Catch up

Someone sent me this link some time ago and it was swamped in the NLOTH flood. I've linked this blog before, and in this post a UCC pastor reflects on U2's reinventions of themselves, and his favorite "Dirty Day," as paradigmatic for congregational leadership.

Shut Up and Let Me Love You

Thanks again for the help fixing the Fez link in the last post. It is fixed.

Stealing directly from Mark Meynell here, who has pulled out of the conclusion of Bono In Conversation this passage, which was already arresting enough, and suggests we hold it up against "Unknown Caller." I suppose when it comes down to it you can't actually sing "shut up," but you can sing "shush now":

Assayas: You said about your father: “He would disappear into silence and wit.” I think that in your case, you do disappear into volubility and wit. [Bono bursts out laughing] What do you make of that?
Bono: Guilty, your honour.
No further comment?
‘Be silent and know that I am God.’ That’s a favourite line from the Scriptures. ‘Shut up and Let Me Love You’ would be the pop song. [laughs] It’s really what it means. If ever I needed to hear a comment, it might be that.
Ultimate question, then you’re rid of me. What leaves you speechless?
[sighs… 20 second pause, continuous sound of cicadas] Does singing count?
I’m afraid not. Songs have words.
But not when I start. Usually, it’s just a melody and nonsense words. Hmm… Songs are about as succinct as I get. I’m just sparing you. [laughs then ponders for a moment] ‘Forgiveness’ is my answer.
You mean ‘being forgiven’?
Yeah.

Down tools

Thinking back to our talk about Dkhir and the Sound, I was interested to watch, in this video of a recent interview in Fez, how the band react to the muezzin's call to prayer interrupting the filming twice (perhaps especially compared to the way the interviewer reacts.) We even get an appreciative critique of which of that day's calls to prayer had the best chanting.
[Update: thanks to Rihannsu for pointing out that I didn't originally remember to post the link!]

Another preacher shares his praxis

AngloBaptist posts one of his regular videos reflecting on what he plans to preach. This one is called "a feast of grace a la U2". Includes a mini-tour of the church nave.

"The sermon I keep preaching and why"

Blogger Steve Lindsley posts about why he keeps preaching on exile, with a couple U2 stops along the way.

Soul Surmise

Contributor to Get Up Off Your Knees and U2 expert in his own right Steve Stockman has posted an article on NLOTH (billed as a review, but more of a reflection piece.) Excerpt:
Every U2 phase gets a name check... the worship of the youthfully exuberant October is back on Magnificent which finally kicks in to a Unforgettable Fire soundscape... while Fez - Being Born has a Passengers mood... Stand Up Comedy is the girder crunch chords of Achtung Baby... the lyric of Unknown Caller would sit well on Zooropa... Cedars Of Lebanon is like one of those great Joshua Tree soft spoken word poem out-takes that finally got their recognition on that album’s Twentieth Anniversary Edition. I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight would have sat nicely on the last two albums but as highlighted in the unsettling sound of the lead-off single Get On Your Boots it is all wrapped up in fresh experimental recycling. Having suggested familiarity there are many tracks and sections of tracks that if played without vocal would not reveal the band’s identity at all.

An Unapproved Road/ Holy Skin and Bone

An Unapproved Road is blogging through NLOTH, full of connections and personal impact. Here's one post in the series, called MAGNIFICAT and focusing on "Magnificent."

Holy Skin and Bone responds to some ideas floated here with a useful challenge: isn't "life in the sound... intrinsically unsettled"?

Getting Ready to Leave the Ground

Stepping away from NLOTH for a moment or two, the @U2 blog last week ran a fine feature on how to prepare for the allegedly-coming-soon U2 pilgrimage album Songs of Ascent by digging into some background on the topic. After a funny "Breathe" joke, Scott Calhoun suggests the following: Listening to Coltrane, "going Sufi," and considering the Biblical songs of ascent (including, perhaps, a commentary on them by Eugene Peterson which turns out to have some interesting connections).

