U2 : "Not just for the ones who kneel"

The Bomb Part 3 1/2: From Anality to Freedom via Loud Creativity

2006-02-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

It is either among his most cringeworthy/corny lines or among his most profound/prophetic.

Likely both.

When Bono sings "Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head;" his passion borders on the embarassingly exhibitionistic; he means it. One can almost watch him pushing past the cringe factor; knowing it will morph into, and unloose the prophetic...if only enough veins pop in his neck. He is giving birth himself, perhaps. At the very least, he is shamelessly singing for his life; maybe even to maintain his wobbly freedom.

Almost as if keeping his day job and eternal salvation secure was proportionate to his (and our)abandonment to the truth of the

CONTINUED: here

The Bomb Part 2: Apocalyptic...Baby!

2005-06-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

APOCALYPTIC BABY : FOUR HORSEMEN RIDE THE MOTHER OF ALL PARADOXES:
How to Definitively Dismantle the Death-Bomb in 14 (!) Simple (!!) Steps

Chapter 2 of a Fun Theological Roundtable Around U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb”

By Dave Wainscott
=====================================================

"If you meditate on life you start with death.” -Bono

INTRO TO THE INTROIT: Choir Try-Outs

“What’s the scoop on surviving a bomb? What do you learn? You learn that, at first, the past will only seem like a cause for mourning, but your job is to twist it around and make it a cause to rejoice. At the end of meals every Sabbath, observant Jews sing a psalm (126) that has a strange muddle of verb tenses. Some scholars insist that the text is corrupt and propose changes, but only people who study the thing are confused; people who sing it understand.”
-David Gerlanter, survivor of a Unabomber mail-bomb, in “Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber,” p., 154

“When Yahweh returns his grieving ones from exile, they will feel as if awakening from a death-dream; these weeping ones, though, will emerge with songs that rejoice”
-verses 1-3 of the Psalm (126) referred to above

“Only people who study the thing are confused; people who sing it understand” …especially when the “thing” is death. Death, that ancient enemy, which when “twisted” via the “strange muddle of song,” can morph into joy. That’s not only an amazingly accurate thesis for this essay: it’s an invitation to join the only choir that counts! Join the choir..please! No, I don’t mean the mass choir that is the U2 fan club, though that club is a worthy one that I shamelessly hang and sing with; but the “choir” of those vulnerable and brave enough to, in the midst of “awakening from a death-dream,” sing heartily, longingly, feebly and fearlessly ...about all things “life”… which would include death…and thus understand; thus live.

And by the way, I would invite all readers… especially those who, for whatever reason, will never be full-blown fans of U2… to stay with us, for though you may occasionally feel lost in the U2 lyric references and in-house “preaching to the choir” U2-isms to follow, I am going to be waxing here ultimately about a very practical, absolutely universal need: dealing with the mother of all paradoxes; one that can be grasped perhaps only in Scripture and song: death. Which of course must be grappled with under the rubric of “all things life.” And it may well be that U2’s Bono is right (again): meditation on life must begin with death. And it may well be that William Stringfellow is not exaggerating: “The truth is that human beings are concerned with nothing else but death…though that be seldom realized.” (William Stringfellow, “An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land,” p. 69). At the end of the day, it is actually U2’s “ job” to redress and rebuke that “seldom,” and address the paradox by name, and in song; and as the Unabomber survivor suggests, it’s my “ job to twist (death) around and make it a cause to rejoice.” This all, of course, is the job of God, of choirs. And all human beings.

So I dare to believe that you, dear reader, since the chances are strong that you are indeed a verifiable human being, if not also literally in the U2 fan club “choir”, can benefit greatly from insights that U2…people who “sing and thus understand”…have offered us all through their “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” CD/book package. The Irish lads have “en-choired” us into a release that’s all about life…or is it death? Most correctly, according to its primary author, it is foremost a “mediation on life”, albeit through the lens and backdrop of death. This disc is not then a dirge or depressing…just one that , in its recklessly joyful affirmation of life, is not in denial about death. In fact, you can even dance to it! How could one not dance to the bottom line: “I’m alive; I’m being born.”

SOLDIERS IN THE CHOIR

In context, then, humans, you should know that you are reading the second (of 4 ½!) installment of a theological analysis of the 2004 release by U2; with particular emphasis this time in answering the disc’s title question in (14 part! ) harmony; especially with the rich insights of the invaluable, same-titled book included in the deluxe (read “required”) edition of the recording. We maintain that in an authentic and authentically apocalyptic kind of way, U2’s disc/book can help us creatively wrestle with nothing less than the mother of all paradoxes: death. Death and it’s prequel/sequel; it’s underside and other side: life. In particular, birth. Because under the guise and disguise of a fun “return-to-roots” rock record, the lads are about some serious business; the meaning of life kind of stuff, as usual; literally life and death matters, in fact. With such heavy subject matter, we call out some heavy-hitting theologians to join the choir (You’ll see by my eclectic list that everybody and their mother is a theologian in my book!). Included are the venerable “Walters” (Bruggeman, Wink and ..uh, Cronkite!), from whom we cull keys to the conversation. Then from the Constantines (both the emperor and the Keanu Reeves movie character!) we also gladly glean. And it’s on to some more “obvious” inclusions: both Saints Francis, a couple of dead (existentially) existentialist Russians (Tolstoy and Berdayev); and from our time, Annie Dillard, Chagall Guevara, and the at times prophetic (other times pathetic) Cheech and Chong(!). All these and more contribute to the choir; as anybody is invited to the loft who deals loftily, intelligently, and irreverently (in a reverent way) enough with The Paradox in question; and is thus certified in the necessary dismantling skill that Bono and team have called us to sharpen.

So join the choir! Again, I simply mean, in the language of the explosive quote at the top of the page, that even if you consider the U2 catalog “corrupt and propose changes,” at least join in with the only “people who understand”: those who sing. Especially those humbly bold and riskily real enough to sing about , from, and to, death. Singing death to death, enough to reverse the curse and wrangle life from its ashes and memory. “You’ve got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight,” to quote Bono, who is quoting Bruce Cockburn. Dismantling worship of death (more on that later) even, and setting up in its place worship of the One who has mercifully murdered death, and loves to love us to life. “Music is the language of the Spirit,” says Bono, our choir director. And since “the one who sings, prays twice,” why not apply prophetic song to the mother of all paradoxes; and sing about the shadow of death, in the context and light of Life.

“What emerges as most remarkable in the here-and-now,” concludes Gerlanter in assessing what he learned from surviving the Unabomber’s bomb, “is not the callousness or evil of the onslaught but the resilience of the defense….If you focus the big sweep of history on a single lifetime, the poet {of the Psalm 126 song] says, you see life as a stubborn return from sorrow again and again.” (151) “Dismantle” is nothing if not a “stubborn return” for the band; and thematically, “a stubborn return from sorrow again and again.” After all, Bono stalwartly and stubbornly sings (again and again) those very words (“again and again”) in a lyric (from “Mercy,” a chilling song cut at the last minute from the record, but excerpted lyrically in the book) that summarizes the record’s theme: “I am alive! Baby, I’m born again. And again and again and again and again and again……” If that makes no sense, try singing it…again…

We are inescapably singers anyway. The human spirit cannot not sing; it’s hardwired towards tune; as “life is at base, music” (Leonard Sweet’s summary of current physics theory). So it’s simply a matter of which songs will sing most strongly through us; which we will tune into and turn into: Life or Death. On this note (pun intended), I am somewhat surprised that in the inevitable web-flurry flurry of theologically-informed posting, reviewing and blogging that has followed the release of “Bomb” (best warehouse to access all this: http://www.u2sermions/.blogspot.,com), I have not yet seen much made of the obvious “trainspotting” connection from the new disc’s title to a stanza in an early U2 song (“Seconds” from the “War” album), which backs up and jacks up everything I have been trying to say so far. Note, as well, the emphasis on song:

And they’re doing the atomic bomb/Do they know where the dance comes from/ Yes they're doing the atomic bomb /They want you to sing along/Say goodbye, say goodbye

Someone has to trace the wires of this connection. The “they” of this lyric are those “atomically” addicted to war and death. We are not to “sing along” with them, but with the other/opposite choir-dance, otherwise we literally have “hell to pay.” I can’t help but also juxtapose the last words of “Seconds” (“say goodbye, goodbye”) and the haunting counterpart refrain of “Vertigo” from the new album (“Hello, hello”). Even though on the surface, “Vertigo” is a “a nice little ditty that makes you want to kill yourself,” Bono laughed; in the context and clothing of the disc and book, “Vertigo” is actually a hearty “hello”, amen and allegiance to the song/dance of life; which when sung, counters and counteracts; defuses and dismantles the “goodbye, goodye” death-song that dominates these days. But as Bono has been desperately calling out to the audience at the end of “Vertigo” in concert: “Hello? Hello?.... Is there anybody out there?” Is anyone getting and going with this? Please, join the choir; please sing and understand; please deal with death, sing it to life. Hello?

FEAR OF DEATH IS SEXY

As bizarre a strategy as it sounds, the thoroughgoing sexiness (as any siren-song must be packaged) of the devil’s death-song is successfully seductive. And the stategy does make perfect sense: sex sells, so if an agent is selling death, package it pruriently and provocatively; shape it erotically and evocatively. The Tempter desires that we buy not only the damning lie that death is the last word, but his whole counterfeit cantata which claims just that…in pseudo-song. He would love to soundtrack and hijack our lives accordingly. The connect between the sexual lure into accepting death’s sovereignty, and the dismantling prayer of surrender to life is creatively parabled in the obscure alternate version of “Seconds” (the MFSL 24K "Gold CD" Version), in which a commanding sergeant (on one speaker), and an officer (on the other) battle it out about which side and “song” ultimately wins, in a spoken word conversation, buried in the mix:

Sergeant(Left speaker):
“Hold it,Alright this time how about, Put on a smile and say:
Sex, sex, Sex! Gun, Gun!Gun, Gun!Gun, Gun!Gun, Gun!Kill, Kill!Kill, Kill!”

Soldier(Right speaker):
“Oh Dear God,It's getting to be that time!And you don't know it until it's taken.
I can't give it to anybody anymoreI can't, it's not in meI just can't do itThis is all I've gotI can't give nothing To anybody else anymoreIt's been strippedIt's been taken

The entire dramatic dismantling dilemma of the 2OO4 disc is painted and prophesied for us twenty one years earlier in a “throwaway”, out-of-print recording that most U2 fans are not even aware of! How stealth, how embedded, how U2; how “accidentally on purpose” is that? The sex and death connection is exposed. Not only are we all inescapable singers who must choose between repertoires that either praise or damn death; we are also inveterate connectors of sex and death. Weigh this:

Poets of both genders throughout the ages have suggested a connection between the two themes. Psychiatrists and psychologists have long argued that fear of sexuality is simply a disguised version of a universal human fear of death. Anthropologists assert that sexual taboos, institutionalized through religion, are but another effort to keep death at bay. They fail not because people are immoral but because death persists….

Sexual imagery reflects preoccupation with controlling death…
Cultural imagery reflects the magnitude and intensity of these efforts. The pornography industry exploits our nearly obsessive efforts to control both death and sex and to solve the cultural/biological puzzle presented by the relationship between sex and death, especially for men.Pornographic films and magazines, even those that do not deal directly with death, routinely turn living subjects into inanimate objects, allowing men - and increasingly women as well - to place their sexuality in a fantasy world, where they can without ever losing control.
http://www.rusnecro.com/english/articles/sex_and_death.htm

Aha! Now my thesis in Part 1 (that the 2000 song “Elevation” is about, through prayer, “twisting” life out of sexual temptation) makes sense. As does my controversial proposal in Part 4: “Fast Cars,” though only included on the deluxe and Japanese version of “How To Dismantle” should be seen as the “true” last song on the disc, as it summarizes and in a very obtuse way, ties up its loose ends:

My garden’s overgrown I go out on my belly crawling I got CCTV, pornography, CNBC I got the nightly news To get to know the enemy All I want is a picture of You All I want is to get right next to You
All I want is Your face in a locket Picture in my pocket

In the above snippet, Bono is clearly (granted, among other applications) referring to the devil; the reference to Genesis’ description of Satan being kicked out of the garden as a “crawling on his belly” serpent is clear, as is the identity of “the enemy.” As then is the explicit attribution of pornography (even the pornography of the “nightly news” which seduces us to worship and submit to sex-death) to the devil’s doing. No wonder all the main character wants is a “picture of You (God).” Only such a snapshot can counter the demonic death-bomb, no matter how sexily it is projected. Just one pocketed picture of God/Life, even a miniature in a locket, will do the trick against an incessant and sexualized satanic broadcast. (Which, coincidentally…not!….was also the theme of U2’s 1990s “Zoo TV” tours!) One provocative book proposes that death only entered the picture (and world) once sex did!! While proposing that sex inevitably leads to death is overstating the case (thank God!), that the two are intentionally tied in the tempter’s hand is a huge practical lesson that we would be wise to file. And even sing about, so that we understand. And survive the bomb-blast.

To exit the intro, then. With the help of the soldier from “Seconds.”Contrasting the false trinity of “Sex! Gun! Kill!” with “God, I can’t play that game anymore!”, offers us wonderful and wild hope of destroying the dominion of death over life. The soldier (U2), decades ahead of his time (and prime) is pointedly and presciently, by the baptized rebellion of praying pacifistically, dismantling every last possibility of fellowship with death , and sexual friendship with, the serpent’s porno-bomb. So, choir: choose your song; select your stereo-speaker. Will it be the false and frenetic sex of and with guns and killing (intercourse with the “death system”), or a humble yet defiant “I can’t do it anymore” prayer-song towards God and Life? A song of necrophilia or glossolalia? Uh, I’ll take the new song. It’s the only way to incarnate and activate the right song in the foreign land we’re warring in; a realm where violence and death reign by default…until sung to, and thus dismantled.

It’s no accident that the haunting biblical question ,“How long to sing this (new) song?”, is again (after a decade-plus absence from the setlist) the last thing the audience hears U2 (and themselves, long after the band has left the stage) sing.
It’s because U2 knows what they are doing. Bono, in his introduction to the Psalms:

"40" became the closing song at our shows, and on hundreds of occasions, literally hundreds of thousands of people of every size and shape of T-shirt have shouted back the refrain, pinched from Psalm 6: "How long (to sing this song)." I had thought of it as a nagging question, pulling at the hem of an invisible deity whose presence we glimpse only when we act in love. How long hunger? How long hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of its precocious, hell-bent adolescence has been discarded? I thought it odd that the vocalising of such questions could bring such comfort -- to me, too.

Odd, but comforting. That’s what a God-song is, an oddly comforting “vocalizing.” U2 know exactly what they are doing. “We do the show; we do the business, but this is not show business, ” Bono has been heard chanting on the current tour. Now, he knows on one level, it is show business; but it’s also oh-so-much- more. The boys are about huge and holy business, yanking the Almighty’s hem, dismantling death and all, because frankly….

INTROIT: IT’S APOCALYPSE NOW…..BABY!

U2 is a sign of the end times.

Now, don’t shut me down yet. This is decidedly NOT proposing the U2 disc as the fitting 348th installment of “Left Behind,” and by now you sure I am not among fundamentalist Pharisees who lambast U2 as antichrists due to their “secular” Christianity. And neither am I suggesting that U2’s latest contains a secret encoded message about who “666” is.

Uh, oh. Actually, I take that last one back. Now that I think of it, “Bomb” actually does contain a very revelatory message about the identity of said “beast” ; I’m serious! But maybe it’s more a “what” than who; maybe it’s “death” as system and worldview whose “mark” we are to avoid at all costs! Just maybe that’s what the writer of the Revelation-Apocalypse intended for is to envision and spell out all along!!

READ THE SIGNS

U2 is a sign, then, of the end times; inasmuch as their mission is the same. Inasmuch as they are messengers of the dethroning of death as ultimate lord. Let me unpack what I connote by “sign” , and then what’s implied here by “end times.” All I mean by U2 being a “sign” is what Jesus meant by the word (in the biblical Greek: “semeion”): “a distinguishing mark by which something is known.” U2 don’t hold signs, they are signs; they are a “distinguishing mark by which something is known.” In fact they name the very mark of the beast, and point us to the One who overcomes and overwrites it. This definition of “sign” causes Charles Swindoll(He Gave Gifts, p. 55) to paraphrase “semeion” , and thus (though I am guessing he would argue with my application) U2 , as "a super-human ability which authenticated God's spokespersons by convincing people that they were, in fact, bona fide servants of God" What better definition of U2 could you ask for (You’ll notice that Swindoll, as a fundamentalist and cessationist, is unfortunately bound to relegate “sign” to past tense. I believe signs from God, especially people/groups/ rock bands are still around.

