I was never a particularly big fan of ye olde Screamo-Emo during its mid-2000s hey-day (I was already in college at the time, so was perhaps just a tad too old for it to hit me in the adolescent feelings), but I still had a soft spot for the band-name Taking Back Sunday. It’s a brilliant one, frankly: if (as this series has repeatedly argued) Sunday is the day when you are most likely to get stuck in your own head brooding over the trajectory of your life–“when the weight of [your] decision was impossible to hold”–then Sunday naturally is the day that you must take back and make your own, if you are to have any hope of snapping out of it. Hence I’ve always made room on my Sunday Morning playlist for their 2004 hit “This Photograph Is Proof (I Know You Know).”

I’ve taken a shine to this song for a couple reasons:

1) there’s something quasi-religious about its impulse towards perfect epistemological assurance–that anthemic “I know you know”–that resonates with my own religious upbringing, viz. how the Brother of Jared “had faith no longer, but perfect knowledge,” implying that although without faith it is impossible to please God, nevertheless our ultimate goal really is to get beyond faith, to not just believe, but know (which we practice at and try to enact throughout our own repetitions of “I know…” during Fast and Testimony Meetings–even if we don’t actually know yet).

And 2) because photographs really are evidence. I got home from my mission the same year as when this song was released, and in retrospect one of my regrets is that I always took photos of the converts just before they got baptized. The photos are fine, though as always, the smiles are a little forced, their body postures a little guarded, their eyes a little nervous. It wasn’t till I saw some snapshots that other missionaries had snapped of the convert arising from the water, leaving the font, that I realized my mistake: their smiles were always broader, brighter, spontaneous and joyful in a way that cannot be faked or forced. Their eyes had genuine relief in them, that they had indeed felt something that they feared they wouldn’t; their countenance literally shined, their faces contorted in a happiness that only comes from actually feeling the Holy Spirit–it was photographic proof of the existence of God.

Even if they later forgot that feeling and slipped into inactivity (as they often did), you nevertheless could never deny that they had really once felt it, that they had not faked it, because you had a picture of it. You would always have evidence: This photograph is proof. I know you know.

Taking Back Sunday’s solution to the Sunday morning mood is to “remember more than you’d like to forget,” to openly embrace and accept all your overwhelming memories and anxieties, and then release them all in an emotive catharsis (the entire modus operandi of the old Emo scene). But that’s not the only strategy for taking back your Sunday; another is to not remember a thing at all. That appears to be Cat Steven’s goal when he covered the Christian hymn “Morning Has Broken” in 1971.

A 1931 English hymn based on a traditional Scottish melody, Cat Steven’s cover popularized it around the world. Lyrically, the focus is not on brooding over the collective weight of history since the dawn of creation, but erasing it: “Morning has broken, like the first morning,” is how it opens, “Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.” This is a Sunday morning “Born of the one light, Eden saw play.” This is a song that proceeds as though the Fall never happened, as though it were still the first morning in Eden.

Emphasis on the “as though.” The song isn’t naive; it’s fully aware that this beautiful dawn is only “like” the first morning, that the Blackbird singing is only “like” the first bird. The fact that it’s a Blackbird in particular singing feels relevant: implicitly, the song is acknowledging that one must push from one’s mind a whole mess of dark history to enjoy a beautiful Sabbath morning. But as a hymn, the song also implies that such is not impossible: we are of course looking forward to the day when the Earth will receive again its Edenic glory, when the infinite and eternal Atonement really will wipe out that dark history, when “the elements shall melt with a fervent heat and the earth be rolled up like a scroll.” The Blackbird will no longer have any darkness associated with it. Like the ancient-day Saints, we are supposed to be looking towards the Latter-end as though it has already happened–part of which, we are apt to forget, is that we will have a first day again.

But of course the next first day will be different from the original first; we will (hopefully) have a greater appreciation for it after all the historical horror and suffering we’ve passed through. It really is a Blackbird that sings. It doesn’t feel a coincidence that Cat Stevens recorded “Morning Has Broken” only a year after Tea for Tillerman, his album chock-full of such melancholy hits as “Wild World,” “Hard Headed Woman,” “Father and Son,” and “Where Do The Children Play.” That is, there’s nothing maudlin or saccharine about Stevens’ choice of that hymn to cover: he had to pass through a dark place himself to get to it. We all must.