Bouquet of links

More catchup: Quaerentia continues its trip through the album.
Author Christian Scharen announces a study guide to his 2006 book.
Project rednoW muses on how "White As Snow" chooses "description over commentary."
Laurie Britt-Smith writes a Christian themed review on U2 fansite Interference.
Fresno Dave postulates some "meta-motifs" of the album.
Well-known writer Don Miller gives a comical sense of how tough it is for U2 to be U2, followed by interesting discussion by various other Christian voices in the comboxes.

Return. The call. To home.

Josh Hurst at The Hurst Review, where I was part of a U2 retrospective just before NLOTH came out, invited me to engage in an email conversation on the new album and publish the results. Our extended dialogue is up today if you'd like to see what we came up with.
(You also might enjoy reading some earlier comments from Josh on "I'll Go Crazy If...."

theology kungfu: The Comedy of U2's 'No Line on the Horizon'

Catching up with some linking I skipped the past week. Jeff Keuss usually offers interesting and provocative theological takes on U2, and this trip through NLOTH is no exception. It begins by asking whether U2's entire body of work is more like a tragedy or a comedy in dramatic terms, then continues with thoughts on faith versus certainty, the call of beauty, and the nature of "a love you can't defeat." Long but worth it. Excerpt:
As Bono goes on in "Stand Up Comedy", we "can stand up for hope, faith and love" as the grand Christian virtues, but perhaps there is more to it than this. As Bono continues that verse, he decries choosing knowledge and will power over faith when he sings "while I´m getting over certainty/ Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady." This double challenge - (1) dropping the search for certainty in favor of faith, and (2) allowing God to... well... *be* God becomes the liberating truths for the protagonist.
Another acknowledgment of the 'comedy' that we are called to is found in the focus on beauty. There is the acknowledgement in "Get on your boots" that humanity needs to realize our beauty... In true beauty, we are lead to the truth of things and in many respects, we are led to the Divine. As ones made 'beautiful' ("you don't know how beautiful you are") we are also called back to true/truth nature as made in the Imago Dei - the 'dictator of the heart.'

Like a crown

I've enjoyed throwing out ideas on NLOTH this week, and I want to wind up this series of posts with thoughts about some of the songs that are not as obviously "character" pieces. I've talked a few times about this vibe of "settledness"; part of that was on the very large scale of the Sound ("God is, period"), but these songs tend to show us settledness in a more domestic, pragmatic, incarnate setting.

The propulsive sunburst of "Magnificent" is retrospective in tone, as the narrator looks back over his life and names it as having been claimed by God from "my first cry," while also commiting to continue a life of service and adoration "till we die." (The "living sacrifice" line "I give you back my voice" is quite poignant, even more so if it happens to conjure for you another close-to-the-bone promise from 28 years ago: "If I had anything, anything at all, I'd give it to you.")

The middle of the album features a three-song pop/domestic set, which comes off to me as picturing a couple at ease with each other in a long relationship. In "Crazy," they're mature enough to have accepted that the sudden victories we dream of in youth nearly always "come slow" and are still far from complete, but they're reminding each other that their quest to get "all the way to the light" is assured of success, and vow to keep generating "sparks" as they go. They look back down the "mountain" from partway up to offer reassurance to those daunted by early stages of the climb, and encouragement to the rest of us to value those "boys and girls" too. (Here's another way to say what I mean about "settledness" here: If this song had been written by U2 in the 80s, it probably would have treated the quest and the climb as demanding uncompromising urgency: tonight! tomorrow's too late! -- yet now the actual topic of record is taking a fun break from it with your lover.)

"Boots" is that break, the "fun fair" at which the reliability of "love and community" proves its ability to "cast out all fear" and overcome the nervous environment; what's actually eternal is not "a bomb scare" but the "laughter" of "[real] joy," which to quote a recent Bono interview is "the spilling over of a life well-lived" (back to "Crazy" and forward to "Comedy" and "Breathe" to see what a well-lived life looks like.)

