How often do we find ourselves talking past each other when things get heated? Whether we’re too caught up in what we’re trying to say in the moment, pre-constructing our responses, or just uninterested, we miss what the other person is actually saying. How often do we tell ourselves that we’re just being direct or clear, when we’re actually being cruel or self-righteous? How often does it have absolutely nothing to do with what we think we’re talking about, and is actually just a manifestation of our current or past pains? And when we’re certain that we’re right, what might it take to break us out of this cycle?
In “Broken Record,” an episode of the early 90s family-friendly sci-fi/horror show, Eerie, Indiana, Tod, a nerdy friend of Marshall, the protagonist of the series, buys a record by a band called Pit Bull Surfers (ha!) because Marshall thinks a song like “Eardrum Lobotomy” might help his friend lighten up. Though to Marshall the song (and band) are just a joke, “No-one understands you / No-one digs your dream / Just crank up the music / Don’t wanna hear your parents scream / What you need is / an eardrum lobotomy — eardrum lobotomy playing into your brain!,” Tod becomes obsessed, feeling the song is speaking directly to him, “telling it like it is.” When they go to Tod’s house and put the record on, Tod’s dad, a frustrated and out-of-work farmer, angrily storms into the room. Berating him, he says: “Turn that garbage off right now … What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you stupid enough? Isn’t your brain already full of mush? You wanna pollute that worthless mind of yours even more? Why can’t you study more? Why aren’t you doing your chores? Why do you have to be such a loser?”
Today we might cringe at the sheer rage of Tod’s dad, but just because you’re not yelling at your kid doesn’t mean the judgments are more muted.
That night Tod listens to the record over and over, tears down all the sports posters in his bedroom, transforming from nerd to “headbanger.” The following day, Tod steals and crashes a milk truck. A police officer comes to inform his parents what happened. That’s the final straw for Tod’s Dad. He is convinced it’s the music that is making his son act out. He makes the police officer come upstairs to prove to him that there are secret messages in the music. He finds the record and starts spinning it backward maniacally.
Expecting to hear something sinister, urging the listener to “drop out of school, do drugs, and disrespect parents,” Tod’s Dad is instead smacked upside the head by his own voice screaming from the record, “Turn that garbage off right now … What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you stupid enough? Isn’t your brain already full of mush? You wanna pollute that worthless mind of yours even more? Why can’t you study more? Why aren’t you doing your chores? Why do you have to be such a loser?” Tod’s Dad goes silent, eyes wide. Everyone else walks downstairs leaving the dad alone still spinning the record backwards in shock. He eventually comes down, chastened and deeply sorry. He apologizes to Tod, hugs him, and begins to reconcile with his son.
We occasionally have to allow ourselves to be open to listening to unexpected sources in unexpected places to hear what God is trying to tell us. God is nothing if not unpredictable. It’s not as if the Holy Spirit only moves or speaks to us when we ask. Sometimes all we need is that “still, small voice,” but other times we need something more akin to a megaphone blast. Sometimes God has to come in an almost violent form to shake us out of complacency and error. Tod’s Dad needed to hear what he was saying to his son in a surprising way.
Tod’s Dad needed not “mere words” but “a message with power behind it — the effectual power in fact, the Holy Spirit” (1 Thes 1:5). He was troubled, reeling from the loss of his farm and job a year prior, unable to see that any good could come out of his difficult experiences, and this came out in the way he treated his son. The psychologist Frank Lake once wrote that, “The troubled person cannot be reached except by someone who can see and feel with him the strange, limited universe into which his spirit, crabbed and confined, has shrunk.” Unable to be reached by mild suggestions from his wife or son, God had to be the one who reached out, as God, in Jesus, is the only holder of the intimate knowledge of the totality (and particularity) of all human suffering.
When a previously loving relationship breaks, especially one as elemental as parent/child, the effect is entirely disorienting and leaves one or both parties in a state of shock and constant anxiety. This is what Tod was experiencing. He nostalgically remembers a time when he and his Dad got along, but believes he must have done something to break the relationship. Being a kid, Tod doesn’t understand that his father’s frustration is situational. In his helplessness, he turns to rock music, (as many boys do at that age).
Reconciliation doesn’t always happen. To see it, even in the context of a pretty silly kids’ show, can be healing for those of us (of any age) whose parents rarely apologized for anything. In an episode of the Mockingcast a few years ago, R-J Heijmen said that all children really want to hear from their parents are three things: I love you, I’m proud of you, and I’m sorry. But as Elton John sang in 1976, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” — especially for parents.
What does a parent risk in apologizing? Are we afraid to admit failure? Do we think we will no longer be taken seriously as role models if our fallibility becomes too pronounced? Are we worried that it might shatter the image of perfection we’ve up to this point tried to project to our kids? Will it undermine our authority? These thoughts, though natural, are entirely counter to the way of Jesus.
When we shift the focus from what apologizing might do to us or our status, and instead look to the child who receives such an apology, we see that in addition to the apology, they receive the gift of seeing their parent model the kind of need for forgiveness they themselves also need. This reversion of authority roles counterintuitively restores the trustworthiness of the parent, and confirms for the child that something isn’t right and that it’s not their fault.
When a real apology does happen, it’s nothing short of a miracle. Especially an apology for something big enough to have previously splintered a loving relationship. It’s God making whole what either once was, or maybe even more miraculously, what never was, but always should have been. Maybe the only way to cut through the noise of all these things we can’t or won’t hear in our unending arguments with one another is to just say two unexpected, but needed, words: “I’m sorry.”