And all I mean by the “end times” is all that Jesus meant by it: the eschatological reality and Kingdom era that Jesus inaugurated in his first coming; more simply put, the God-haunted times we live in, even if we are still (hold on to your hats, “Left Behind” fans) a million years from the Second Coming! When Peter preached at Pentecost, citing Joel 2, he was clear: the end times have begun, and they are evidenced by the Spirit being poured out on all flesh (Hey, it doesn’t say “just on the Christians”, or “only on traditional Christian music!”). Folk of all ages and stages prophesying is the main “sign” of the beginning of the “end times.” This means even (!) U2 can prophesy, as even (!) a leading Presbyterian pastor has gladly admitted: “If we are lucky, a prophet shows up…For many these days, it is U2 that shows up..(to) purge our imaginations of the culture’s assumptions on what counts in life and how life is lived.” (Eugene Peterson, forward to Beth Maynard’s “Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog”) . U2 are end-times prophetic signs . Apocalyptic even.

Apocalyptic?

Now there’s a word that needs defining and demantling, at least of its commonly understood denotation: “The whole damn world is going to hell in a Doomsday Basket Fireball, any Armaggedon day now.” . Well, for one, take Armaggedon… please. The word is mentioned in Revelation, but only once, and not even then as a literal; once-for-all, “end of the world as we know it” battle that we have always been told is spelled out in Revelation. Win thousands of dollars by betting “Left-Behind”- inundated Christians that the “battle of Armageddon” is not mentioned at all in the Bible. They will think you are nuts, but you will be right and richer! All the biblical book says about that locale is “the “kings gathered” there. It never specifically predicts or depicts a battle actually happening, and nowhere describes it at all, let alone in the multi-volume mega-graphic detail of the million-selling series of novels. Check this out, doubters, in the Bible volume, it’s all of one verse: Revelation 16:16. This sentence mentions, almost in passing, about kings “gathering” , maybe for an event; one that may or may not happen….at least in the way we’ve been taught. Now, there may well be a literal Battle in the end of the end times, but perhaps even more importantly and apocalyptically, we are even now waging an “apocalypse now,” an actual and practical proleptic armageddon against death and devil’s dominion, in all aspects of faith and life. That’s a very practical, “everyday,” here-and-now and not just “then-and-there,” end-times battle/job/vocation we have all signed up for. Armageddon, and all apocalypse, is best understood as a process and way of life more than a definitive event. U2 simply calls it “dismantling an atomic bomb.” David Dark, coins it “everyday apocalypse.” Hang onto that apparently unlikely and oxymoronic linking of “everyday” with
“apocalyptic,” as we let Dark enlighten us:

We apparently have the word “apocalypse“ all wrong. In its root meaning, it’s not about destruction or fortune telling; It’s about revealing; It’s what James Joyce calls an epiphany-the moment you realize your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obssesive vanity…The real world, within which you’ve lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It’s starting to come to you. You aren’t who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypse
has occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer…Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering and folly before daring a word of hope. The hope has nowhere else to happen but the valley of the shadow of death. Is it any surprise that we often won’t know it when we see it?

-David Dark, “Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons and Other Pop Culture Icons”, p.10

Besides the fact that that quote amazingly described U2; it reveals that apocalyptic, end-times, is “simply” about revelation. And as a subset of that revelation, it’s about the explanation that death is not the end; though life’s hope “has nowhere else to happen but in its shadow.”
U2, in the past (1990s, hallmarked by the song “Until the End of the World,”) looked at life and faith through the shadow and perspective of death and unbelief. Even such “darker” treatises were “meditations on life.” Now they are focusing more clearly on ditching irony and pitching life directly. Same message: Life wins. Though death is still visible, it is not victor. What a revelation. U2 then, fits extraordinarily well, the biblical definition of apocalyptic:

As a literary genre, “apocalyptic” is a way of investing space-time events with their theological significance; it is actually a way of affirming, not denying, the vital importance of the present continuing space-time order, by denying that evil has the last word in it.
-N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

This continual “denying that evil(death) has the last word” is an everyday end –time dismantling of old ways and wineskins. One could make the case, and one (Beth Maynard) basically has, that nothing less than the whole point of U2’s “Bomb” is to effectively and affectively, through apocalyptic and prophetic song, “dismantle the lie that death and destruction hold the cards.”

All I can say is “Amen, Beth!” And I may add “Apocalyptic Baby! “

ANAL RETENTIVES CAN’T SAY “BABY”!

And I may add “Apocalyptic Baby! “

Huh? Explain the “baby”? The common spin in reviews is that the “How to Dismantle” is a sequel to it’s immediate predecessor, 2000’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind.” That sequence make sense, and indeed works in a number of ways: the organic return to roots and dismantling of U2’s 1990s irony continues and grows. I can connect those dots. It is also, by the band’s clear admission, a “full circle” sequel to its very first CD, “Boy.” We have already explored the relationship between “War” and “Bomb.” These all work. But as per usual with U2, there is more up than meets the eye and obvious order. I maintain “Bomb” in an equally valid but more apocalyptic way, is also sequel (heck, maybe prequel) to 1991’s “Achtung Baby” (the album which was centerpieced by the “End of the World” song we’ve mentioned). Of course, this may seem an unorthodox “twinning”, as “Achtung” (ostensibly “about” being stuck in a moment of death, darkness and divorce) is in many ways the newer work’s opposite and antithesis; but “Bomb” is also “Achtung”’s complement, complement, and completion. Perhaps “Achtung” is answered, even deprogrammed, even dismantled, by “Bomb”’s death-defying life-love. The first paints a grim portrait of death; the second paints over (without defacing; actually using as a starting point the “original” canvass). Many do sense an intuitive connection between the two works; Rolling Stone even suggesting they may be two of the band’s masterpieces.

In a stimulating 1990s speech to German artists on the futility of fascism, Bono (who else would give such a speech? ) claims (apocalyptically, of course):

Laughter is the evidence of freedom…. It was from a Mel Brooks movie called “The Producers” that U2 took the name of their latest {“Achtung Baby”} album . In the bizarre musical, an S.S. officer is met with the greeting “Achtung Baby!” to which he replies, “Zie furher would never say ‘baby’!” Quite right. The furher would never say ‘baby.’ We are writers, artists, actors and scientists. I wish we were comedians. We would probably have more effect…Anyway, for all this: imagination!..To tell our stories, to paint pictures…but above all to glimpse another way of being. Because as much as we need to describe the world we live in, we need to dream up the kind of world we want to live in. In the case of a rock and roll band that’s to dream out loud, at high volume, to turn it up to eleven. Because we have fallen asleep in they comfort of our freedom. (cited in Bill Flanagan, “U2 At The End of the World, p. 171)

Apocalyptic, baby! David Dark, inspired by the above portion of Bono’s speech, laments “the anal retentiveness that can’t say ‘baby’.” (142) This lament mourns that , for no good or God reason, we can’t muster the chutzpah to say/sing “what needs to be said” : It’s time to dismantle the death-bomb. Hence the inevitability and apocalypsis of the CD sequence: Achtung Baby to Apocalyptic Baby. Another important symbolism to the (intentionally innocent/throwaway-looking) word “baby” in Bono’s lexicon helps here. Love it or hate it (I may vote both), observe (even at the risk of cringing) the line in the new U2 song “Miracle Drug”; the famous/infamous “Freedom has a scent/ like the top of a newborn baby’s head.” This is in fact yet another angle on the central proposition of all of “Dismantle”. If it’s all about dismantling death, what more obvious dismantling tool than life; and more specifically, life at its beginning to dismantle life at its end. “Bomb” is about dismantling death through birth. And it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Bono has a specific baby in mind here as he sings. Plunder the back catalog with a fine-tooth concordance and you uncomb lyrics like “looking for Baby Jesus under the trash.” One theory is that the “baby” in “Ultraviolet” (tellingly, another “Achtung Baby” song. Aren’t these the only 2 U2 albums that even drop the “b” word at all? Hmmm..) is Jesus, as Satan is pleading with him for redemption (which is in a sense the theme of that whole album!): “Baby, Baby, Baby..light my way”. Of course, for another reason, and for other artists of faith, substituting “Jesus” for “baby” is not a new approach : witness countless “secular” love-songs by Christian artists with double “baby” entendres… Is it a girl or is it Jesus he’s singing to? ) Either way, there’s “always pain before a child is born,” as Bono prays in “Yahweh.”
And anytime a Jesus-moment is about to be birthed, the mothers (that’s all of us) will inevitably experience the pain of transition and pregnancy. But the birth smells good. It’s very smell and song dismantle Death. Mantle and midwife Life. The anal retentive fuhrere cannot say it, but: That’s apocalyptic….baby. Thanks to Baby Jesus, who has in God’s sovereignty arisen out of the trash and the tomb with nothing less than the keys to death and hell. That’s the bomb!

And since freedom’s scent reminds of a newborn’s scalp-smell, no wonder “laughter is the evidence of freedom.” Who hasn’t laughed with love as they witnessed (if not smelled) a fragile head emerging from the womb. In such a room, we as far removed from tombs as possible. Childbirth is holy; miraculous, and thus cosmically comic… and unless we are able to laugh, we have “fallen asleep in the comfort of our freedom” in the delivery room. A room that Bono has complained in a predecessor CD, is often too filled with smoke to see anything or anyone in. The current disc is even more revelatory, it effectively blows smoke out of our way, so we can see and defuse any bombs still under the table.

HOW TO DISMANTLE THE DEATH BOMB, IN 14 SIMPLE STEPS

Anyway, baby, never trust an essay entitled “How to Solve All Your Problems in Ten Easy Steps.” Even if written by apocalyptic end-time signs like U2. I hope you noted that I am proposing in my title that we can though “dismantle the death-bomb in 14 ‘simple’ (hardly equivalent to “easy”) steps. The 14 (the fans, will know why I settled on fourteen) steps are summarized below. I hope the headings make you laugh. But I believe they will work, if we work them out:

· 1):BY NAMING AND FRAMING THE BOMB
· 2))BY PLUNDERING THE PARADOX
· 3)BY REPAIRING THE CHURCH VIA PRAYING NAKED WITH FRANK
· 4)BY BECOMING A LOSER and BUCKING THE SYSTEM
· 5)BY LEARNING THE LIFE LESSON OF ONE OF BONO’S FAVORITE PASTORS
· 6)BY GIVING THE FINGER TO FATE , AND HAMMERS TO THE PEOPLE
· 7))BY CRITICAL WEEPING
· 8) BY BECOMING A HOLY FOOL, REMIXED FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM
· 9)BY BUILDING A TIME MACHINE ON ASLAN’S TABLE AND EINSTEIN’S FOUNDATION
· 10) BY DISARMING ENEMIES VIA DISARMING YOURSELF
· 11))BY BEING BORN AGAIN TO THE NTH DEGREE
· 12)BY RESERVING YOUR ROOM AT THE HEARTBREAK HOTEL
· 13)BY FEARING NOTHING BUT THE FEAR OF DEATH ITSELF
· 14)CATORCE AND CONCLUSION: EMBODYING THE THING DISMANTLED”
·
Anticipating that these provocatively-phrased steps will raise a few questions, it’s time to explore each in turn, and in detail Have fun. Laugh even. How to dismantle death?

I:BY NAMING AND FRAMING THE BOMB

NARROWING DOWN THE NAME

We have already tipped our hand and named the bomb: death..and it’s underside and other side: life, in particular, birth. That’s freedom indeed! Which of course makes apocalyptic babies of us all!

At this point, it might help to back up and enter, though, the debate regarding what exactly IS is the atomic bomb referenced in the title of the disc and book; though you already know the answer this essay assumes.
As Walter Wink suggests in “Naming the Powers,” the mere naming of the “powers that be” is the first step in prophetically dismantling them (Wink is one of several key theologians who often utilize the term “dismantling,” which obviously and delightfully dovetails with our topic. In fact, another leading theologian and proponent of dismantling, Walter Bruggeman , will be the an intelligent intermittent tourguide through the fourteen steps. So let’s back up and officially narrow down the “main name” of the bomb. What are the aspiring nominees?

In one sense, Bono is (as often) purposely and artfully throwing out an intentionally nebulous and multiplex metaphor-bomb by the intriguing title. And there is fluidity and validity in multiple interpretations of just what the “bomb” so in need of dismantling is. Candidates such as the Western political system, the American church mindset, technology run amuck, religion run rampant, pride and hate have all been proposed, and are all partly right. Let’s rehearse the oft-repeated anecdote in which Bono, prior to the CD release, winkingly asked Christian musician Michael W. Smith, “How do you dismantle an atomic bomb, Michael?”. After a proper pause during which Smith admitted agnosticism about the answers, Bono replied “With love, with love.” This would certainly lend credence to the “hate” candidate; hate personified as a bomb of atomic proportions; undone and unmantled prayerfully and carefully by love/Love. “Where…,” Bono repeatedly asks in the climactic “Love and Peace Or Else” outro “ …is the love?” Only love overcomes hate, its archenemy and obvious opposite.

Bono, to Smith, was characteristically and knowingly tossing out a half-right preview-tease to get publicity and web forums stirring as to the identity of the bomb, and the “deep” meaning of the title reference. But though “hate” fits; “death” is a deeper and more detailed one-word answer than “hate”.
Hate is very close. But after all, the only person place or thing specifically described and prescribed in Scripture as being ”stronger than death” is NOT the obvious fill-in-the-blank “ hate”; it’s love. (Song of Solomon 8:6). What is love called to conquer? Hate, yes; but definitively, death; it’s mother.
The bomb is death. Not just hate. The bomb, in a word, is death. Whether Bono knew it pre-release or not, I believe he knows it now.; often the Bonoman will candidly admit that it takes months of touring and “living in” new songs and discs until he realizes “what in the world I was ‘on’ about.” Though it was obvious to him from the beginning that much of the disc was response and “therapy” to one particular death, he (like any artist) may have at first been unaware if the broad and universal sweep of his brush:
You don't hear people talking about atomic bombs very much these days, do you? It comes from my father's lexicon. His generation would call it the atomic bomb, we call it weapons of mass destruction, but although everyone in the world is trying to figure out how to put the toothpaste back in the tube, i.e., once you have this knowledge available on the internet, are we ever going to be safe? Even though that is a thought that's hanging in the air, in my head, “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb” is about my father, Bob: “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bob.” He died a couple of years ago, and his demise set me off on a journey, a rampage, a desperate hunt to find out who I was, and that resulted in a lot of these songs so, it's a lot more personal than a political record, I think. http://www.u2tour.de/specials/htdaab_trackbytrack/

Regarding the above quote; First, it is precisely because the disc’s material IS so personal that it is also and inevitably so hugely and profoundly political. The deathbed makes bedfellows of us all. As Marva Dawn points out, in a book she coauthored with Eugene Peterson entitled “The Unnecessary Pastor”, death is the last ememy to be conqured, but it is one of the first enemies to affect (all) our daily lives” (87)
“Bomb,” even if “just” a personal journal of one man’s public scrambling to make/fake sense of his dad’s death, such is by necessity also a huge help in anyone’s personal/cosmic “rampage and desperate hunt” to come to terms with the mother of all paradoxes; the one word that defines “what is the bomb we are dismantling”..in a word, death. In words, Life emerges out of death.

Secondly, as you have already surmised by my title, the bomb is not just Bob …or not just Bob’s death, as atomic as that was. That was also part true story/part curveball, to “let the reader understand” that in a larger ,apocalyptic and macrocosmic sweep, it’s also all about a theological, practical, and inevitably “political to the max” dismantling of our last (political and practical) enemy itself: death itself! One might even focus the focus a bit more, as we have already suggested Beth Maynard has masterfully done. She blog-thinks that what is to be radically dismantled is, very pointedly, “the lie that death and destruction hold the cards.” Again, touche, and bingo! I believe Beth was the first to correctly namecheck and nametag the bomb, in a 2004 post copied completely below, as it is fundamental to our thesis. She is also right that the book accompanying the “deluxe” version of Bomb is so “theologically rich” that it is almost necessary as a commentary on the record. (Go deluxe while there is still time!)

FRAME IT: BETH IS RIGHT AGAIN

We’ve named the bomb, and to completely understand it , it’s time to frame it. No, I don’t mean “ frame” as in enshrine; God forbid. I mean frame as in position it in context and background, and thus build the case that the assumed name is accurate. Beth found the frame, literally an inclusio (literary framing device), with which the entire book is, well, as she said, “bookended.”