I've said elsewhere that I spoke on "spiritual health for social justice workers" the day before first hearing "Stand Up Comedy," and one of my initial thoughts was that I could have just played it for the audience, and said "If you sound like this after 33 years, you're doing fine." Bringing that filter to it, you could say that all the standard spiritual pitfalls for people passionate about justice are handily disposed of in this song. The call to take action is undiminished from earlier U2 work motivated by outrage, but now it is pictured as empowered by an unassailable joy (again) that, not being dependent on seeing achieved outcomes, is far more sustainable than anger. Action is also set in the context of non-anxious perspective on one's own flaws, hapless "small child"/"high heels" ego, and hypocrisies. Another part of sustainability is "getting over certainty" (in favor of a more spacious assurance that the Divine is not so feeble and fragile that everything depends on how hard we "help God" get us what we think is right.)

And then there's "Breathe." While the verses are an onslaught of distractions and chaos, everything else radiates spacious ease. It's hard not to just quote the whole thing: "got a love you can't defeat," "there's nothing you have that I need," "I found grace, it's all I found, and I can breathe." Not to mention that culminating "wear them like a crown" line you could cite about a hundred Bible verses for. But all this is not just easy triumphalism; it's rooted in the "every day" task of getting up and doing what needs to be done in a world that is as crazy as those verses. It all adds up to a song -- and an album -- which almost makes me want to say, "If U2 were to quit after this, it would be all right."

Counting down to.....?

Pulled out of that last post to avoid getting too off topic: I mentioned that there's a frequently-remarked error in the official lyrics to "Moment of Surrender" and that I think it may be explained by the fact that "MoS" and "Unknown Caller" began as a story that flows from one song to another. The official lyric sheet ends "counting down to the Pentecost," but Bono very clearly sings "counting down till the pain would stop."

If we think in terms of a cross-song narrative, "counting down to the Pentecost" would fit as a description of the character who ends "MoS" having surrendered to God, but is still waiting for the direct revelation (i.e., his own Pentecost) that happens in "Unknown Caller." I wonder if that concept may be where the line came from. But U2 didn't really stick as strongly with the 3rd person character premise for the album as they had originally thought they might -- and if you're not using it deliberately to send a character into the next song's story, the line about Pentecost makes less sense. So my guess is they replaced it with "pain would stop," which is far more appropriate to the vibe of "MoS" by itself. But that news didn't get to the official lyric people -- just the kind of thing that often seems to happen with the many errors in U2's printed song texts.

[Update: commenter Rhiannsu below adds the helpful information that if you bought the deluxe box set, you actually have the correct lyric, as opposed to what's on U2.com]

Moments and characters

I talked in the last post about how NLOTH seems to have both a settled confidence in God's availability (as distinct from "certainty" about religious ideas) and a sense of being at mature peace with life. It interests me that while we've heard Bono speak from that kind of place in interviews over the past 7-8 years, U2's music has not reflected it as much. (I suppose it's sort of there on HTDAAB: you might name "A Man and A Woman," which was handicapped by sounding like a 60s toothpaste commercial, and we hear moments of it in other songs.) But I wonder if, in part, the use of 3rd party characters on NLOTH helps the outlook we've heard in interviews come into view: when Bono stops singing so directly about himself, we paradoxically get a clearer view of how he thinks the world works. What I mean is that we witness deliberate choices to set up situations that turn out to be (sorry to keep beating up on this reviewer's phrase) the kind many people "wouldn't bother to consider."

So let's look at a couple of those. "Moment of Surrender" and "Unknown Caller" are both songs in which the narrator began life as a 3rd party character -- the same character, in fact. (Incidentally I think this may explain a frequently-remarked error in the official lyrics, but I'll put that in a separate little post.) The situation examined in "Moment of Surrender" is exactly what its title says -- that precise moment at which someone reaches the point of giving up to God, in this case from the dregs of a life gone bad. And "Unknown Caller," which for my money is perhaps the most sublime spiritual document U2 have ever produced, pictures the Divine response to the previous song's surrender, although brilliantly choosing to focus just before the character has made meaning out of the liminal experience of his phone starting to talk to him. (A few minutes later in the story, and the title would have had to be "God Calling.") But U2 don't want to show us the certainties we humans make of religious experience after the fact; they want to show us actual religious experience in all its imperious, weird, transformative power. (PASSWORD: YOU.) The mere decision to identify and enshrine that moment makes the hair on my arms stand on end, as does Edge's attempt to play the ineffable after the Caller goes to work following his Psalm 46-esque last word: DON'T MOVE OR SAY A THING

"White As Snow" is another 3rd party song which situates us in a moment -- in this case the deathbed, with the narrator's life having come down to wondering if he can still recapture his early experience of "forgiveness" from and knowledge of "a love divine" through "the lamb as white as snow."

