Today, January 30th, marks the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” AKA the Bogside Massacre, when 26 unarmed, nonviolent civilians were killed by police in Derry, Northern Ireland. The murdered were participating in a peaceful civil rights march against the Protestant majority’s marginalization and mistreatment of Irish Catholics who had been left behind in the north after the secession of the Irish Free State in 1922.

The flagrant injustice of the massacre is generally credited with radicalizing the Catholic minority across Northern Ireland, militarizing the IRA^[1]Irish Replublican Army and the pro-Protestant UDA^[2]Ulster Defense Association, and leading to over a quarter century of vicious sectarian violence known under-statedly as “The Troubles.” (I wrote my PhD dissertation and my first book in part on modern Irish history and literature, so this anniversary has been especially auspicious for me.) As I wrote parenthetically about Paul McCartney’s own pro-IRA anthem just a few weeks ago, “Just what is it about Sunday that brings out the worst in us?”

In some ways, it feels almost too on-the-nose for the Troubles to have officially begun on a Sunday: if the first day of the week is already when you most feel like your life is going nowhere, then Sunday is also the day when your internal tensions–both individually and nationally–are most likely to reach their breaking points. Hence, the songs that were written in response to Bloody Sunday in particular can still feel like spot-on Sunday Morning songs just in general.

First and most obviously is U2’s 1983 break-out hit “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” from their third album War.

U2 of course is no stranger to the Sunday Morning; we’d mentioned in a much early entry on Johnny Cash that U2 has narrated the betrayal of Christ from the perspective of Martin Luther King, Jr. in their 1984 hit “Pride (In the Name of Love),” and again from the perspective of Judas on their 1991 track “Until The End of the World.”^[3]Great Sunday Morning songs both, by the way! They were always just a step away from being full-on Christian rockers. How fitting, then, that the song that first transformed them into international arena-anthem rock stars was also a Sunday song. As native Dubliners themselves who were small children during the Bogside Massacre, the members of U2 could bring their own formative trauma to “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

Yet that rock anthem didn’t become a multi-national hit because so many countries care about what happens in Irish politics (though the emerald isle has indeed enjoyed a massive international influence out of all proportion to its modest size and population). No, the song resonates because lyrically, it works equally well on a personal as on a national level. Those opening lines of “I just saw the news today/Oh I can’t close my eyes and make it go away” could indeed be describing an Irish child watching the Bogside Massacre on TV; or someone watching the plane hit the second tower the morning of 9/11; or watching the capitol riots on January 6th; but it could also be someone seeing that their ex has gotten engaged, or that their mother has been diagnosed with cancer, or that their ex-roommate was killed by alcohol poisoning. Even if the catastrophe only affects you personally, it is still no less traumatizing and dispiriting.

To quote their fellow Irishman James Joyce, “In the particular is the universal.” In the particular of Bloody Sunday, U2 was a able to write a universal Sunday morning song.

Joyce also wrote in Ulysses that “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” History was also a nightmare for U2 on Bloody Sunday; so is history a nightmare for us all on every Sunday morning.

The other example I’d like to highlight is the Police’s 1981 hit “Invisible Sun.”

Police frontman Sting said in interviews that he very explicitly wrote the song in response to the hunger strikes held by IRA prisoners in Belfast that were going on at the time (which were themselves a re-enactment of the Great Famine of 1847-48–when over a million Irish peasants died of starvation while bumper crops were being shipped to England under armed guard–a way to highlight the longstanding grievances of the Irish against the United Kingdom). The music video featured scenes from Northern Ireland, which got it banned from the BBC.

Yet once again, in the particular is the universal: his description of conditions prevailing in contemporary Northern Ireland could apply to any number troubled areas all around the world: “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life/Looking at the barrel of an Armalite/I don’t want to spend the rest of my days/Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say,” and so forth.

For that matter, as the verses progress, they could be referring to not only any part of the world, but all parts of the world, at once, right now, in our industrialized, pollution-ridden, anti-human hellscape: “It’s dark all day and it glows all night/Factory smoke and acetylene light,” “And they’re only going to change this place/By killing everybody in the human race,” and so on.

But it’s the chorus that is of special interest to us here, what Sting tried to identify as the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel: “There has to be an invisible sun/It gives its heat to everyone/There has to be an invisible sun/That gives us hope when the whole day’s done…” Cause those of us essaying to be Latter-day Saints also believe in an Invisible Sun, quite explicitly: as we’ve written elsewhere, “The light of Christ…is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made” reads Doctrine and Covenants 88:7. The visible sun is in turn powered by the invisible son, the Son of God.

Because just how do we deal with this world so full of injustice and pollution and terror, where the evil prosper, wherein “we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered”^[4]Malachi 3:14? To quoth the Bard, “who would bear the whips and scorns of time,/Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,/The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,/The insolence of office, and the spurns/That patient merit of th’unworthy takes”?^[5]Hamlet Act III scene i We just have to believe that there is something better out there, that will deliver us and make up for all the misery and suffering and injustice of the world. Such is not just wishful thinking: it is, like all things we experience in this world, something that we sense, something that we feel.

We are fond of saying on occasion that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience; such is also the thesis of the Police’s own “Spirits in the Material World” in fact.

That is, we don’t hope there’s an invisible sun, again, we sense it, feel it, inuit it. But then, that’s how all of our senses work: we simply trust that our eyes see the light, that our ears hear the sounds, and so forth. Cause we could all just be brains in a vat, or plugged into the matrix, or incepted into a mirage, a dream within a dream. We all “walk by faith” just as a matter of course. We trust that our senses detect something real–especially when the soldiers open fire on us on Bloody Sunday.^[6]And also, lest anyone think it’s a little patronizing for a bunch of rich and famous Englishmen to preach “There is no political solution/There is no bloody revolution,” I would … Continue reading

So is it also with the Holy Spirit: we have no more assurance that what we are feeling via the Spirit is real anymore than we have assurance that anything we feel is real. We trust that the Spirit is revealing something we can’t see yet, either. It senses the Invisible Sun, “what gives us hope when the whole day’s done.”