Beth is right. When it’s all said and done, it’s about…

How to dismantle death, basically Scans of the book that will accompany the deluxe box set of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb have been posted online. It's a long book, and getting a real sense of it from these scans is perhaps a bit much to hope for, but I'm going to take a shot at talking about it because it is so theologically rich. Overall, the trajectory of the artwork is exactly the same as the description Bono recently gave on the BBC of the trajectory of the album itself: an arc from fear, in "Vertigo," to the "joyful noise" of trust in "Yahweh." That claim obviously needs unpacking, so here we go: the book opens by showing a world in blackness and chaos here, with a quotation from Hindu scripture. The verse, in which death is identified as ultimate (it's the god Krishna saying "I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world," a paraphrase of Bhagavad Gita 11:32) was famously quoted at the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945. Although the verse is out of context, it's used here to create the effect of death and evil, war and destruction, throwing down the gauntlet on page 1, proclaiming their "truth" -- death is final, God is as much evil as good, might and power are found in the ability to crush and destroy the enemy.Well, the rest of the book, in brief, dismantles these claims and constructs alternative ones. In fact, it literally dismantles the quote bit by bit, taking each word back for goodness, back for God, back for the Kingdom. Thus, scattered throughout the first half of the writing and painting and reflection we find the exact words of the opening quote, subjected to U2's faith-filled midrash, redefined and reworked in an artistic alchemy.I AM: if you've wondered about who's being addressed in the "All Because of You" lyrics, this page answers the question. These words don't belong to death, but to the One who told Moses to take off his shoes because he was on holy ground.DEATH: Yes, death is real, the writer has seen it and been wounded by it, but the words rendered in large print prefer to evoke resurrection: the Lazarus effect. And the last word: "miracles are possible." We've also got THE on the facing page, as we meet a crudely sketched, horned devil-goat who's identified as our enemy. Oh, is that all? Not much of a THE, is he?MIGHTY DESTROYER: Who is really mighty? What does power look like? Read the prayer to find out. And it's not God who works for destruction, it's the fallen brightest star who became the blackest hole (with "Crumbs from Your Table" being quoted here.)"OF" is set in a target highlighting a textual image of love as battling misery from "Mercy," and THE concretizes one example of love's power as it gently undoes personal loss, using recollections of Bono's father.And then we see the WORLD: It's surrounded with the symbols of the great monotheistic religions, the same basic device that was hidden on the wall in one of the live videos of "Vertigo" -- read as letters, a commenter informs me, they spell out what we all must do, no matter how stongly we may be personally committed to our own faith: COEXIST.Constructed like a Pauline epistle, the text has made its theological points and now moves to action, using dominantly more positive images from this point on. (In the hard copy of the book, you actually have to turn it upside down here, reversing your point of view to step into a new reality.) If you have dismantled the lie that death and destruction hold the cards, what then do you do with the truth you've seen? The answer is embedded in another quote, which now reads backward to the end of the book. What do you do? Maybe you work for fair trade..."IN THE"; maybe you seek mercy or honor the body..."TO SEE". Maybe you work against AIDS..."WE WANT"; maybe you share a vision of giving 1% of national income to end poverty..."THE CHANGE", or you try to find your own unique vocation... "BECOME". Perhaps you argue for compromise... "MUST," or freedom and equality..."WE."So the last word, the quote we've been creating in reverse, goes (elegantly) to another Hindu, Gandhi, as we see a globe no longer in chaos as on page 1, but subsumed into the shape of a cross. We must become the change we want to see in the world. Overall, we're bookended by two versions of reality, one about death and one about hope, and with these images U2 dismantle the first and get us to the second. I'm really struck by the depth and power of this vision, and hope I've said enough for it to be clear why. I would welcome conversation with anyone who has comments.
http://u2sermons.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_u2sermons_archive.html#110069032496435964

Wow, Beth’s post is loaded, and is itself indispensable as a commentary on the commentary. And in a very real sense, all my catorce steps below are commentary upon Beth’s commentary on the commentary! Read her post again, play with it, and plunder it. Rejoice that death does not hold the cards, U2 bookends us with another “version of reality…one about hope.” We can do nothing about the details of dismantling until we have come this far in our foundational understanding.

DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING, STAND THERE!

If Bono did nothing in the way of practical good works towards dismantling death in our world (which of course, he has done plently, perhaps more than anyone in our generation), he would have “done enough” if he had just bequeathed us the record and disc, as a seminal Christian thinker/writer, he has framed the bomb eloquently. Richard Inchausti:

The point that many moderns fail to grasp about Christian thinkers is that they have very little interest in changing the world. They seek merely to see things clearly in the light of God's hidden logic. And if by so doing they expose the narcissism of their contemporaries, the false agendas of their leaders, the didactic pornography of their artists and entertainers-well, that is all to the good. But unlike their more utilitarian peers, they desire to live in the truth even more than they desire to be effective in the world. ...Evil manifests itself in absence of perception, and in the negation of Being more than it does in the presence of stupidity, violence or even hatred. It is more often than not a species of folly-a commitment to "virtues" that are not really virtues...It wears a suit or a uniform, waves a flag and has credentials. That is why the primary moral task from a Christian perspective is first to perceive evil. And this requires that one see what isn't there and through things that are. This is possible only for someone who is suspicious of virtre and believes in a greater reality than his own. What the Christian mysteries require from us is not that we construct a better world, but that we love and serve the one we are given. As one Parisian graffiti artist wrote in 1968:: "the intellectuals have hitherto only changed the world, the point is to understand it." This is a decidedly contemplative observation, one that confirms Blake's suspicions of the new aesceticism and Kierkegaards' view that even if someone were to speak the Word of God directly today, no one in the modern world would hear it, simply because there is too much noise and distraction. The function of the modern apostle, therefore, is to create the silent contemplative places where individuals can
experience truth for themselves.
-Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and Other Christians in Disguise. pp187-189

2) BY PLUNDERING THE PARADOX

So, if the above quote is accurate, Bono is obviously an apostle; and death (at least as card-holder) is obviously “the bomb”. Death as the bomb.

What, then, is death? Does it not at times feel as if it is some kind of entity; alive? Stringfellow, in his previously quoted “Ethic” agrees that death is “apart from God Himself, the only extant moral power living in this world.” And the very “moral reality which rules nations and all other powers and principalities of this world…”(72) Wow. Perhaps death is ” living,” but not alive; “ruling,” but not Ruler. And like any living “thing,” it can..and will… invite and invoke idolatry. Even more so as the very opposite of life. Stringfellow continues: “Death dominates ; Death assumes for the principalities the very role of God.. Death is institutionalized…incarnate in the ethos of each nation.”

Therefore:

“No” (to death) is the only hope worthy of human beings, because no to death, incarnate in the nation or in any other appearance, means yes to the gift of life…So from death arises new life Suffering issues in celebration. To be ethical is to live sacramentally. To discern apocalyptic signs heightens the expectation of eschatological events. In resistance. persons love most humanly. No to death means yes to life (156)

CONVERT YOUR ENEMY

We arrive at the heart of the death paradox. Death is the bomb. But maybe in addition to the “usual” definition of bomb as something big, bad and explosive; maybe also…paradoxically… in the way that young folk talk colloquially about something good being “the bomb.” All this is what has classically afforded Death “the Mother of All Paradoxes” title. Is death enemy or friend? How to defuse all the confusion, isn’t it a both/and? 1 Corinthians 15:26 seems clear: “The last enemy is death”; but it’s also clear that (unless those “Left Behind” novels are more accurate and timely than we have thought, and a rapture is imminent!.), death is the only possible entrance into afterlife, and so must be, in addition to being defied as an enemy, in another sense be submitted to as a “ friend” who ushers us into glory; into birth and life; a midwife.

Perhaps it’s significant that Paul did not say, “Death is the last enemy,” but “The last enemy is death.” This order could imply that death is not technically or inherently an enemy, except if/as it still unconquered by Christ’s once-for-all overturning. This indeed is the context of 1 Corinthians 15:26. Death cannot be dogmatically written off as evil, as it is “far better” (Philippians 1:23) to die and thus be with Christ. “To live is Christ, but to die is to gain,” Paul concludes.

“Death is inevitable.” Sound familiar? This was one of the multitude of maxims flashed at manic speed onto the huge video screens of the 1990s “Zoo TV” tour. But did U2 mean it? Fans will remember that the sayings purposely, randomly and indiscriminately flipped from truth to lies, from satire to schlock. What followed the “death is inevitable” slide most nights: “Superficiality is God.” So does U2 mean this, or is it a joke? Yes, both. (Obviously, as believers, they don’t imply that the One True God is “Superficiality,” but the superficiality they are spoofing is practically speaking, unfortunately, a very “real” god; the “god of choice” for many in our culture.) But that’s what a paradox is: ‘both/and. Some of the sayings were comical, as “This is not a rehearsal” (but it was also seriously both true/false) . To quote another false (?) truism from the line-up: “Contradiction is balance.” Technically, paradox embodies not contradiction, but complementarity. Which sounds impossible regarding death, which surely must be either for or against us … since it inevitably inevitable (Or is it? Argghh!). How could anything inevitable be evil or enemy, if God, in his economy allows it?

Hold on.

Enemy? Friend? Enemy who becomes a friend? St. Paul helps out; he frames death as a conquered enemy. Well, what exactly is a conquered enemy, in the Kingdom economy? A friend! Or at least someone you defang and dismantle by taking Jesus’ flat-out command at face value: “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:45.) Do the math; it’s not a faulty syllogism: “Love your enemies. Death is an enemy. Therefore; love, befriend (and mantle) death.” (As you simultaneously hate and dismantle it!) Bottom line, death is defined as a defanged, dismantled enemy…whom we are constantly, in the words and title of the “Bomb” song, “one step closer to knowing”….(as we) “watch the taillights glowing”… is now, in God’s sovereignty, friend. How to dismantle the diabolical death bomb? Surely it’s futile without embracing the mystery and paradox that is death, and in so doing, also embrace its quite apposite opposite: life. Confused? That may be a good sign, but if you are completely baffled, perhaps considering the words of a certain (heavy clue: Irish) postmodern poet will help out: “uncertainty can be a guiding light.” It is only by living in the creative tension of paradox and “both/ands” that we are anywhere near the One who is so sold on the power of paradox that he doesn’t seem able to speak, or act without it! And on uncertainty: no one less than Abraham is lauded, in the Book of Hebrews (11:8) for “Launching out..even though he was uncertain about where he was going.” Of course, his radical trust was built on a decision made in life, to “die in faith’, , and so upon entering the door of death, arrive on the other side in a “better country.” (13)

LAXATIVES AT THE FEAST

Kierkegaard, the Danish master at pursuing Jesus and preaching paradox, honors the defining moment in Abraham’s life as the decision to trust Yahweh with what could only look like death: the death of his son, Isaac. Death was dismantled, even pre-empted by embracing it. Ot at least admiiting it’s inevitality. But death did not win. How paradoxical is that? In a passage with a hilarious punchline, the Danish wonders aloud about the validity of voluntary martyrdom, of a human intentionally embracing death, even for a good cause:

The parson (collectively understood) does indeed preach about those glorious ones who sacrificed their lives for the truth. As a rule the parson is justified in assuming that there is no one present in the church who could entertain the notion of venturing upon such a thing. When he is sufficiently assured of this by reason of the private knowledge he has of the congregation as its pastor, he preaches glibly, declaims vigorously, and wipes away the sweat. If on the following day one of those strong and silent men...were to visit the parson at his house announcing himself as one whom the parson had carried away by his eloquence, so that he had now resolved to sacrifice his life for the truth—what would the parson say? He would address him thus: "Why, merciful Father in heaven! How did such an idea ever occur to you? Travel, divert yourself, take a laxative."
("Has a Man the Right to Let Himself Be Put to Death for the Truth?")

So to choose to be a martyr, to choose to embrace death may be, paradoxically, death itself; and dumb indeed. Take a laxative and get it out of your system. Unless you are Jesus:

"Why is it Christ cannot be called a martyr? Because he was not a witness to the truth, but 'the truth', and his death not a martyrdom but the atonement" (Journals, X 1,A, 119).

If you prefer your theologians to be Russian, try on the ever-articulate Nikolai Berdayev: “The greatest of all tensions in human life is connected with love and death…Love conquers death, it is more powerful than death and at the same time it leads to death..This is a paradox of human existence . (Freedom and Slavery, p. 227.

If you need the Galillean Theologian to speak to this, consider a few representative quotes from His Journal. The same one who spoke that overcomers “do not love their lives so much as to shrink from death (Rev 12:11) self-identified Himself as "I, Yahweh, the “I AM,’, the resurrection and life”, (John 11:35-36). “The one who trusts in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives and trusts in me will never die. Do you believe this?" Pretty hard to believe, unless paradox, mystery and uncertainty are guiding lights alongside faith!
Literal Death is in a limited sense, enemy to be “loved” and befriended; spiritual death to self in this life, is the only path to life in this life. Either way, death is to be welcomed and embraced, even as we resolutely refuse to believe that it “holds the cards” and can live up to its bombastic, antichristic claim : “I AM..the mighty destroyer.” In God’s wild sovereignty, death is merely a door, even if of the devil’s design, that can be walked through with Abrahamic trust and abandon. “I, Jesus hold the keys of death,” he claimed in Rev 1:18,” because I was once dead myself.”

I tell you the amen-truth, unless a kernel of wheat..or anything, falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The one who loves their life will lose it, while the one who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

“Whoever seeks to save their life, loses it: whoever loses their life (death), saves it”
Mark 9:24

The gospel, Eugene Peterson offers, in a word that appears to contradict Kierkegaard’s, but instead honors paradox:

involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives. The Gospel of Mark is so graphic this way. The first half of the Gospel is Jesus showing people how to live. He's healing everybody. Then right in the middle, he shifts. He starts showing people how to die: "Now that you've got a life, I'm going to show you how to give it up." That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love. It involves a kind of learned passivity, so that our primary mode of relationship is receiving, submitting, instead of giving and getting and doing. We don't do that very well. We're trained to be assertive, to get, to apply, or to consume and to perform.

It’s time to undo our training. “Whoever hears my words..is past judgement; .they have already emerged from death and entered life.” (John 5:24). Paraphrase: “Death can be dismantled; the toothpaste can be put back into the tube, for Christ’s sake (literally). If we hear the word of the Lord, we learn how to die, and thus how to live, and love.

So in short, how to dismantle death? By embracing it, even if only as condescending enough to walk through it when God wills. But to embrace it, even as Moltmann says below, you simultaneously protest it. Living in that creative tension and place of paradox is the only was to completely dismantle.
So read Moltmann (Bono must be ….or must be made aware of this ever-articulate theologian). Underline his last line: “anyone who fails to hold these two things together (at the same time)” not only “fails to understand,” but remantles death and completely misses the point, paradox and feast:

The Easter faith recognizes that the raising of the crucified Christ from the dead provides the great alternative to this world of death. This faith sees the raising of Christ as God's protest against death, and against all the people who work for death; for the Easter faith recognizes God's passion for the life of the person who is threatened by death and with death. And faith participates in this process of love by getting up out of the apathy of misery and out of the cynicism of prosperity, and fighting against death's accomplices, here and now, in this life.
Weary Christians have often enough deleted this critical and liberating power from Easter. Their faith has then degenerated into the confident belief in certain facts, and a poverty-stricken hope for the next world, as if death were nothing but a fate we meet with at the end of life. But death is an evil power now, in life's very midst. It is the economic death of the person we allow to starve; the political death of the people who are oppressed; the social death of the handicapped; the noisy death that strikes through napalm bombs and torture; and the soundless death of the apathetic soul….
Easter is the feast of freedom. It makes the life which it touches a festal life. "The risen Christ makes life a perpetual feast," said Athanasius. But can the whole of life really be a feast? Even life's dark side -death, guilt, senseless suffering? I think it can. Once we realize that the giver of this feast is the outcast, suffering, crucified Son of Man from Nazareth, then every "no" is absorbed into this profound "yes," and is swallowed up in its victory.
Easter is at one and the same time God's protest against death, and the feast of freedom from death. Anyone who fails to hold these two things together has failed to understand the resurrection of the Christ who was crucified; Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.
Jürgen Moltmann, “The Feast of Freedom,” from The Power of the Powerless

3)BY REPAIRING THE CHURCH VIA PRAYING NAKED WITH FRANK

“Repair my church.”