So three choices, three narrative situations: the moment someone surrenders to God, the moment God responds, and the moment of accounting before God's face at death. It's probably no wonder all that stuff would bore people like our straw-man "bother to consider" friend whom I keep quoting. But for me these choices reveal a distillation of life's true questions; they highlight which are the moments that really matter in the end.

Next full post: a few comments on the songs which seem to be less 3rd-party.

Dhikr

So, we continue on with this series of posts. (BTW, readers, thanks for having the courtesy to hat-tip when you borrow material from here.) My theory about why a less apophatic and more immersive sacred "sound" comes to the fore on NLOTH is that in part, it may have to do with the album's initial birthing during the World Festival of Sacred Music in Fez. Comments about that history from critics have focused on how the songs don't sound North African, but I think they're missing the point. What if the real influence was not particular musical gestures, but something much closer to the mission of the Festival?

A little background: Along with formal concerts from sacred musicians of many religions, this article talks about how the "real draw" in Fez is the opportunity to experience nightly Sufi dhikr ("remembrance of God"), ecstatic musical worship in various styles. (Here's a clip of one of those sessions from Fez 2007 when U2 were in town; more can be found by clicking around.) This Muslim mystical tradition has a developed understanding of sound itself as a medium of direct contact with God (as well as, incidentally, a long history of something U2 also have a long history of: using romantic metaphors for the experience of that contact).

Musicians from the Sufi brotherhoods were invited into the studio with U2 along with Gnawa players (by the way, I do think the bass on "Moment of Surrender" has a fairly Gnawa sound.) More recently both Bono and Larry Mullen have invoked "Sufi singing" in interviews (and you could argue that the Sufi use of unison chorus, which you can hear above, turns up all over the place on NLOTH, as do Sufi-esque melismas.) So I wonder if NLOTH doesn't actually bear many traces of Fez, in the form of fruit from a broader, cross-cultural experience of shared sound as a vehicle for the Divine in the midst of a songwriting residency.

That's some of what I think is behind this sacred "sound" you don't just hear, but can immersively go "inside." So in view of that, I'm turning over the notion that NLOTH may be the beginning of a subtle shift away from U2's dazzled wordless foretaste mode, the wellspring of which I've always assumed lay in the band's early charismatic formation (let the reader understand). I'm not saying wordless vowels are absent; in fact, there are probably more "oh"s on NLOTH than usual! What I mean is more like this: U2 often used to give us quite a lot of lament alternating with dazzled foretastes, or the two married into a kind of ache. But there is not much aching on NLOTH. The album is more settled and assured on both ends; its quest is to dwell in reality, not drum up drama, and yet it seems more confident than ever that there is a realm of very palpable connection with God available now as well. This embodied confidence is quite distinct from intellectual, abstract "certainty," which we are instead supposed to be "getting over."

NLOTH's evocations of God's vibrant presence (and that's where we're going in the next post, I think) seem to me not to be framed so much as the awe of one who is suddenly undone by a gift of inbreaking grace even "under the trash" or "when there's all kinds of chaos." They're still every bit as celebratory and broadly inviting, but now they rest on an unsurprised, grateful security, in a spaciousness that allows us to "breathe": This is how it is.

Then she put her tongue in my ear

A quick followup to the apophatic/immersive discussion. It hits me that of course you could immediately invoke the title cut of "No line" as partaking of the standard U2 apophatic spirit: "Time is irrelevant/it's not linear"; the farthest we can imagine, "infinity," is nothing but a "place to start." However, I find it interesting (and very U2ey; let's not over-spiritualize this one! But still...) that we're told the bearer of this message immediately becomes physically intimate with the narrator.

Born of sound

Having thrown out some general context in the past couple posts, I want to move on now to making more specific comments on No Line On The Horizon.

