Journeying Into Springsteen’s Badlands Wisdom

Badlands, you gotta live it every day
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay
Keep pushin’ until it’s understood
And these Badlands start treating us good.
(chorus of the song, Badlands, by Bruce Springsteen)

Philosophy peddled as rock music. Listen into the words and melody of this 1978 Springsteen classic and in it is a worldly way to live this life that can be juxtaposed with the biblical way of living this life.

Springsteen has written this song for the common battler. It’s an important song with an ever-poignant title. Whoever lives the life of truth knows that reality makes most of us feel the ways the song talks about.

The only way to enjoy this life is to embrace it,
the Badlands as they are.

So many of us seem won to a dream that seems ever out of our grasp. As if to avoid the Badlands, the life as we know it. Badlands tells us not so much to give up on the dream, the calling, but to stop waiting, to not waste our time waiting. John Lennon said life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans. Making plans incessantly is the easiest way to miss this life. We ought simply to live it.

The nature of life is it seems dog eat dog. Poor men want to be rich, the rich want to be kings, and kings aren’t satisfied until they rule everything. But the gold of life is in the lessons we learn. These are the things we can count as real blessings. They show us the product of our progress, the only real possession.

Faith, hope and love rate this mention — that one day they might elevate him high above these Badlands. The promise of eternity believed and enshrined within. What other hope is worthy of our faith in this oft-difficult life? Other than the snippets of joy that come from the simplest gratitude.

It’s no sin to be glad we’re alive. It’s a blessing. The notion that’s deep inside us all is we need to feel we belong wherever we feel God has set us; this, to be glad to be alive.

We may feel there are still too many looking straight through us — ignoring us. We may see more those who reject us than accept us. These are common problems, though not impossible to overcome.

These Badlands are treating us good if we see their role, which is to teach us about life, specifically, our lives.

This is what I think the song is saying in sum:

This life, if it’s the life of learning,

Satisfies only the seeker,

And in becoming meeker,

Satisfied are we in our yearning.