The story is told of St. Francis of Assisi once hearing this voice of God from behind the altar of the San Damiano, Italy church. At first, he interpreted it at face value; as a commissioning to a literal repairing of the small “c” church; that is, the dilapidated and dated building he was in. So he immediately responded by taking some fabric from his father’s shop, intending to use the money to pay for repairs on the building. When his father, an atomic bomb kind of guy, got wind of this turn of events, he had his son dragged in before the bishop to confess the sin of theft, demanding that Francis return the money, or relinquish all rights as heir. . By this time, Francis had grasped that the Voice had commanded not just a literal reparation, but also a broader call to spiritually repair the overall, capital “C” Church. Francis dramatically threw not only his father’s fabric at the bishop, but also every last item of clothes he was wearing! “ Pietro Bernadone is no longer my father!, ” he announced. “From now on I can say with complete freedom, 'Our Father who art in heaven.'"” Naked, he went off into the freezing woods; singing, rejoicing that he had made the right decision. The rest of his future is history.

Several parallels to “Bomb” may be pursued. On this record, Bono is both honoring and and recovering from him, in a way only possible after his father’s death. Lines in “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’ (ostensibly a song to his dad, but more pointedly a song to himself) “It’s you when I look in the mirror”; ”If we weren’t so much alike, you’d like me a whole lot more” ; “You’re reason why I have the opera in me.”..may be the language of love, but may also be a tossing of clothes; a “Bob Hewson is no longer my father.. From now on, I can say with complete freedom (we already know what freedom smells like in Bono’s dictionary) that “Our Father who art in heaven is my father.” This may sound too harsh, and it is if it stands alone. “He was genuinely cool and charming,” Bono wrote in the bomb-book, “(but) also unknowable.” Gulp.
“I got to make peace with him,” he offers in an interview, “ but never really to become his friend.” Funny, in light of our conversation section two above, that could also be said about death itself. But maybe it’s only after Uzziahs die that we see the Lord, and ourselves as we are. And Bono, contrary to his father’s stern advice (“His advice was always ‘Don’t dream..To dream is to be disappointed. ‘ He never said that exactly; but that’s what the raised eyebrow and hairy eyeball meant.’) dreamed of nothing less than changing the world.” “As a child, I always wanted to have fun and change the world.”

At the same time, “I wanted to be great… because good would not be good enough,” Bono spoke to his Atomic Bob in the original lyric of “Sometimes”

Unpacking; detoxing from, dismantling the dad who was both charming and unknowable; the well-meaning dad who gave fatal advice with eyebrow alone.

Already in an 1997 lyric, Bono has confessed that since his mother died, “no one tells me ‘no”. Iris, his mom’s “no” was likely the necessary, preventative “no” that all good parents must utter with truth and love. Could it be that now that dad Bob has also died, part of what Bono can dismantle is the inappropriate dream-shattering “no” that Atomic Bob’s eyebrows spoke?
Now for the first time in his life, without either earthly parents, Bono is free to inherit the best of his heritage, admit and excuse the “less than best” of the heritage, and transfer his trust to his Father in heaven in a fresh way. Full circle indeed. Bono has said the band’s first CD was drenched in innocence; the newest one is about “having lost your innocence, wanting it back.” The “Love and Peace Oe Else” lyrics, then, “ As you enter this life, I pray you depart, with a wrinkled face and a brand new heart” likely means “in the same way and style you entered this life, may you likewise leave it: like a baby…who of course is naked..wrinkled, and trusting. A new heart. In spite of it being broken by earthy parents.

The “Catholic Online” article on St. Francis is pertinent here:

When the bishop showed horror at the friars' hard life, Francis said, "If we had any possessions we should need weapons and laws to defend them." Possessing something was the death of love for Francis.. Also, Francis reasoned, what could you do to a man who owns nothing? You can't starve a fasting man, you can't steal from someone who has no money, you can't ruin someone who hates prestige. They were truly free.

"Possessions are a way of turning money into problems,” the Edge, a very “Franciscan” heart (Or as Bono calls him, a “Zen Presbyterian”), recently said.

I don’t know if Bono is familiar with the brilliant work of the band, the 77s…they were briefly on the same Island record label for one 77s record, before being dropped when guess who became the breaking biggest band in the world. This forced the 77s frontman Mike Roe to “resort” to signing the band with a conservative Christian label for their next release, which Roe announced at a Christian festival would be titled “Pray Naked.” But there was a record label executive in the audience who mumbled, “No it won’t!” So on the eventual hilarious and profound madness that is what became the 77s’ second self-titled (but to fans will always be “Pray Naked”) record, the song by that name (whose title was blacked out as a sarcastic olive branch to the record company) is wonderfully refreshing and relevant here. In it, we are encouraged to pray from a place of vulnerability and “naked” honesty…..exactly what Francis did, and precisely what Bono is so “natural” at. ( I mean, naked symbolically, though there is that ancient story floating around about the interview he allegedly did naked when the interviewer was apparently ‘going through the motions”!)

Scribbled (literally) in the “Bomb” book, Bono contemplates such nakedness:

I hate navel gazing. I know sometimes you need to do work on yourself, fix something that’s broken , as the way to see yourself or the world. But the greatest t insights I have ever had into myself have been through other people…not just talking to them on a train or plane..but looking after people , you kind of find yourself.

Losing a father, especially a father who never talked about losinh his wife, would explain the bouncing around the Kubler-Ross “stages of grief” ( denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) that Bono has candidly admitted to:

My mother was never mentioned…
After she died, my father didn’t talk about her. So it never came up. So that’s why I don’t have any memories of my mother, which is strange.
She collapsed at the funeral of her own father. She never regained consciousness. Well, actually, we don’t know if she did or she didn’t. My father, when he was losing it or we’d been having a big row, would say: “I promised your mother on her deathbed that . . .” Then he never finished the sentence….

Ali said to me that since his death I haven’t been myself, and that I have been a lot more aggressive and quicker to anger, and showing some of my father’s irascible side.
When he died, I went on a short vacation, which turned into a euphemism for “drinks outing”. I don’t like to abuse alcohol — anything you abuse will abuse you back. But it’s fair to say I went to Bali for a drink. With my friend Simon, we just headed off. I wanted to blow it out a bit, get the monkey off my back. But when I returned, funnily enough, it was still there.
And so just on Easter, I went up to the church in a little village where we live in France, and I just felt this was the moment that I had to let it go. In this little church, on Easter morning, I just got down on my knees and I let go of whatever anger I had against my father. And I thanked God for him being my father, and for the gifts that I have been given through him. And I let go of that. I wept, and I felt rid of it.

That little French church, like the making of “Dismantle” was Bono’s San Damiano. And just as Francis heard there a call to strip down to the basics, realizing who his Father was, Bono cut a deal that may well be just as historic. He has for the last several years, been aware of a call to “rebuild the church,” especially in sensitizing her to practical compassion and justice. Just think what that rebuilding can look like, shaped as it is now is by the disarming and dismantling events of Bob’s death, and the anger and resurrection of Easter morning.

“I’m getting closer to what’s true/Going to find myself in You.”
-lyric from a “Bomb” B-side (“Are You Gonna Wait Forever?”

4)BY BECOMING A LOSER and BUCKING THE SYSTEM
It exists as a prophetic underground renewal movement. Its officially stated purpose is to be “a community of obedience,” an “experimental community” raised up in part “as an act of confession and repentance because its members realize that the Church in its Western expression, especially in the United States has largely succumbed to the world’s system of values.” Among the stated desires of its members are to “reject the prevailing violence of the world and challenge it by their preparedness to absorb the world’s violence rather than perpetuate it,” and to remember that as intoxicating as it is, “the ‘success syndrome’ is to be rejected as being in fundamental opposition to the Kingdom of God”…which “accepts the biblical mandate to serve the poor and speak for them.” It seeks to live by the principle that, spiritually speaking, “life comes only through death” and through a “seeking to receive that freedom which will bring the cross back to the center of the Church’s experience,,and allow us to experience the peculiar joy of the Lord.”

“Okay what’s the big deal?,” you ask me. “You’re describing U2, Bono in particular. If not directly quoting one of his sermons to a church or Christian festival, then soundbyting his mind and reading his mail, right? Well… yeah…but not directly. I’m not talking about U2…or am I? I am simply quoting the “Statement of Confession and Intention” of the “L.O.” Society, a covenant group founded by my Bono-esque (Well, usually no fly-shades, but he was behind the very first Christian rock festival) Bible professor at Asbury Theological Seminary (http://www.asburysem.edu/), a gentle PhD by the name of Bob Lyon. I belonged to this group while in seminary ,and it is a no-brainer that Bono would have joined it..this group whose unofficial greeting was “peace and towels…or else.” (Okay, just kidding about the “or else.”) .As the document explains, “L.O. stands for ‘ Loyal Opposition Society,’ and derives from the custom in parliamentary systems of government referring to the party out of power as the ‘loyal opposition.’ The name points to the society’s radical criticism of power which is the fundamental attribute of what the Bible calls ‘the world.” We studied writers such as Moltmann, Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, etc.; ..that is, books and documents that are likely right now stashed beside Bono’s bedside.

“Lord, the righteous stay oddly still; without wisdom all the riches of the world make us poor...and strength without humility is weakness…and war is always the choice of the chosen who know they will not have to fight.” Brilliant prayer, not from a L.O. Society text….but from a book amazingly resonant with them; it’s the prayer of Bono from the “Bomb” book...on a page called “ Ave Maria.”

JESUS’ TOOTHY WIFE

We “Losers” (as we were conveniently and affectionately called)were made up of “radicals” who were committed to their denominations/traditions, but had grave concerns about the pull of “the system”, and were fearful of growing “a mouthful of teeth” as systemites often do. In a song addressed from Africa to the Western “fundamentalist” church:

You were pretty as a picture It was all there to see Then your face caught up with your psychology With a mouth full of teeth You ate all your friends And you broke every heart thinking every heart mends You speak of signs and wonders But I need something other I would believe if I was able But I’m waiting on the crumbs from your table

We, like Bono once said of contemporary Christianity, “sometimes felt more like a fan than actually in the band.” Yet we wanted to prophetically buck the system; to dismantle it….but “with love, with love, Michael!”. If the U2 song “Peace on Earth” had been out then (1990s), we would have often quoted that line bemoaning our tendency towards “becoming a monster so the monster will not break you”.

See, we were “at the door of the place we started out from,” (the church), and even though we saw the system thereof as imperfect, we “wanted back inside”. Like Bono would do a decade later, as he learned to dismantle Bobs and bombs, we were.learning to come to terms with; not being ashamed of being Christian, while being embarrassed about the church.. (In the catchy goth-punk song of the same title, “Jesus, I love You, but I don’t understand Your Wife”., Brian Healey of Dead Artists Syndrome, wrote:

Jesus I love youBut I don't understand your wifeShe wears such funny make upAnd she always wants to fightEvery time I turn my backShe's waiting with a knifeIn a world of black and grayShe argues shades of white
Jesus I love youBut I don't understand your wifeShe wears such funny make upAnd she always wants to fight
She loves capitol punishmentAnd nuclear armsThen screams about the right to lifeAnd the Grand Old Party's charmShe's always burning bridgesEven ones she's standing onAnd when I try to tell herShe says with you I don't belong
Always hear me complainAnd you're listening once moreI know everything your bride's againstBut I don't know what she's forSo don't mistake my anger for bitterness and strifeCuz on bended kneesI'm begging you pleaseJesus talk to your wife

Embracing the wife/bride/body of Christ, even though she is more harlot than faithful wife; ranking himself among that number..as part of the problem, has been a growing strength of Bono. I, as part of the movement, must “become the change I want to see” in it. By abandoning power and becoming “L.O.” (pronounced “low” with a wink and on purpose) enough to ..well, dismantle death and buck the system from a place of humility, not arrogance.

“I’d join the movement if there was one I could believe in/\Yeah, I’d break bread and wine if there was a church I could receive in/’Cause I need it now.” That was 1991 (“Acrobat” from “Achtung Baby”) “Now” has come. Apparently, Bono has actually been spotted “breaking bread and wine” in a church he could receive in.…

IN THE SYSTEM BUT NOT OF IT

The only way to claim any authority to buck the system is by admitting part of it.
Bono has come a long way from the Beliefnet interview quote “You know, God has some really weird kids, and I find it hard to be in their company most of the time” to its more recent version, something like,
“God lots of weird kids. I am one of them.”

In part 4 of this series of essays, I make the case that the line “I’m not used to talking to somebody in the Body” , from the song “Fast Cars” (bonus song on deluxe version of “Bomb”, is partly about Bono reconciling himself to the fact that he has become “L.O.” enough to to preach more often..as he did at Wheaton College, and at least one Midwest church in 2001. (Though his proper and preferred pulpit is indeed the stage, appropriate to the context and contours of his calling). And his message is synchronous with Walsh and Keesmmat, in their amazing targum on Colossians:

Your hope is not the cheap buoyant optimism of global capitalism with its cybernetic computer gods and self-confident scientific discovery, all serving the predatory idolatry of economism. You know that these are gods with an insatiable desire for child sacrifice. That is why your hope is not the shallow optimism of the "Long Boom" of increased prosperity. Such optimism is but a cheap imitation of hope. Real hope-the kind of hope that gives you the audacity to resist the commodification of your lives and engenders the possibility of an alternative imagination-is no human achievement; it is a divine gift. This hope isn't extinguished by living in "the future of a shattered past," precisely because it is a hope rooted in a story of kept promises, even at the cost of death.

Colossians Remixed, p.39

This is a message the church forgets to remember, and as a result,
by default, remains dialed towards death, violence, and worship of prosperity. All the garbage the system pumps out. Well, where the system and structure is death, buck it.

Bono has come along way..now he’s a “loyal oppositionist” who wants to “buck,” ..and not simply, well a word that rhymes with ‘buck’..the system. Allow Steve Stockman, Irish Presbyterian pastor, author of “Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2” and webmaster of Rhythms of Redemption, speak, as he addresses a website reader’s complaint of “Over the years I heard several things that bothered me. For instance, Bono saying things like ‘F*** the system’.

Stockman’s wise and balanced reply, in part, is

For me using the word F*** is not as big a sin as the system. We rage at Bono using that word but fail to see that the system needs turned upside down. We spend our time talking about whether that means he is backsliding rather than getting out there to campaign against the systems Third World debt. Interestingly while he does it. Bruce Cockburn another believer who has used such a word said in an interview, that I was at, that some obscene things need obscene words to describe them. I think Bono is a little liberal sometimes with his use of it but spirituality is much more than bad words. I know that in his family life and in his ordinary behind the shades life this guy is searching after God in a way I long for and in a way I hope you and I are getting near….

Steve Stockman
http://www.stocki.ni.org/u2/faith.phtml

I love the other singer mentioned above, Bruce Cockburn, as does Bono. His related line from “Maybe The Poet” is “Don’t let system fool you/ all it wants to do is rule you.” Buck it! In a loyal opposition kind of way.. With peace and towels…As one who; like Neo in the Matrix, is in the system, but not of it.

From fear of death, Man sows death; as a result of feeling a slave, he desires to dominate. Domination is always constrained to kill. The state is always subject to fear and therefore it is constrained to kill. It has no desire to wrrestle against death. Men in authyority are vety much like gangsters.
Berdayev, p251

From Walter Bruggeman’s amazing “The Prophetic Imagination,” as he writes about Bono. (.oops, dateline 1979..I should say, he writes prophetically about Bono of twenty five years later!) This is precisely what I esperience in the ethereal but very real encounter with God I taste anytime I get near a U2 concert or speech by Bono. It’s also an expose of what he’s doing throughout the “Bomb” disc, book and tour:

The prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency…

The task of the prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there, Hope, on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk.. On the other hand,. hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present…the public expression of hope (is) a way of subverting the dominant royal embrace of despair. (67)

Bruggemann..what more could you ask for, also frequently uses the very word “dismantling” throughout this seminal book. For example, he speaks of the ways that the preacher-as-prophet (a la U2) makes and unmakes the world of the listener in first "dismantling, " then "energizing" the people (109).

What better job description of Bono’s prophetic-priestly gift and call, a call I believe he has recently seen is “irrevocable” (Romans 11:29)… to dismantle, deconstruct, and unplug (often literally) that which needs it (songs, presuppositions, expectations, death and culture of death); and to mantle and construct..before our eyes and ears…subversive life, justice, hope, joy…to “energize” the people he prophetically pastors and sings to. So that we all get to participate in a corporate dismantling of death. Remember the quote in the a“Bomb” book, “I always wanted to have fun and change the world.”? It concludes with “ That’s why I joined a rock band; to do both.”

Maybe that’s why he joined the church, too.