As has been pointed out already, it seems clear to me that "the sound" is one central metaphor. We have three "let me in the sound" requests, as well as "I found grace inside a/the sound" and "people born of sound," all of which have an essentialist, palpable ring (especially if you want to argue for a vague John 3 echo in the last one.) Along with these, there are more evocations of sound per se as granting some kind of mysterious access to the ultimate: "hear the universe," "roar on the other side of silence," and "the rhythm of my soul... that yearns to be released from control." And don't forget this album's ineffable soundscapes themselves, such as the one that begins "Unknown Caller." Because of all that, I am more inclined to understand "sound" in NLOTH as pointing to mystical communion with God now, rather than as looking forward to songs sung by others in heaven.

While we also get several specific mentions of people themselves vocalizing ("Sing your heart out," "I was born to sing for you," "listen for me, I'll be shouting") it's the sense of sound as sacred essence that intrigues me here, as if Pop's "looking for a sound that's gonna drown out the world" quest has been fulfilled in a sound-baptism by immersion on NLOTH.

So I think I'd like to at least play with a distinction. I'm certainly not positing a major disconnect, but I'm wondering if we could say that the "sound" metaphor represents something of a shift? Previously, have U2's evocations of eschatological fullness not tended more towards the apophatic? Their work has often reached, yearning, to that ecstatic limit, and then there are no words for what is coming. "I try to sing this... but." "You know I believe it, but I still haven't found..." with "what I'm looking for" left unspoken. "Mysterious Ways" (at least live): You can hear it, and see the celebration, but the lyrics are over by then. In fact, at a lot of these foretaste moments in U2 there is only inarticulate vocalization. And for the quintessential example, as glorious a moment of fulfillment as it is, the song is called "Where the Streets Have No Name," and they traditionally blind us at all its high points. (Any fans of Pseudo-Dionysius and his dazzling darkness out there?)

As a side comment: If you buy the idea, it would be interesting to discuss whether this instinct for apophaticism at the spiritual apex is part of what has made U2 so accessible to secular listeners.

In my next post, I'll share some thoughts about why this more immersive and less apophatic "sound" metaphor might have come to the fore, and either then or later I'll get to how I see it tying in with the settled Sitz-im-leben I mentioned earlier.

In my last post I talked about the perception that NLOTH deals with "subjects [many people] wouldn't bother to consider," and I commented that I am very interested both in these subjects that U2 are considering and in the way they are considering them. But let me clarify (in case the focus of this blog might contribute to any confusion on this point) that by this I do NOT mean I've been hoping to hear U2 sing about God more, or that I like NLOTH because it has many Christian references. That doesn't seem like a very reliable criterion for assessing art to me. As far as I can see, the band have brought the same basic worldview to all their work over the past three decades, whether or not recognizably Christian language was being used or identifiably "religious" topics were being addressed.

Now, naturally I am touched to hear any fellow believer giving wholehearted love to Someone I also love -- but I personally don't feel any special excitement purely upon discovering that U2 have chosen to record a song with that focus. ("Magnificent," for example, did little for me on my first several hearings, and I still don't really enjoy "Yahweh.") I don't much care how many times the texts directly quote the Bible along the way, either (although being able to recognize such allusions when they come is guaranteed to increase your appreciation of U2 songs). But what I do care about, and what so far seems to me to be near the heart of NLOTH, is seeing them (to paraphrase a former homiletics professor of mine) take the issue/moment/situation they want to present and integrate it with everything they have so far learned as Christians about the universe.

It seems to me that what U2 have to give at this point is not "We can be cooler than the Killers" or "We consider Fordham students our contemporaries" (which made me cringe on Friday). What they have to give in their chosen genre is a much larger than usual pool of resources for that integration.

A rock band shouldn't....

While I see the main task of this blog as tracking theologically-informed discussion of U2's work, I think I am ready to take a break from being a guide to others' Christian or Biblical reflections on No Line on the Horizon and make a few posts myself this week. Not a review, but some things that have struck me personally.

