lyrics, reading and learning and memorizing them the way one does poetry.

It was the song, “Roll Away Your Stone” that took me to the internet to search for its words.  Every time I listened to it, my attention would hone in on “Stars, hide your fires.”  I knew it was Shakespeare, but I couldn’t remember which until I was reading a book and saw it quoted from MACBETH.  Excited that Mumford & Sons would quote that infamous, dark and grisly play, I searched for the rest of the words around it, hoping to see what message they were trying to convey.

It was on one of those lyric sites that I found others’ comments; their theories on the meaning and it was there that I found the Christian message woven into the words.  Roll away your stone could be in regards to moving aside the stone that blocked the body of Christ within the cave from which he resurrected.  Then of course there was all of this soul and grace talk and I had a very STEPBROTHERS-type WHAT?! moment.  In talking to friends, it was agreed that much of their music is based in faith.  After I sat there wearing a frown and staring at my computer screen like it had turned green and started oozing pus, I wondered why that should change the feel of the song for me.  Why does knowing a song is “Christian Rock” or sung by a “Christian” singer devalue it in my little atheist mind?  But it does.  Inexplicably.  There are sites I stay away from that have the infamous numbers colon numbers following some italicized text, songs that will peak my interest until I see the capitalized H in He and books that I will flat out not go near, especially if Kirk Cameron has anything to do with them (I don’t think I’m alone in that one, thought.)  And I wonder if I’m missing out by limiting myself this way.

There was a time when this wasn’t so.  In my youth, when I was going through my questioning phase where I asked, “What if?” though it always preceded, “Eh, still don’t buy it” (I sort of started out agnostic, dabbled in belief and then went full-blown atheist) one of my favorite books was the Darkness series by Frank E. Peretti.  I LOVED these books of angels versus demons, light battling dark and the sacrifice of Christ painting it all in his blood.  It never bothered me then, so why does it now?  A few years back a wonderful book series by Robert Liparulo was recommended to me, but it came with the warning, “It gets a little Jesusy, though.”  I enjoyed the books, but it did taint my opinion when the Christian message started to bleed through like Sharpie on rice paper.

As an atheist, I’ve somehow surrounded myself with Christians.  My best friends all proclaim their love of Jesus and it doesn’t affect my opinion of them, so why should it my interests in music and books?  Why limit myself because I don’t believe in the message.  I still read mythology and fairy tales and to me, it’s no different.  I don’t really know the answer.  I guess I’ll just leave it to my friends and Mumford & Sons to change my mind, one song at a time.