5)BY LEARNING THE LIFE LESSON OF ONE OF BONO’S FAVORITE PASTORS

"I was, and am, grateful to the ecclesiastical institution that put me to work organising a new congregation. They ordained me. They spent a lot of money on me. They provided me with encouragement, advice, and counsel. They gave me access to a tradition in theology and polity that is foundational and stabilising. At no time in the process I am recording did I repudiate this institution. But I did learn that in addition to being a sinner myself [a key doctrine in my (Presbyterian) denomination's theology], the institution itself was also a sinner. In those early years of my ordination I didn't understand the prevalence and depth of institutional sin. I caught on soon enough. One of the duties I had as the organising pastor of a new church was to prepare a monthly report on my work and send it to a denominational executive in New York City. It was not a difficult task, but it did take a day's work. The first page was statistical: how many calls I made, how many people attended worship, a financial report of offerings, progress on building plans, committee activities. This was followed by several pages of reflection on my pastoral ministry, theological ruminations on the church, my understanding of mission, areas of inadequacy that were showing up in my ministry, strengths and skills that seemed to be emerging. After a few months of doing this, I got the impression that my superiors were not reading the second part. I thought I would test out my impression and have a little fun on the side. So the next month, after dutifully compiling the statistical data, I turned to page two and described as best I could an imagined long, slow slide into depression. I wrote that I had difficulty sleeping, couldn't pray. I was getting the work done at a maintenance level but it was a robotic kind of thing with no spirit, no zest. Having feelings and thoughts like these, I was seriously questioning whether I should be a pastor at all. Could they recommend a counsellor for me? Getting no response, I upped the ante. The next month I developed a drinking problem which became evident one Sunday in the pulpit. Everybody was very nice about it, but one of the Elders had to complete the sermon. I felt that I was at the point where I needed treatment. How should I go about getting it? Still no response. I got bolder. The next month I cooked up an affair. It started out innocently enough as I was attempting to comfort a woman through an abusive marriage, but something happened in the middle of it, and we ended up in bed together, only it wasn't a bed but one of the pews in the church where we were discovered when the ladies arranging flowers for Sunday worship walked in on us. I thought it was all over for my ministry at that point, but it turned out that in this community swingers are very much admired, and on the next day, Sunday, attendance doubled. This was turning into a gala event one day each month in our house. I would go to my study and write these wonderful fictions and then bring them out and read them to my wife. We would laugh and laugh, collaborating and embellishing details. Next I reported some innovations I was making in the liturgy. This was the sixties, an era of liturgical reform and experimentation. Our worship, I wrote to my supervisors, was about as dull as it could get. I had read some scholarly guesses about a mushroom cult in Palestine in the first century in which Jesus must have been involved. I thought it was worth a try. I arranged for the purchase of some mushroom caps, peyote it was, and introduced them at our next celebration of the Eucharist. It was the most terrific experience anybody had ever had in worship, absolutely dazzling. But I didn't want to do anything that was in violation of our church constitution, and finding nothing in our Book of Order on this, could they please advise on whether I was permitted to proceed along these lines. These report-writing days were getting to be a lot of fun. Month after month I sent the stories to the men and women who were overseeing the health of my spirituality and integrity of my ministry. Never did I get a response. At the end of three years I was released from their supervision. As pastor and congregation, we were now more or less on our own - developed, organised, and on our way. I went for a debriefing to the denominational office in New York City under which I worked. They asked me to evaluate their supervision through the three years. I told them I appreciated their help. My pay cheques arrived on time each month. I was treated courteously at all times. But there was one minor area of disappointment: they had never read past the first page of statistical reporting that I had sent in each month. "Oh, but we did," they said, "We read those reports carefully; we take them very seriously." "How can that be," I said. "That time I asked for help with my drinking problem and you didn't respond. That time I got involved in a sexual adventure and you didn't intervene. That craziness that I reported when I was using peyote in the Eucharist and you did nothing." Their faces were blank and then confused - followed by a splendid vaudeville slapstick of buck-passing and excuse-making. It was a wonderful moment. I had them dead to rights. I replay the scene in my imagination a couple of times a year, the way some people watch old Abbott and Costello movies. The laughter and fun of those days, though, was cover for a deep disappointment: I had discovered that spiritually and vocationally I was on my own. The people who ordained me and took responsibility for my work were interested in financial reports, attendance graphs, program planning. But they were not interested in me. They were interested in my job; they cared little for my vocation. My deeper discovery was that I was mistaken to expect anything else. Spiritual direction doesn't come from institutions. The institution has its necessary and proper place. I could not function well without it, maybe not at all. But I was quite mistaken to look for spiritual nurture and expect vocational counsel from the institution."

From: Eugene Peterson:’s ”Under the Unpredictable Plant “(Grand Rapids:Eerdmans), 1992, p. 76ff

6)BY GIVING THE FINGER TO FATE , AND HAMMERS TO THE PEOPLE

The word “activist,” even “crusader”, is often included front and center among the nouns describing the indescribable (Bono) in the press; often coupled with “rebel with a cause.” Of course, this is partly true, and in large part a reductionistic misunderstanding. For one, as Bono has preached again and again regarding the world situation: “It’s not a cause, it’s an emergency.”

RABBITS PRAYING IN THE HEADLIGHTS

But secondly, and the point here: As much as Bono is a man with a mission, especially regarding the issues of DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa) , he is becoming, perhaps because of the activist bent more a man of meditation and prayer, even somewhat of a quietist (!). He admitted years ago that “I can’t change the world, but I can change the world in me.” (“Rejoice)” And more recently, his self-assigned task has been streamlined to “become the change we want to see in the world.” Though he has lots for us to do, God didn’t make “human doings,” but human beings. Margaret Wheatley articulates:

For too long, I have lived in the world wanting to change it. This has been an impossible stance. It intensifies normal desires to contribute something to the human condition into crusades that are doomed to disappoint. I have gradually weaned myself from this posture, I think, because it is just too exhausting and unsatisfying to maintain.
We so want to know our purpose that we too quickly determine what we think it is, and we kill ourselves in the process. We turn from stillness and listening to earnest action, and Spirit disappears. After a while we find ourselves expired-we played God with our lives and lost the source of all inspiration, the breath of life…..

This is a real dilemma. How do we attend to our purpose while holding the humility that we do not create it? Once we catch a glimmer of what it might be, how do we avoid taking over as creator? It gets even more complicated. How do we avoid getting ego-seduced by the specific manifestation of our gifts? Is it possible to live in the humility of knowing that our purpose, as clearly as we self-define it, is but "a husk of meaning"? The task is really to become superb listeners. Heidegger wrote that waiting, listening, was the most profound way to serve God…

To this place, listening carries us. Whatever we conceive our work to be, in the end we know that we are only, infinitely, serving the place of prayer.

-Margaret J. Wheatley, “Consumed by Either Fire or Fire: Journeying with T.S. Eliot”Journal of Noetic Science, November 1999

To “only and infinitely” serve the place of prayer, as “practical mystics” such as Brother Lawrence have been challenging us to do…excuse me, be…all along, is a tough place to return to. Only a prayer-based activist like Bishop Tutu could rebuke Bono into such place:

. We visited the headquarters of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we met with Desmond Tutu. So we all walked into the room, just completely honored to meet him. We were exchanging pleasantries and then he just turned around and said, ‘Can we bow our heads now please?’ We all had to bow our heads and he made this prayer, which just changed the molecular structure of the room and everyone in it, and suddenly we weren’t tourists any more; suddenly he was reminding us of what was really going on here. I asked him a rather stupid question afterwards. I said, ‘Do you get time with all this work for prayer and meditation yourself?’ And he just looked at me, threw a scowl at me, a real rebuke. He just stopped in his tracks and said, ‘How do you think we would do this if we didn’t take time out for prayer?’ I was scolded by the great man! And of course he’s all laughs normally. Then afterwards he brought us upstairs and said, ‘Look, I have a few people who would like to meet the band,’ and we said okay, great. So we went upstairs. There were six hundred people sitting there. He brought us out and said, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I have for you, to sing a song, U2!’, and we had no instruments, nothing! We just looked at each other, just like rabbits in the headlights. The only thing I could think of singing was ‘Amazing Grace’, which turns out was appropriate; it is a story of grace interrupting karma.
-Dazed and Confused magazine interview with Bono

Making poverty history, eliminating Third World Debt, dismantling AIDS in Africa, no small tasks, these. And all these impossibly huge targets are appendages of the death machine that rules in the world largely unchallenged. So it is massive spiritual warfare to even try to tackle such princilaities. Unless, as Walter Wink “History belongs to the intercessors…. Intercession is spiritual defiance, in the name of what God has promised.” Bono is not on a crazed quixotic quest, motivated by idealistic idiocy,. He is, however, naive enough to think he can make a difference. Become the change he wants to see in the world. But only as he prays and intercedes. He is not exactly a visionary, more precisely, he is a vision. Because he has seen a vision,

“You speak of impossibilities” said the King. “You must have seen a vision.”
-“Flatland”

As we have seen, the seconf half of the “Bomb” book, the “upside down” section, is full of practical ways and means of becoming change and doing impossible things. Review Beth Maynard’s observations:

Constructed like a Pauline epistle, the text has made its theological points and now moves to action, using dominantly more positive images from this point on. (In the hard copy of the book, you actually have to turn it upside down here, reversing your point of view to step into a new reality.) If you have dismantled the lie that death and destruction hold the cards, what then do you do with the truth you've seen? If you have dismantled the lie that death and destruction hold the cards, what then do you do with the truth you've seen?

You pray it into being. You change the molecular structure of the world, through prayer.

"Intercessory prayer is spiritual defiance of what is in the way of what God has promised. Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current forces. Prayer infuses the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present…

All of Jesus' teachings on prayer feature imperatives. (See for example, Luke 11:9 "Ask.....search.....knock.") In prayer we are ordering God to bring the Kingdom near. It will not do to implore. We have been commanded to command. We are required by God to haggle with God for the sake of the sick, the obsessed, the weak, and to conform our lives to our intercessions. This is a God who invents history in interaction with those "who hunger and thirst to see right prevail" (Matt. 5:6, REB)…
History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. If this is so, then intercession, far from being an escape from action, is a means of focusing for action and of creating action. By means of our intercessions we veritably cast fire upon the earth and trumpet the future into being."
-Walter Wink, The Powers That Be
bearth and trumpet the future into being."
In his 2001 commencemnt speech to the University of Pennsylvania, Bono does reconize the need and tug to give the “finger to fate”, but grasps that it’s only the fingers that have been folded or raised in prayer that can give the finger and defiance to the death-system. He also challnges grads to not just use their finges responsibly, but another tool he wishes he literally had as a prop:

You know, I used to think that the future was solid, or fixed, something you inherited—like an old building you move into when the previous generation moves out. (Or gets chased out.)
But it's not fixed. It's fluid. You build your own building. Or hut. Condo.
Whatever. This is the metaphor part of the speech.
My point is that the world is more malleable than you think, and it's just waiting for you to hammer it into shape. If I were a folk singer, I'd launch into ‘If I Had a Hammer' right now, get you all singing and swaying. But as I said, I come from punk rock, so I'd rather have the bloody hammer right in my fist.

Bono knows, as does Wink, that the “Praying is rattling God's cage and waking God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and this starved God food and cutting the ropes off God's hands and the manacles off God's feet and washing the caked sweat from God's eyes and then watching God swell with life and vitality .” Hammering God, and people

Wink’s startling conclusion about prayer and change dovetails and details “Dismantle”’s primary passion to “become the change we want to see in the world: :”A space opens in the praying person, permitting God to act without violating human freedom,” Wink suggests, and then drops the clincher:

“The change in one person thus changes what God can thereby do in that world.”

energy and following God wherever God goe

7)BY CRITICAL WEEPING

“I wept, and I felt rid of it,” you’ll remember Bono saying about his prayer in the French church.
That was a crucial, critical weeping. Which in and of itself dismantles the power of death.

The sight of tears in Bono’s eyes ( sans the shades and thus signaling to God that he is “open for business”), as he sings “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,” a song about/to/from his “old man” (Experiment with the “from” format; it may be parallel to the way Kite morphed from a song to his father to a song from his father. Try it with “Sometimes” sometime!) is self-authenticating; it is not manufactured. It is public grieving. Tears turn the wheels of the dismantling machine.

Jesus had understood Jeremiah..Only those who embrace the reality of death will receive the new life…those who do not face endings will not receive the beginnings. The alternative community can stand in solidarity with the dying, for those are the ones who hope. Jeremiah, faithful to Moses, understood what numb people will never know, that onty grievers can experience their experiences and move on.

I used to think it curious that when having to quote Scripture on demand, someone would inevitably say, “Jesus wept.” But now I understand. Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again; a) that weeping must be real because endings are real and b)that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the Kingdom to come. Such weeping is a radical crticism, a fearful dimantling, because it maens the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do wihout losing their thrones. Yes the loss of thrones is precisely what’s called for in radical criticism (Brugegman, 60-61)

Plenty on that quote to purse. Of course, any U2 fan will “pick up the phone” upon hearing Brugegman use “numb” language so frequently; recalling in particular the drone-litany of the song “Numb”, which is about, well, like Bruggeman says, “the numb cannot discern death” (67). If one cannot even discern or detect the enemy, what hope is there of dismantling it? Critical weeping puts us in touch with our innate death-detector. What, then, does Bono weep about on the record:
“What happened to the beauty I had inside of me?” “It’s you when I look in the mirror,” “Dignity passes by”“You are gone and so is God. That’s all material worth crying about.

There’s lots to weep over in “Love and Peace Or Else”’s million dollar question, “where is the love and peace?” “America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable,” quipped Hunter S. Thompson. This too is Bono’s beef with the more fundamentalist adherents of the three
world monotheistic religions. In a “Love and Peace” line that has usually been (too quickly and without much evidence in the context) linked to the Israel/Palestine issue,
“Lay down your guns/All you daughters of Zion/All you Abraham’s sons,.” I believe between the lines are Bono’s prayer-tears and fears that Christians, Jews and Muslims will wind up blowing each other up unless Love comes and peaces us down to our knees in prayer that we can coexist and dismantle death together.

Jesus’s concern was..for the joy of the Kingdom..But he was clear that rejoicing about the future requires a grieving about the present order…There is grief work to be done in the present that the future may come. There is mourning to be done for those who have not known of the deathliness of their situation….those
who have not cared enough to grieve will not know joy… The mourning is a precondition in another way, too. It is not a formal, external requirement but rather the only door and route to joy.
-Bruggeman 68

If death is inevitable, as U2 sublimally flashed into our subconscious in the 1990s; and if death is paradoxically also cancelable, reversible, and bomb-able as U2 are boldy claiming now….If “history is more malleable than we think,” why don’t we allow ourselves to be (literally) moved to tears; more often.

“ I wept, and I felt rid of it.”

8) BY BECOMING A HOLY FOOL, REMIXED FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM

All this emphasis on the critical nature of prophetic weeping and laenting . reminds that deep imside, no matter how numbed-over; no matter how deathed-down we are all crying. Or at least crying to cry. We intuitively know that tears are not only healing but prophetic. But we hide behind a mask, and only cry the tears of a clown.”

In the 9O’s Bono often wore a mask. For dismantling death and consumerism in that neo-nihilistic era, that was the proper costume. But the 00’s are a time to “pray naked.”

Bono: (Paul McGuinness) would sit me down and say, “You have what it takes. You must have more confidence in yourself and continue to dig deeper. And I don’t be upset or surprised when you pull something out of the depth that’s uncomfortable.”
Assayas: So you discovered things that, on first glance, you’d rather have kept hidden? What were those?
Bono: The gauche nature of awe, of worship, the wonderment at the world around you. Coolness might help in your negotiation with your world, maybe, but it is impossible to meet God with sunglasses on. It is impossible to meet God without abandon, without exposing yourself, being raw. That’s the connection with great music and art, and that’s the other reason you wanted to join a band: you wanted to do the cool thing. Trying to capture religious experiences on tape wasn’t what ypu had in mind when you signed up for the job.
Assayas: What about your own sunglasses, then? Do you wear them the same way a taxi driver would turn off his front light, so as to signal to God that this rock star is too full of himself and not to hire at the moment?
Bono: Yeah, my insincerity… I have learnt the importance of not being earnest at all times. You don’t know what’s going on behind those glasses, but God, I can assure you, does. (53-54)

Sans glasses, still wearing wisdom, and more irony than one might think. It’s just been properly retooled and “dreamed up again” for a new millennium. He’s still a

“Holy Fool,” which is a wonderful tradition of the Eastern Church who periodically pops up here in the West. In the Russian tradition, some of the saints would do almost anything to avoid being perceived as saints. One of them kept offering to wrestle bears so people would think him a nut and not praise him as a saint. In the West, St. Philip Neri acted goofy, partly because he enjoyed being a goof and partly to throw people off the scent of his sanctity and keep them from gushing over him. When offered a cardinal's hat, he proceeded to play football with it. Currently, we saw something of the Holy Fool in Forrest Gump a few years ago. All such fools have one thing in common: they know they are not wise. Similarly, those who are convinced of their innate wisdom are invariably great ninnies. It's far better to be a fool for Christ than to be a fool on one's own. Today, thank God for the folly that is his wisdom.