First, a more general comment on the black and white reactions to the album. One of the many very negative reviews complained that throughout it, "Bono usually sounds like he's speaking for us on subjects we wouldn't bother to consider." This comment has come to mind several times as I've gotten to know an album which definitely speaks for me, and on subjects that I consider constantly -- subjects which in my worldview are so central that I can't think of many I'd rank higher.

Now in one sense that disconnect is nothing new. It's no secret that some of the preoccupations traditionally seen as appropriate to pop culture have never been of much artistic interest to U2, whereas some of the preoccupations seen as gauche or taboo draw them in -- nor is it a secret that many people can't stand that fact. If you are one of those people, my guess is that you will especially hate NLOTH. As I have said to some friends, this is U2 distilled, 120-proof U2, synthesizing their previous work and considering very U2ey subjects in a very U2ey way. (As opposed to in a "classic U2 sound" way or a "the 90s redux" way or a "gotta get on the radio" way. See, I also think people who prefer to interpret the band through only one of the diverse titles under which they get pegged down -- U2 of the Joshua Tree, U2 of ZooTV, U2 of the Stadiums -- are less likely to enjoy this album. You gotta accept it all this time.)

But the particular NLOTH red flag to the bull, I'm beginning to think, is not just its distillation of the essence of U2 (bad enough!), but also its, if you'll forgive a technical Biblical studies term, Sitz-im-leben. This album speaks quite clearly from where the band actually stand: men nearing 50, mostly with long-term families, long-term experience in discipleship, long-term experience in staying in community, and enough perspective to have not just sorted through priorities but also reflected on different modes of addressing them. Statistically, this Sitz-im-leben is pretty rare in the West these days, and vanishingly tiny among the rock 'n' roll world. How many people today create or consume pop culture from the context of even one 33-year relationship, let along a whole gang of them? How many people today create or consume pop culture from the context of a complex spiritual worldview that's been slowly ripening in subtlety and breadth of application for even one decade, let alone three? If you already really like U2, you'll follow them there anyway and see what's on offer, but if you don't....

So no wonder listeners to whom that Sitz-im-leben is foreign, who don't resonate with its insights or imagine it having a valid place in rock 'n' roll, would find connecting with No Line on the Horizon very difficult, and see its whose essence as uninteresting and remote from anything anyone normal would "bother to consider."

This doesn't explain all the negative press, but I think it explains some, and really, it isn't that big a surprise. One of the reactions to U2 has always been "a rock band shouldn't do this." But in the end, haven't their violations of the list of things "a rock band shouldn't do" been the source of their power? From my vantage point, what's going on now is one more example.

Roundup continues

A couple more links where there's theological discussion going on:

De Regnis Duobus makes some comments about "the sound" and the Reformed love for hearing over other means by which God gets access to us. Bit odd to claim "vision over visibility" as a reunciation of seeing, but along the way there's a nice connection to "Amazing Grace."

The folks at Ephphata Poetry wrote to tell me about their reflections (there are 2 parts).

Holy Skin and Bone gives a Simone Weil-sounding nod in an analysis of the cover (what do you expect from a philosophy professor?) and follows it up with lots of thoughts on every track, informed by the book that accompanies the deluxe edition. Excerpt: Is this U2's most explicitly Christian album? I'm not sure I even understand the question. Some of the lyrics will no doubt send chills up the spines of those of us who fit our own stories into The (Christian) Story. And Bono may no doubt have penned them from within The Story. But the lyrics and the album as a whole have broader appeal. You don't have to be a Christian to resonate with the realities about which Bono sings.

A NLOTH lyric devotional: "How, then, has God left himself open to interpretation?"

If you've wondered about the presence of any kind of story arc in NLOTH, have a look at this extraordinary meditation, made up completely of lyrics in the order they appear on the album, by Brian Draper of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Includes reflection questions with very apt thematic Biblical connections at the end. Seriously, folks, print this one out and put it to use.

The Dude Abides on NLOTH

A lovely piece by Cathleen Falsani talking through her reactions to, and some of the background of, U2's new album. Excerpt:
"There is plenty of rock-n-roll levity and grandeur on No Line on the Horizon, but it is eclipsed by the heart and soul of this album — perhaps the most dynamic gospel music I've ever heard."

