‘Mirrorball’ – Elbow

Tom writes:

I still remember it like it was yesterday. It was the morning after the night before (you can imagine for yourself what that might mean, and you’ll probably be wrong, but hey, a bit of mystery is no bad thing!). In the April morning sunshine, I was walking along the suburban streets as though they were air, skipping several perfectly usable bus stops because that would mean standing still, and I was too full of joy to even think about standing still. Around me the world glowed.

Given much of the past twelve months had been disastrous, a time of being broken into a thousand pieces and being unsure how they might be put back together in any coherent way, a time of anger and bitterness and confusion, a time in which what should have been the start of something exciting and encouraging fell apart and ended as something devastating and disheartening, such a feeling was remarkable.

It is this moment that I think of whenever I hear Elbow’s song, “Mirrorball”. The song is a reminder that how we see the world is rarely based on unfiltered fact. Rather, our interactions with the world are shaped by so many factors –not least our own mood and recent life events. The band’s lyrics reflect deeply on the ways in which finding love results in seeing the world differently. What were once normal street scenes have become a ballroom in which the couple dance together. Life has not always been a bed of roses since, but when I hear this song (written and released a few years later than that moment over twenty years ago) I am transported back to that morning, that walk, that feeling of a world transformed by love.

Of course, the love that changes our perception of the world does not have to be romantic. While the songs lyrics remind me particularly of that morning, the ways in which my perception was changed after a period of seeing the world as grey and blurred in that spring involve other loves as well. There is the love of friendship, the joy of late nights talking about the deepest of pains and of cross-country dashes on empty roads across highland moors. There is the love of family, the welcoming arms of familiarity and stillness and the opportunity to say nothing because nothing needs to be said. And there is the love that I will call divine – the unconditional love that holds us and enfolds us and reassures us in sudden moments we do not expect, like stepping off a ferry on a jetty and knowing not only that you are welcome but that, despite how everything feels, all will be well.

Whenever I preach on the moment in the Jesus stories that we call the Transfiguration, the moment on the mountaintop where Peter, John, and James see Jesus glowing with divine light and spending time in conversation with Elijah and Moses, I’m reminded of “Mirrorball”. To me, that moment is a reminder that encounters with divine love, the divine love most clearly revealed in Jesus, change the way we perceive the world. That is why, even in a world such as it seem right now, we are able to have hope in a better future, find joy amidst the grief, believe peace is possible despite the deep injustices and violence around us – because we have experienced the way in which love turns dark streets to dance floors and the moon into a mirrorball – we know that everything has indeed changed, and it is our call to live out that change that love brings in the world, so that we might reflect the love of God in the world in a million myriad ways.

Find out more about Elbow at https://elbow.co.uk/