1 Corinthians 3:18 Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. -Mark Shea, Daily Cathloc Exchange Devotional, Aopril 1, 2005 http://www.stbenedict-chesapeake.com/church_today/message.asp?message_id=&sec_id=5

He’s still a holy fool, just more stripped down and streamlined. Far more subtle, no devil mask. But how is is that, on this current tour, he can dedicate “Running to Stand Still” to the troops in Iraq with a straight poker face, let alone without a McPhisto/devil mask to make the irony obvious? Does no on get it? Has anyone booed? No, they applaud what they perceive as patriotism (and they are partly right) and miss and misunderstand the subtle point (War is an exercise in death; in futility, and in standing still). Applaud is what they should do……but for another reason altogether: the singer has just brilliantly and understatedly (!) pulled off a holy fool moment. And dismantled death even. Even if not many “get it.”

9)BY BUILDING A TIME MACHINE ON ASLAN’S TABLE AND EINSTEIN’S FOUNDATION

Bono has been begging for a time machine for years. Even prayed for it in 1997: “Jesus..is it like a tape recorder, we can rewind on more time?” But living in the past is not where it’s at, and he knows it. There is, however, a time machine that can be built, by the love of God. After all, “Love makes no sense of space and time” is not a cheesy line in “Miracle Drug”, it’s the very key to the time machine that can dismantle death by turning its time backwards!”

“When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”

I dare to deduce that this line from C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia,” (in which the “willing victim” is Aslan the lion and Christ-figure, and the “Table” is the Cross) is the very reference Bono had in mind recently when he tweaked the “Sunday Bloody Sunday” lyric into “Holding on to peace hard won/Till death itself is undone/On Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Yes, Virginia, you can put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Elswehere, Lewis complains “It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn't matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.” And in confessing that death is “irrevocable and irreversible,” he is not denying the power of Aslan/Christ to undo, rewind, revoke and reverse its power and direction. The Bomb is. But through the death of Christ, it’s stanglehold over us has been reversed and dismantled.

BONO VOX IS A PHYSICS MAJOR

Which contemporary physics can attest to. One of the key discoveries of relativity and quantum physics is that “the arrow of time is not necessarily unidirectional.” Einstein of course discovered a version of time travel by proving that time can outrun space. So “Love makes no sense of space and time,” far from being a corny Bono lyric is pure physics, great science, even Einsteinian in its truth and brilliance. (Of course this is a song w at whose midpoint, Edge specifically prays that “in science” he hears God’s voice whispering). And very practical in its application towards our daily dealing with death.

In a tongue-sometimes-in-cheek physics book with the serious title: “How To Build a Time Machine,” the author cocludes that time travel is “not intrinsically paradoxical but just very weird state of events(103).and the only complications with mantling it, besides availability of technology is the problem of “unfetterd free will”(96). What will we choose to do with our fee will, ho will we choose to steer it responsibly?
Of course this sounds like that previously quoted commencement speaker, one Paul Hewson:

“The only question is: ‘Do we have the will?’”

I WANT MY PIE NOW!

All this talk about time and death working backwards is not as loopy and ozoned-out as it sounds. It is in fact the very definition of the Kingdom of God. The Jews of Jesus day all has a conceptual category for the phrase “the Kingdom” It meant the future, it implied heaven, it was relegated to the then and there, not the here and now. But Jesus rocks their world in Matthew 4:17 by decreeing that in Him, the Future Kingdom has arrived (not fully, but “more than you think”, enough to taste and see it!) Any who have studied George Eldon Ladd’s life message have seen Hebrews 6:1-8 in a new light: “We have already in this current age and time, tasted and previewed the powers of the future Kingdom age to come.” What is that if not the future invading the present; time traveling backwards?

“I don't expect this pie in the sky when you die stuff," Bono once announced. "My favorite line in the Lord's Prayer is 'Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven' (Matt. 6:10). I want it all, and I want it now. Heaven on earth-let's have a bit of that.” I agree, and such streamed out of me once, in poem form:

waiting hating it baiting it waiting to be unchained unframed changed rearranged unbound unfound by anyone but Messiah Man dying to be crying to be not trying to be consistently insistently persistently in the place where He is all all i want is to walk on water to break bread for thousands to touch the hem and hand it to the world all i need to get there safe but not sound is holy impatience persisteverance focused fury to pray with gentle violence, "Thy Kingdom come on earth on Fulton Mall on time on me in Africa in hell in droves in me Gethsemane me, Jesus Moriah me, Messiah till i bleed and breathe nothing but You" i won't wait anymore it is finished i walk on water i heal the sick i do works of Jesus or i die

“…or I die.” And I do, unless I dismantle death itself, by building a time machine that ushers in the future Kingdom’s life into this dying kingdom’s system… I defy time, logic, Newtonian logic, and the devil every time I do something so “everyday” as shopping…..Kingdomly. Wham! Time and death immediately, and supernaturally start working backwards, against time, big time. And I was just minding my own business, shopping!

SHOPPING IN THE FUTURE TODAY

“Shopping is politics,” Bono writes in the Bomb-book. “To close down a clothing factory in Africa and move to somewhere cheaper to save a few cents on a T shirt is not good for anyone in the chain”

Have you noticed that Bono keeps his physics hat on at several points on the CD? “Distance does not decide/Whether you live or whether you die,” he sings. “Distance does not decide who is your brother.” He speaks in concert, paraphrasing Jesus, of course; in addition to the great physicists. Who have discerned that..imagine this..all of life is organically connected and interdependent. No wonder my shopping necessitates and unleashes a quantum “butterfly effect” throughout the planet. Stringfellow, too, gets this, and applies it specifically to the death-bomb: “No violence is private” (128).

At any rate, remember, shopping is politics. It is radical intercession. It’s Kingdom Come. Its time working backwards and dismantling death.

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies hats and straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.
-Annie Dillard, :Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 40

10) BY DISARMING ENEMIES VIA DISARMING YOURSELF

“Love is treaty and compromise” (“Mercy” lyric from the Bomb-book version, anyway)

More physics helps here. Let me quote from two physics texts:
1)“We are each other”. (the Bomb book)
2) “I am you and you are mine.” (The Bomb disc)

If we really got that, of course we would disarm ourselves literally and symbolically, and talk to our enemy, who is our brother, who is us, who is Jesus in purposely thin disguise.

Hidden away in the obscure book of the deluxe edition of “Bomb” is nothing less than this gem, which interprets not only a line in“Love and Peace Or Else,” but the very core gospel of U2’s bomb:

The Himalayas are about as high as a human being can get without getting a nosebleed. At about 10,000 feet, the mountain becomes unfriendly, the rockface earnest only a goat could trust..The earth doesn’t so much punch a hole in the sky with a fist, more a series of blows arc it over its head to protect the peaceloving peoples who live in their shadow. Etched into this Vertical that has forgotten it started out life as a horizontal one paths…the ground is on its side now a profile against a cold blue whisking sky…
..The paths are sometimes twenty or thirty mile contours that offer the only way around the mountain..if you are 1)mad enough 2)a parachutist 3)a goat. Start down one of these trails and Nature will teach you a lesson about God, or maybe it’s God teaching a lesson about nature. To meet another soul on one of these paths without rock-climbing equipment is disaster. The goats know this. They glare at each other. They bristle. Their baby that’s just woken up can become a grown up growl. To pass each other is impossible. One will have to turn back to give way to the other. Struggle will mean a certain end to one of them, maybe both of them, unless…

One lies down and becomes the path for the other.

It’s an extraordinary sight to see a goat do what a human cannot: Compromise.

As its legs bend and kneel the comic little creature lies down with its face pressing the humbling dirt. The e other awkwardly mounts and walks over its potential rival and goes its way…

I have always wondered why the word compromise was so compromised..the suggestion that you had sold out too cheaply your values; trashing your ideals by exposing them to the elements of other competing ones..diluting your strength..appearing weak

We expect little of our politicians and what little we expect is that they would stick to their guns. They shouldn’t. They should put them down and go talk to the enemy.
(Bono..scribbled in the “Bomb” book)

11))BY BEING BORN AGAIN TO THE NTH DEGREE…

I live each day to kill death;I die each day to beget life,and in this dying unto death,I die a thousand times andam reborn another thousandthrough that love.-Julia Esquivel

THANK GOD THE NEEDLE’S STUCK ON ‘MERCY”

“I am born again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again again and again ……….

12)BY RESERVING YOUR ROOM AT THE HEARTBREAK HOTEL
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal...
-C. S. Lewis, “The Four Loves”

“Take this heart and make it break..” as Bono boldy prayed to Yahweh, in the song named for “Yahweh”. To actually sign up for a broken heart is as death-dismantling as one can get.

An example that I’ll close with is from an exchange between a pupil and a rebbe.
You should know that a rebbe is not exactly the same thing as a rabbi. This is because
there are certain rabbis in the Jewish tradition who are like the big tiger and other rabbis
who are no more or less than good, old-fashioned clergymen. Nothing wrong with
clergymen, but there are rabbis who are unusually wise and powerful and such rabbis
were called rebbes.
And so, the pupil asks the wise rebbe, just as I asked the man with the winged
eyebrows, about a certain passage in the Old Testament, in the Book of Deuteronomy,
which is part of what is called the Torah, the heart of the Old Testament. There is an
important sentence in this part of the Bible, which can be translated into English as “Lay
these words upon your heart.” And those words referred to summarize the fundamental
belief of the Hebraic tradition, which is the source in certain ways of the Christian, as
well as Islamic tradition, which are all rooted in one common source. “Lay these words
upon your heart,” and these are the words, the simple, profound words: “Hear, O Israel:
The Lord our God is one Lord; And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” (Deuteronomy 6: 4-6)
And the pupil asks the rebbe, “Why does it tell us to lay these words upon our
heart? Why doesn’t it tell us to put them in our heart?”
And the rebbe answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and the
words can’t get it in. So we just put them on top of the heart. And there they stay. There
they stay until someday, when the heart breaks, they fall in.”
The great wisdom: study it in all its forms, and someday when the heart breaks,
either in great sorrow or in uncontainable joy, it will fall in, and you’ll understand this
other level of human values that every school worthy of the name is trying to lead you
toward.
# # #
Goodrich Lecture
Indian Springs School
Jacob Needleham, http://www.jacobneedleham.com/

13)BY FEARING NOTHING BUT THE FEAR OF DEATH ITSELF.
“Fear nothing, Fear nothing, Fear nothing!’ –“Mercy” lyrics

“IT can’t be true. He would go to his study, lie down, and again be alone with It: face to face with It. And nothing could be done with It except to look at It and stutter.”

“It” is death. In Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” which is his version of “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,” the title character’s entire life is “scripted and maneuvered around the evasion of even one thought of death.” One day he hears the “voice of the soul” asking: “What do you want?” (note this question is exactly the same as Bono’s voiceover asked repeatedly and hauntingly on the rotating tapeloop that introduced the “Zoo TV” Tours ..coincidence?)

His answer poured out, it didn’t need much thought, as it was his whole life’s mission statement: “To live..and not to suffer.”

That is the universal answer.

After pondering the impossibility of this request, Ilyich began to grapple with the reality of death and suffering, to actually say the word “death.” His fear of death is overturned.

“I asked my old man why he didn’t take care of himself and live longer. He said ‘It’s not that I’d live longer; it would only feel longer’ That was Bob Hewson.” And all of us. If only life would last longer, or feel longer, we could detour or derail death. Remember, this is the Bob Hewson who never mentioned his wife’s death.

The fact that we do not talk about death does not mean that we do not think about it. A team of psychiatrists in Missouri came to the conclusion, on the basis of tests that indicate what goes on under the skin and inside the skulls of Americans of all ages, that people think four-and-a-half times as much about how to solve the riddle of death and what comes after it as they do about sex and romance… In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial f Death, Ernest Becker suggested that the primary concern of every living person is death, and most people deal with that concern by denying that it will ever happen to them. That reminds me of a story told of Lord Palmerston. Seriously ill, his doctor told him the severity of the situation. He huffily replied, “Die, my dear doctor! That is the last thing I shall do!”….
Melanie Klein, an English psychoanalyst, believed fear of death is at the root of all human anxiety. Paul Tillich, the renowned theologian, based his theory of anxiety on the idea that man is finite and must die. Austrian psychiatrist William Stekel went so far as to express the hypothesis that every fear we have is ultimately fear of death.

SEX BEFORE DEATH

The clamour of sex drowns out the ever-waiting presence of death…Death is the symbol of ultimate impotence and finiteness. What would we see if we cut though our obsession with sex? That we must die. Rollo May in Time magazine, “Death as a Constant Companion.”

Maybe it’s always sex that subs for death. After all, Bono did include it among the fourfold “love and faith and sex and fear” list of “all the things that keep it here.” (“A Man and a Woman). We baptize sex, want to bring it to life; as a way of avoiding our funeral….or as a rehearsal for it:

Sex offers a chance to test this hypothesis and to practice our death. It invites us to "conquer" the enemy by befriending and forgiving him. It allows us to reverse the poem, "do not go gentle into that good night" and to walk with confidence and gratitude into the deaths which beckons us.
Sex, that "little death" is not a threat but a promise; it is our assurance that all is well in the universe….
The necrophiliac is fascinated by death but motivated by control. His temptation to force death to submit to him is recognized as potentially intoxicating, perhaps overwhelming, but ultimately bizarre.
But closer to us than we like to admit
Yet on another level almost all mainstream pornography appeals to a form of necrophilia. The images of women (and men in gay porn) which are presented as a turn on, are nearly universally deprived of life. Sexual objects, not subjects, they have had the breath sucked out of them. If these objects had a personal history - foibles, accomplishments, affections, failures - it is now behind them. At best it has been appropriated into a common mythology; worse and more frequently, it has been eliminated completely.
Bodies with the souls gone: that's plain old porn
What we see in much of porn is simply bodies after the soul has left them - anonymous as cadavers, without even a piece of clothing to suggest preference, difference, personality, will. It is easy to say that these frozen objects might only tempt an aberrant taste, but they have become the large scale focus and context for expressing a mainstream, if problematic sexuality.
http://www.rusnecro.com/english/articles/sex_and_death.htm

Of course, if sex is not available, we can always resort to other death-counterfeits, drinking and drugs…or shopping. There all about a death-wish! “Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, “ Becker offers, “or else he goes shopping, which is the same thing.”

BILLY GRAHAM MISIDENTIFIES GOD
We fear and want death. So we have sex. Or do drugs. Or go shopping. Or those other wonderful standby strategies: religion and television! Neil Postman whose thesis is revealed in his classic book title, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” betrays the betrayal of the television/religion culture (exactly what ZOOTV was about?): “..the danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows, but that television shows may become the content of religion(124). This of course was Bono’s point in the ad lib: I can’t tell the difference between ABC news, Hill Strret Blues, and the preacher on the Old Time Gospel Hour” (tellingly, in an old U2 song about dismantling death), and in dressing up as the Mirrorball Man TV evangelist..(who eventually morphed into Mr. McPhisto, who morphed into the devil himself)…

Not long ago, I saw Billy Graham join with Shecky Green, Red Buttons, Dione Warwick, Milton Berle and other theologians in a tribute to George Burns, who was celebrating himself for surviving eighty years in the business. The Reverend Graham exchanged one-liners with Burns about making preparation for Eternity. Although the Bible makes no mention of it, the Reverend Graham assured the audience that God loves those who make people laugh. It was an honest mistake. He merely mistook NBC for God (p. 55)

Avoid death, avoid God. And might as well have fun while hiding from/running towards what you want/fear: have sex. Drink to excess. Shop till you drop. All in front of NBC God.

This house is crumblingThis property is condemnedThis house is crumblingWho'll say the last amen? ....