Songs of Ascent

I guess many readers have seen the reports that a companion album to No Line titled Songs of Ascent is scheduled for release within a year, featuring more meditative, reflective, "Sufi-singing" style music, and an overall theme of pilgrimage. It's nice to see U2 claiming their Psalmist mantles with this title, which refers, of course, to Psalms 120-134 which were sung as pilgrims "went up to" Jerusalem, climbing as they walked. Especially when you remember that the albums were worked on simultaneously and could have been a joint release (in fact, you can glimpse some planning for this on the whiteboard in the magazine that comes with one of the editions of NLOTH), Bob from Bob's bloggery makes a great connection of this news to a lyric from "Crazy Tonight."

Another take on the album worth checking out

Mark Meynell at Quaerentia offers several thoughts on some of NLOTH's tracks (with more to come) as he prepares for a speaking engagement on the band. Also, just do not miss his Wordle of the album lyrics here: quite revealing!

Excerpt on "Moment of Surrender":
"Then comes the magical lyrical turning point: It’s not if I believe in love But if love believes in me, Oh believe in me. Fabulous. This is the invasion of grace - or rather the yearning for it. There is a sense of wonder in a great human relationship that love has come - but surely it is even more applicable to Christ’s call (and he’s just cried Oh God in the previous line). There is a shrinking back, a doubt that love might not come cf. George Herbert’s LOVE BADE ME WELCOME.

"But the key change comes at the moment of surrender, I folded to my knees. This is echoed earlier in the song by another role reversal - playing with the fire till the fire played with me. But that’s what happens when we start getting involved with God - he is so much bigger, so much greater. We put him in the dock only to find ourselves in the dock; we think we’re doing him a favour by loving him, but find that his is the greater favour. Such surrender could sound like a subjugation, a resignation. But the music lifts it up to a moment of joy - with the Edge’s backing vocal giving it a sense of shared joy.

"And that is done without any concern about passers-by. Who cares what they think?"

[Update: The @U2 blog has picked up the Wordle.)

Make Straight the Path: Learning to Get Ready

Fordham theologian Tom Beaudoin blogs about his campus's upcoming U2 concert at Rock and Theology.

[Update: more news from Beaudoin here]

"Be ever hearing and never understanding"

I expect this video may be gone quickly, but I wanted to make a stagecraft comment on U2's "Magnificent" from Letterman last night. Those who have been following reviews and discussion will have noted that a lot of hearers seem to be taking "I was born to sing for you...to lift you up" as an insufferably arrogant phrase directed at U2's audience; it has come in for a lot of criticism. In light of that, it is almost funny to see, as this moment arrives in the song, the visual Bono chooses (starting at about 2:45). He begins with a standard wide-armed orans position, but immediately shifts that into an awkward-looking, aggressively vertical orans with both arms parallel all the way over his head, and just holds it. (The text is directed up, folks. Not horizontally. Up. Is this clear enough for you?)

Somebody has checked their album release schedule

Crossroads Community Church in Enterprise, Alabama USA has just launched a month-long series drawing on U2 songs. This week, "Beautiful Day" in a snowstorm (some comments on the pastor's blog); next week, "Mysterious Ways." I have not had time to do anything more than glance at this, so no idea of the quality. If you're interested in checking it out, streaming audio will be here.

If you don't have it or haven't paid for it.....

FYI, Amazon.com is selling downloads of No Line On The Horizon for only $3.99 today.

more NLOTH writing with a spiritual slant

A few more links for readers looking to see what's being said about NLOTH from people interested in U2's spirituality, this time around on a more popular level than the last post. (As always, a link here does not necessarily mean I agree, just that readers may find the writing thought-provoking.) Here's an anonymous post called I Found Grace Inside the Sound, which sees NLOTH as seeking to "paint a fuller picture of that 'other place,' the Kingdom (not yet) come, on the other side of the horizon line, [describing] heaven as full of sound." Bob at the Bobosphere is posting a series of pieces pointing out Biblical and other connections that he personally is touched by in some of the songs. And finally, fan forum The Goal is Soul at Interference is talking up "Unknown Caller" in particular, as well as a few other songs.