This is the sound of the world coming downThis is the sex of historyThis is the sound of the big house caving inThis is the friction of joy and misery
-“Murder in the Big House” lyrics, Chagall Guevara

Nietzche saw the fear of death as a “European disease”, and attributed it in large part to Christianity! Unfortunately, he was right. In actuality, though, it should be Christians who least fear death, and are thus free to enjoy those other activities…sex, drink, shopping, religious television (in moderation of course, particularly with the last wily one!) “Jesus shared in the humanity of humans,” the writer of Hebrews explains in 2:14, “ so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil--and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their primary fear: the fear of death.”

Bono would fly home from concerts in 2001 to read words of life from The Message Bible over his dying father, and his very human fear:

I slept beside my father with the sound of the audience ringing in my ears during his dying days.“The U2 crowd are the noisiest crowd in the world and I'd still hear it. There were probably still people driving home and I would be lying there beside his silence and he'd just stare at me, or mutter something. I did get to spend a lot of time with him at the end.“We didn't have the greatest relationship when I was growing up but towards the end of his life we made our peace and I felt very lucky to be beside him.“I was there when he said his last words. He woke up and looked at me and I looked at him and he said: ‘Are you all f___in’' mad?' and I said ‘What?' because he'd been whispering and he said: ‘Are you all f___in' mad? This place is a prison and I want to go home.' And I guess he did. “I later realised that he might not just have been talking about the hospital — it was his sickness he was fed up with. “The way I look at it now is that he's got a new body. I'm not afraid of death and I know I'll see him again.” of http://www.macphisto.net/article254.html

“Fear nothing.”

CATORCE AND CONCLUSION: “ EMBODYING THE THING DISMANTLED”

We come full circle. Or full-arc, from “faith to fear,” as U2 would have it. There is no dismantling anything, let alone death, without finding death and life in the life and death of Jesus the Christ:

Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet, and more than a prophet we argue, practiced in most radical form the main elements of prophetic ministry and imagination. On the one hand , he practiced criticism of the deathly world around him. The dismantling was fully wrought in his crucifixion, in which he himself embodied the thing dismantled. On the other hand, he practiced the energizing of the new future given by God. This energizing was fully wrought in his resurrection, in which he embodied the new future given by God. -Bruggeman

“We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
(2 Cor 4:6-11)

Indeed, U2 has bookended us grandly with two versions of reality; asking us to choose this day if it’s Life or Death we mantle. And as always, they have done their job in peerless style,, and in strong song.

Song. As the Unabomber victim learned from the God of the Psalms, “Only those who study the thing are confused; only those who sing understand.” At the end of this essay, we may find ourselves overloaded in the implications of too much study. Hopefully there is truth in Montaigne’s insistence on “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” But philosophy is futile unless set to song. Unless you can dance to it.

“Say not a word in death’s favor,” said Achilles. “I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground, than a king of kings among the dead.”
(Odyssses XI, 88)

Good News! There is a King of Kings among the dead!…And a Father among the living who have faced and embraced the Mother of All Paradoxes, and come out stronger…

Love, still, is stronger than death. Maybe that quick answer to Michael W. Smith, about love dismantling the bomb was not a throwaway after all., since

it occurs that Love is able to dismantle the bomb in the father and the bomb in the son; that Love has the ability to disarm any weapon of destruction, material or spiritual, no matter how large, no matter how small. That comes as good news about right now.

Bono gets the last word:

I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb…. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That’s the point. It should keep us humbled.

Bono still gets the last word. But since we have established that to sing truth is the means to understanding , we must “close the closing” with a lyric by same Bono, a profound lyric which is equivalent to his wonderful but non-musical quote above, if not quite as polished, theological and eloquent:

“Your love is teaching me how to kneeeeeeeel!
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah!”

The Bomb Part 4:Elevated Vertigo, A Pair of Doxes, Fish in the Sky, and Holy Helixes

2004-12-17T16:29:00.000-08:00

Elevated Vertigo, A Pair of Doxes, Fish in the Sky, and Holy Helixes:
PART FOUR of A Four-Part Theological Blog, Satirical Sermon and Reluctantly Raving Review of (among other topics) U2’s Fourth (maybe) Masterpiece

(find part one here: http://davestuff.blogspot.com/2004/12/finally1-part-one-of-four-part-fun.html
and have patience waiting for the middle parts)

HEY LEADFOOT, GOD SPEAKS IN FAST CARS

A man I know well had just gotten in a classic "first fight" with his wife. He did something uncharacteristic of him: He jumped in his car, and began speeding (literally) away from the situation.

Because he was a believer, he at least had the sense to pray; even as in his fast car he was contradicting his belief. But he prayed, for some reason this prayer; "Lord, I really need to hear from you!"

At that precise moment, a moment he was to remember the rest of his life, the man was strangely prompted to turn on the car radio. Immediately, a voice came over the radio:
"Hey Leadfoot! Turn around, go back to your wife, and tell her you’re sorry!"
Let me tell you, gentle reader; When that happened to me….

…I turned around, went back to my wife, and told her I was sorry!

And it doesn’t change my theology of "God was speaking audibly and directly to me" at all to reveal the way God spoke. At the exact moment I was speeding away from home, and shot up that prayer while turning the dial on, a Christian disc jockey who was broadcasting live felt prompted to say:

"Hey Leadfoot! Turn around, go back to your wife, and tell her you’re sorry!"

I confess that’s the story of my life. And yours. And Bono would be quick to confess it’s perhaps the defining story of his. He might claim that he is famous for driving, living, talking with a lead foot..

Which is why the "real" last song on the new U2 disc is "Fast Cars."

BEEF WITH DESERT

Okay, let’s talk that thesis up, and give it a workout. We’ll get back on the fast car in just two paragraphs.

But some of you need to know this: I will, as the very last section of this paper, condescend to give (as an appendix..or in a far more appetizing analogy, as dessert!) a concise (!) "play by play" "track by track" commentary on "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," which is U2’s (maybe) fourth masterpiece. Granted, in a large and multi-tasking, multi-disciplinary sense, I have been doing that all along. But to make it easy (!) on folks who just want that in a nice easy (short) summary, I will do that, but in usual pomo style, it starts at the very end. But I must preface the end with a big beef; which I think is important to digest (or at least taste and spit out) , as it explains the "maybe." (Maybe!) For those who don’t do beef; and want immediate access to the review , you may skip to the next section by clicking here: (http://www.actuallyitisnotwrittenyetbutwhenitisreadyiwillposttherealurlhere.com/
)once, but as you click you must say in good Schwarzenegger voice, "I’ll be back!" Because I do not think the time and type spent on this chapter is wasted; in fact the commentary may not even land coherently without the prequel .

I warn that I am likely going to overstate my case to make it…or make it convince myself of what, if not true in the extreme I paint it, is true enough to shed new insight into what a gift of God the band formerly know as Feedback is (if you can get past my hype). So even if you choose to have your dessert first; at some point, consider the perhaps provocative thesis re-stated simply in the next paragraph, and unpacked for the next couple dozen. Here’s the bomb..uh, I mean, here’s the beef:

YAHWEH ALLOWS FAST CARS

"Fast Cars" is the last song on "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb."

It matters little that it’s not even ON most versions of the album, and that one has to go way out of the way…...to Japan, to the net, or at least to the "deluxe" version…. to secure a copy which includes this necessary closer; the "real" last song and word.

Not that the "official" U.S. release didn’t give me "everything I ever wanted" in a U2 release. It did; and I love "Bomb." But everything I ever wanted wasn’t what I wanted, as Bono himself once complained. Ironically, the new disc itself offers to take this wiser, harder way: "I’ll give you everything that you want," Bono promises in "Original of the Species,"…"except the thing that you want." I feel slightly cheated that the band gave me both this time around.
I love the U.S. version of Bomb. I’d even say it’s an answer to years worth of prayer-desire. What more could I want but a "straight-up" prayer to Yahweh; complete with Edge’s "swirling epiphanies," and replete with Bono’s gloriously passionate and pleading chorus? Isn’t that too good to be true?

After several weeks of playing and processing the latest release by my favorite band…who could record the musical scales; or opera (that might even happen, Bono threatens!) ; or crap ("Miami" flirts with the "c" threshold), and I would buy and love it …I have come to the working conclusion and sanctified guess that years from now, I will (slightly) hesitate to label it "U2’s fourth masterpiece," though I could envision myself being talked into it (I’d be a sucker for U2 even if they would suck!) …if "Fast Cars" is legally the last song. When Rolling Stone hailed "All That You Can’t Leave Behind" as "U2’s Third Masterpiece," and then highlighted the next CD, this current one, in a gushing hyperbole that stopped very short of directly claiming it’s the fourth; I was forced to face the inarticulable ambiguity that "Bomb" (the version without "Cars") had dropped on me.

I love the atomic, organic sparkling pop-rock, and orchestral guitar across the album. I love that "City of Blinding Lights" recalls "Where the Streets Have No Name." I love that "Sometimes You Can’t Make it on Your Own" reminds of "One." I love that "Miracle Drug" soundchecks "Beautiful Day." I am thankful that "Vertigo" invokes "Elevation" and "Stories for Boys"…., and I am especially thrilled that "One Step Closer" flirts with "Miss Sarajevo." But it’s precisely this flirting that bothers me; it could cross over into incest... One step closer to stealing, anyway U2 once half-jokingly referenced themselves as shamelessly "stealing from the thieves, and getting caught" and that was daring, energizing, successful strategy; grandly risque and risky; but do they now they steal/borrow/sleep with themselves?
I am not sure that’s the case, but it feels like it. And borrowing from the unabashed best (themselves) makes for fantastic "out of the ballpark" music, and everything I could ever want; but everything I wish I didn’t have. Let me rephrase slightly all that I just said about several songs, and all will still be true: "I hate that ‘City of Blinding Lights’ recalls ‘Where the Streets Have No Name.’ I hate that "Sometimes" reminds of ‘One.’ I hate that..….well you get the idea. I can’t live with or without these songs…

YAHWEH GOES TO CHURCH

The expectancy upon hearing that the closing track would actually be called "Yahweh" was huge. And I am not at all completely disappointed with what was birthed. I love "Yahweh" enough that I have made sure that we have "done" it in a prayer meeting at our church; a meeting in which we open with several ‘worship’ songs on CD. The bizarre problem I have is this: in the context of a worship set consisting only of more "officially" Christian songs on either side of it , "Yahweh" actually sounded kind of superficial and sterile (the same accusation that might be hurled at some "official" worship music) , and it felt like we were "doing" it…OK, next song! Wow, I never thought I would experience that! I remembering simply playing a CD of "Still haven’t Found," and it was like "God was in the house," instantly and immediately. What was the problem with "Yahweh," this anointed last song on the CD?

"Fast Cars" is the last song on "Atomic Bomb."

Not the "Yahweh" we have been given. As much as that great song is a theologically and liturgically correct way to end a record marked by a more upbeat faith; as much as it an answer to one of my wildest prayers, it doesn’t smell or jell completely right as the closer. Maybe it’s partly the unwritten rule that the last song on each U2 record will be the defining God-song ("40," among other numbers). "Huh?", I heard the reader just jerk; "What do you mean ‘Yahweh’ is not the defining God-song on the disc, and thus the proper closer?" Of course, I understand that "Yahweh" is the obvious God-song. But in U2-land, the best and most "obvious" God-song is not the one where the lyrics are most obviously Godded; it’s the song where the lyrics are most obviously guarded. That’s how I know it’s "obviously" about God… .it’s a bit more complex, subtle, mysterious, quirky, unsettling, unpredictable, multifaceted, "un-obvious"…..isn’t that exactly the God you know? Though "Yahweh" (the God), by nature, is those eight things and more; "Yahweh" (the song), is not. So it just can’t close the record, OK? By now, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I am off-centered enough to believe that "Is That All?," "The Wanderer," and "Wake Up Dead Man;" as questioning, uncozy, and afflicting as they are, are the "obvious" and defining God-songs of their representative albums; and thus the appropriate album closers. Even "40" for its verbatim praise-quote of Psalm 40:1-3, interjected the uncomfortable, questioning (literally), left-field hook of "How long to sing this song?" So what lingered in the arena atmosphere at the end of the gig was not "He inclined and heard my cry," but "How long to sing this song," …daring to imply that he may not have heard my cry yet; and may even have the "phone off the hook."….Uncomfortable. Obviously;. obtusely, God…

Qualifiers! I realize "Yahweh" includes some very real questions ("Why the dark..?") and is honest enough to name pain as the precursor and curse accompanying spiritual birth. Excellent! It’s just not quite the eccentric right-brain, head-scratching "take a pill to stop it", open-ended zany sanity that drives "Fast Cars" to its (il)logical conclusion at the album’s true conclusion. I also must insert that at times I need….desperately….to be unconditionally uplifted. I need the "Yahweh" song; and I need it to sometimes close my day or my prayer or my drive; I just "need" it not to close the record, or every drive. I need "Yahweh" and large songs in that league because sometimes to even acknowledge too much doubt or uncomfort is to invite too much of it back on me. Which is why I wanted "Yahweh" to fly in the prayer gathering.

But it didn’t , at least as much as I was yearning for it to. This could be simply because it was a new song, sandwiched among the familiar Passion, Vineyard , or Matt Redman pieces. But I fear it might be because it’s everything I ever wanted in a U2 worship song, but it’s….I know can say it…too formulaic. Maybe that’s the word that captures it. So perhaps it the somewhat formulaic music , and not primarily the "too cliché" lyric that is the beef here. The joy that made a first listen to the classic U2 anthems already namechecked here ( "Streets," "One", "Elevation") a historic moment, is that the sounds arose from the speakers with a holy, huge unexpectedness; they marked fresh new territory and terrain for the band at the time. Sure, they sounded U2, but they claimed new ground, like the albums they represented. Note too that these three historic tunes are from the three Rolling Stone-rated "masterpieces" ( "Joshua Tree," "Achtung Baby" and "All That You Can’t Leave Behind")….aha, perchance it’s the very "breaking new ground" that makes or breaks a piece hanging in the "masterpiece" gallery. Maybe I can’t in good U2-conscience label a work a masterpiece if it "stands its ground," yet eschews proactively taking it. And in spite of earlier prognostiBonocations, (I still want to hear the early "punk rock on Venus" sessions) "Bomb" is wonderfully grounded, but does not aggressively take ground, and beachhead, from that (well-grounded) place.

And if I could just chill out and be OK with that, this beef might be a whole lot shorter; and I could yield to the temptation to include "Bomb" into the elite "U2 masterpiece" catalog. But I am ruined; I have seen, in that catalog, what U2 can do!

HETEROCLITES PREFER FLAMENCO
I do admit being heteroclite (great word for the emerging church movement..look it up if needed) enough and quirky enough to..against odds.. prefer the "odd", that is "demythologizing", looser, more creatively confusing works ("Unforgettable Fire", "Pop", even "Passengers") as masterpieces in their own right and gallery (it’s an annex in the basement?) ; simply because they "chop down a Joshua Tree", or are at least free to explore. And because they can sound fresher.

Unlike "Yahweh." But like "Fast Cars." That’s fresh.

I am admittedly addicted to the fresh. When Jesus gave the heads-up to his gang (in Matthew 9:17) that humankind is inherently addicted to the old; meaning "old" and obsolete wineskins, when such needed to be trashed and traded in for new upgrades, I wish he would have spelled out what a little research of culture and commentaries will reveal: How long would you guess the lifetime of a wineskin would last in Jesus’ day, before it became stretched to breaking point and worthless? . ..At the most, a matter of…. Weeks! All kind of implications for life and emerging church structure/culture come to mind (I belong to "new" network of churches, but because we are already six years old, we must be open to the probability that we have is some areas become old and stale. We might even give in to the whopping idolatry and adultery of worshipping wineskin, and throwing the Wine out with the bathwater…uh, wineskin) This is the God who is constantly "makes all things new"! And if I think every few weeks is too frequently to assess how new I am becoming, Lamentations 3:23 laments/boasts that God’s mercies are brand spanking new every… morning! (Wow, mercy is updated even more often than Beth Maynard’s U2 sermons blog!) Yet this same Jesus, this time in Matthew 13:52, Yahweh-yanks us back to balance by parabling that the Kingdom allows and even requires "both old and new" treasures. . So the least I can do let U2 be Kingdom-shaped and release them to populate their threasurechest with both old and new jewels.

But I still think… I think (uh, oh, methinks I’m wavering) "Fast Cars" should be the real last song on the record.

Flamenco-salsa meets Hebrew dance by way of Subterranean (Mediterannean) Homesick Blues!!?? That’s "Fast Cars". That’s what Bono once meant by "I don’t know what it is, so it must be us!" "Fast Cars" doesn’t quite qualify as "punk rock on Venus," but it is from a refreshingly fresh,
different, new plane ..one that would be exciting; that would be "the bomb" as the kids say, to explore! And it sounds and smells, in a way, catorce times as fresh as anything on "Bomb" proper…except maybe (appropriately so) "Vertigo." And most significantly, it throws a curveball into the game; a wrench into the mix; a winning wildcard into the hand ( I’m feeling more at home already!) Edge is not working the "swirling epiphanies" I want him to do, he’s closeted them in favor of something "completely different and off the schedule, " as he himself once famously said (about U2 doing a "gospel song"!) . And could it be that precisely because of the fresh, adventurous, circuitous direction he aims that axe, the guys are also given permission to unbridle some bottled-up fun? It all tastes like new wine, but hey, I’m a new wino!

Granted, much of the rest of "Bomb" does come off fresher than "Yahweh," but still too "old" and lillywhite (Groan! Sorry, Steve, couldn’t resist. You ARE a genius, though) to be called … fun? U2? Having fun? As in "Fast Cars," they sing about… well, what is this song about? Whatever words a soundtrackless reading of the subterranean homesick lyrics as pure poetry would conjure up, ("I got the nightly news to get to know the enemy," "Take a pill to stop it", etc.) terms like fun, or faith wouldn’t appear near the top… maybe fear (maybe that other F-bomb word that Bono loves too much)… But wait, this "real last song" IS the lone and lonely song among the new material that actually mentions the word "fun",.,in the crazy, (outta)context of being "in the desert" no less!….In the desert doing what? "Dismantling an atomic bomb." Sheer joy? Oh, the irony is back. But in the studio this time around, the irony-detector was out; this atomic disc, is decidedly not to be an ironic "bomb . " U2 intentionally renounced radical irony with the last record. So "Fast Cars" didn’t make the cut…

HOW TO ANTAGONIZE AN ARC ON THE WAY TO THE CATHEDRAL

I can honor that that may have been the right choice; I celebrate the season U2 are in, and I bless their decision even as I grieve it. I believe there was a conscious choice to craft this album, particularly its closing hymn..uh, song… as more upfront about God, and upbeat about faith; all of which was probably the right call for where U2’s art, heart and car are parked today. Consider earlier versions of "Yaheweh" which have floated around on ITunes; .a little (gasp!) darker! Beth Maynard’s blogthoughts and redaction-criticism on this song and its history , as often, helped me assimilate what I was feeling, and missing:
http://u2sermons.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_u2sermons_archive.html#110167177249064983

And how about the other clear "God-song", "All Because of You, " which in an earlier and abandoned version declared not "All Because of You, I am" (in which I take "I AM" as the biblical name of God being addressed) , but actually threw this curve: "All Because of You, I’m down." Both qualify as biblically-faithful psalms, but the curveball worked.

I of all people (a pastor type.) cannot knock U2 for being too positive and spiritual. Maybe I miss too much the brilliant tweak of "God Part II": "I don’t believe the devil/Don’t believe his book…But the truth is not the same without the lies he made up." I should..and indeed do.. celebrate the season they are in; It seems to be a Romans 8 season, and not the long dark night (decade) of the soul, they were "Romans 7-ed" in. But at best I want full context…I want Romans 7 AND 8, dammit..uh, darn it! (In the 90s, Bono went as far as to say, he wanted, in the depiction of their shows anyway, "both heaven and hell.") And, glimmer of hope here, isn’t that "both/and" the mode and mood of the first song of the current disc? Ah, I have come full circle, from the "real" last song to the "official" first song, and found an inclusio of fear (albeit faith-based fear). So I find that my beef, and my tantrum, has actually been about the arc. The band have spoken about the "arc from fear to faith" (meaning from "Vertigo" to Yahweh") as the shape, flow, muse and message of the record . So why would I want to make this arc, against its own inherent direction , "complete itself" into a full circle, and cycle back to fear (at least partly)? Maybe because "that’s life." Maybe due to an idolatrous need I haveb for U2 to bring back the wrenches , or due to the (unfounded) fear that they have committed the unpardonable sin of finally finding what they were looking for, and will stop questing for more (Jesus, fresh art, honesty, whatever). "I hope I never do!" Bono used to yell out in concert after singing "I still haven’t found what I’m looking for." But more recently, and more resolutely, he has followed the "You know I believe it (Jesus’ cross and its effects)" line in that song with an ardorous "And I still do!" Can’t I let him bask in the season that I have helped pray him into?

Googling the band’s "arc from fear to faith" quote to get the context; I found a Las Vegas Mercury page (http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:GLbGZ01QHHwJ:www.lasvegasmercury.com/2004/MERC-Nov-25-Thu-2004/25318630.html+arc++atomic+u2&hl=en&ie=UTF-8), and
two great reminders. First, this, in the U2 review: "U2 seems comfortable with its ethereal, chiming rock sound, tweaked enough to sound refreshed but nonetheless rooted in the band's past." Uncle...

But God and Google have a sense of humor. There on the same page, with the term "arc" dutifully highlighted as I had requested in my search, this review of "Cathedral" by the group Castanets: "The best things about Cathedral are its restraint and the haunting quality that persists past the last of it, despite a few cacophonous moments that antagonize an arc the way common indulgence always does." Replace "Cathedral" with "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (U.S. version)," and I am forced to consider that the best things about the Bomb are the same: 1) its restraint (not throwing curves) and 2) that it ends (in most versions) on a "haunting quality (i.e., ‘Yahweh’) that persists past the last of it," and the worst mistake in track-selection just might have been to include "a few cacophonous moments" (isn’t that "Fast Cars" to a tea?) that "anatagonize an arc the way common indulgence does." OK, maybe! But two of the character traits that I have always admired in the Bonomen are precisely "a few cacophonous moments" and "antagonizing an arc with common indulgence." However, the CD was not entitled "How to Antagonize an Uncacophonous Arc." That kind of title is for "four men chopping down the Joshua tree" seasons of life. I have to go with the Reason for the Season. Bono knows the Book, and one of his favorite sections is Ecclesiastes which proclaims "there is a time and season for everything." Bono is a man who knows the times, and he knows the cathedral (and probably the Castanets disc by that name). In fact he told the Times (New York Times, that is); all about the time for cathedrals:

"

There's cathedrals and the alleyway in our music. I think the alleyway is
usually on the way to the cathedral, where you can hear your own footsteps and
you're slightly nervous and looking over your shoulder and wondering if there's
somebody following you. And then you get there and you realize there was
somebody following you: It's God."
http://www.atu2.com/news/article.src?ID=3612

"Bomb" is an album that has arrived at the cathedral by way of the earlier and necessary alleyway of the previous season’s albums.

A WALL AND A BOMB: SPIRALING FULL CIRCLE

Pink Floyd’s "The Wall" in classic Floydian fashion, was brilliant, but a little hard to listen to; deeply depressing . So what’s it doing in this essay on U2’s new release? I think there is some musical/theological/philosophical gold to be mined by "listening" to these two very different (?) discs from very different (?) eras at the same time (Hey, if that inspires someone reading to pursue some wild ideas for burning some U2-Floyd sampling remixes….don’t do it! Besides, Coldplay and The Rock and Roll Worship Circus have already done it better!) Compare and contrast time. Pink Floyd’s "arc" was from fear to resignation (At least Bono wanted heaven and hell; Roger Waters seems to want hell and hell, with no middle or higher ground in sight)….no arc I want to trace, or road I’m dying to travel. No answers, no baby Jesus among the trash. Of course this is the band for whom the line "We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year" was a greatest hit and upbeat, Precious and Kodak moment! For all the Wall knew, the best one can settle for is to be "comfortably numb." And the fact that during concert re-enactments of "The Wall," stagehands literally and gradually built up a wall that eventually entirely covered the stage and band from view; and the band seemed comfortably numb and completely unmoved by complaints that fans paid big money to see nothing but a wall, reveals that Bono and band were on a different page in the 90s (At least Bono , after surfing large-screen TV in front of the crowd, knew when enough was enough. He would say, as he threw the remote down, and the band launched into a song, "But you haven’t come all the way out here to watch TV now, have you?") But Floyd ignored fans and built the wall they were singing about. Pink Floyd may have intentionally been nudging fans towards nihilism and suggesting one will have no choice but submit to facism; . U2 were annihilating nihilism with larger than life irony. And facism? Remember "Goodbye all you neo-Nazi skinheads. I hope they give you Auschwitz!"?

Even though the double "Wall" album, and concert, ended with a short piece, "Tear Down the Wall," and that seemed like a good thing; it is not so good. In the record’s scenario, once we tear down the walls that keep us from others and reality, instead of freedom, we find our worst nightmare: there’s nothing behind it! We are hopeless, and now to make matters worse, naked, and in front of an enemy. A careful listener will hear, after the sounds of the wall crumbling, the "real last song" of the Floyd record, which numbly (Of course another U2 Floyd connection and contrast is the Floyd’s "Comfortably Numb" and U2’s "Numb") submits to circumstances , and coldy bends the arc full circle (literally in this case..I’ll explain) from fear to… fear. The last voice one hears at the end of side 4 (remember records? This was a double album; so four sides) is someone quietly saying something that gets cut off mid-sentence "Isn’t this where…"), and the sentence (as one discovered later) was "continued" at the beginning of side 1: "…we came in.") "isn’t "Isn’t this where we came in?" Clever tactic, depressing thesis: The record (literally) comes full circle (literally); life (spiritually) is endless circle; spiraling (in the "Vertigo" video, our band spiraled down to hell, but they bounced back!) through the grooves of the record, and life, into nothingnumbness. Even if we do tear down a wall, we’ll build another and another. .Gosh, Bono did say "Vertigo" was such a nice little ditty that it made you feel like killing yourself. But he laughed. I cannot imagine Roger Waters laughing as he seemingly invites no other ultimate option but suicide..or at least quiet and hopeless desperation…after completing the endless, vicious circle/cycle. That’s at best bad Hindu karma, not good Irish Christianity (which of course Bono contrasted in the last U2 record’s last song, one initially "about a girl" but in its more elevated meaning about a God that Waters apparently knows not of). The Floyd message is antithetical to U2’s, though both group’s presentations and styles may share a lot of great art-genius. But Floyd is still brilliant, and brutally honest. Just hopeless, with no map out of Vertigo and hell; no love to "teach me to kneel." No dead man to even wake up.

"The Wall," ended with a cousin of the "hidden track", didn’t it (The quiet piece that began on side 4 and cycled onto side 1)? "The Bomb"ends with another cousin of the "hidden track," (Which is why "Fast Cars" is wise enough to sneak up on you only after several seconds of silence after the invocation of Yahweh to do his heartbreaking work). And both hidden cousins (did you have cousins like that?) are proven related in that their mission is to verbalize the "real last message" of both discs. In both cases, it is a risk towards atheism. But in U2’s case, it is a risk well taken, as it leads out of that ditch the Floyd’s fast car would land us in.

HOLY HELIX, BATMAN!

Wrapping up this huge but unwieldy "full circle" theory then: I propose that all that I have tried to discover above in the Pink Floyd comparison/contrast ( especially in light of the too-obvious reference on "Vertigo" to "Stories for Boys" from the first record , "Boy ") means that Bono is wanting to communicate something like this: "Yes, this is full circle; but unlike Floyd’s circle/spiral, it’s a positive and God-thing to come full circle. You CAN start over again, not because you are doomed to repeat mistakes and cycle/spiral into numbness and hell , but because you get to be born again, and again, and again, and again… You get to go back where you started; where you ‘came in,’ but on a higher; more informed level.
When I sing on the new record that ‘time can’t take the boy out of this man,’ I mean that since our first record was ‘Boy,’ we are now in this new disc, which should’ve been called ‘Man’, returing to childhood, but on a higher, grown-up level."

Which is what I mean when I say that a "holy helix"(http://www.geocities.com/patrickmann.geo/helix/helix.jpg)
is what U2 has discovered; and I think such a divine design is thoughtfully embedded throughout all of life. It’s part of the birthright and DNA of life in Christ to (finally) realize and feel ("a feeling is so much stronger..") that God is so lavishly in love with us that he offers us the vital encouragement of grasping the grace of the helix. It may "feel" like we are just stuck on "repeat"("Hello!Hello!"), spiraling down, but what raw joy to uncover that what we are actually travelling is a "holy helix"… helixes that God has disguised as hellholes, so we might in stumbling and landmining over them , watch them explode well-earned joy all over us. Too often I mistake holy helixes for downward spirals. I first caught this phenomenon in Robert Kegan’s "The Evolving Self," whose cover (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0674272315/ref=sib_rdr_fc/002-2248490-8080004?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S001 not only portrays a "boy becoming a man" (or a "man becoming a boy") and thus his "true self," but whose other diagram…a helix…confronted me with the breakthrough truth that in God’s sovereignty (though Kegan sees it as built into social/psychological evolution) we can always make ultimate progress. When it feels like we are headed "down," ultimately the line we are travelling is an upward bound line. But as part of that progress, there are downward directions that are part of the road we must travel. If we lean into the line (maybe it’s a roller coaster track) we can at least enjoy the ride, and trust that it’s getting us where we need to be.

Let’s slightly alter the analogy again , this arc/full circle/Andes road helixy kind of shape! I was thinking of what thrill it is to ride once we realize it’s a God-set-up, and the image of the arc becoming a slide came to mind. Let’s be kids ("Boy) , even though we are adults ("Man"), and be free enough to simly ride the slide…but here’s the analogy I learnde from The Choir, whose seminal dic was called, not "wa;;," or "bomb" but "circle slide." I know it's hard to imagineWhen someone makes you cryFire in the heavensAnd laughter in the skyJust let the wind blow through your spiritLet the sun shine on your faceLet's look into each others eyesAnd sing Amazing Grace. In the title track, they beckon us to trust the ride, (an note! "Jesus round the neck" is once a again the "glimmer of salvation" that everything hinges on:

Imagine one perfect circle/Above the stratosphere
Where lovers hide away/And children cheer
Because the ground has melted/Where the devil stood
Never mind the carnivalIn your old neighborhood/
Come on let's rideThe circle slide
On my neck against my heart/I wear a wooden cross
And sometimes I remember/What freedom cost
Shake off your golden shackles/Children of time no more
Consider now the crimson crown/The Man of Sorrows wore
Come on let’s ride
The circle slide
I know it's hard to imagine/When someone makes you cry
Fire in the heavens/And laughter in the sky
Just let the wind blow through your spirit/Let the sun shine on your face
Let's look into each others eyes/And sing Amazing Grace

Come on let’s ride
The circle slide

(See the slide that inspired it all:
www.thechoir.net/pages/records-cslide.html)

Without a Christ-infusion of perpective and hope, or "being born again the first time," all of life feels like, even is, a downward slide; in fact it drops into hell. Yet in the Kingdom and the economy it births, we inevitably progress, spiraling up , circling up, helixing up. Even when we unnwillingly enter a curve/detour that temporarily drives us down…(All of this sounds very similar to my winding Andes adveture in Vertigo journaled in chapter one), we can’t help but come full circle/ helix. This is the economy of God; it’s "hold on" holy helix ride (from Vertigo to Fast Cars; an arc-cicle-helix from fear to faith to fear to faith, but always with holy progress..even if the slide winds us to (and through) vertigos, don’t jump bus, it is not a detour.

In "John Wimber’s Heavenly Reward for Doing ‘The Stuff,’" one of literally thousands of articles and links on Thunderstruck.org (an amazing and necessary website from which to unearth "daily bread" and manna-crumbs from culture) , the ever apostolic and bravely brilliant (He’s a U2 fan) Steve Beard, is worthy of quoting in full below. Watch for the secret to trusting the helix:

Shortly after John Wimber became a Christian, he became a voracious Bible
reader. The Scriptures excited him. Finally, after weeks of reading about
life-transforming miracles in the Bible and attending boring church services,
John asked one of the lay leaders, "When do we get to do the stuff?"

"What
stuff?" asked the leader.

"You know, the stuff here in the Bible," said John.

"You know, like the stuff Jesus did—raising people from the dead, healing the
blind and the paralyzed. You know, that stuff."

"Well, we don’t do that
anymore," the man said.

"You don’t?"

"No."

"Well what do you do?" asked John.

"What we did this morning."

In frustration, John responded: "For that I gave up drugs?"

Like so many of us, John was taught by example that
the contemporary Christian life was radically disconnected from the power and
awesomeness of the Scriptures. Throughout the remainder of his ministry,
however, he proved that the disconnection was unnecessary.

In 1993, God healed Wimber of an inoperable and rare form of cancer. In recent years, he also survived a stroke. He was recently recovering from a triple-bypass heart surgery when he suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. On November 17, John Wimber went to his heavenly reward where there will be no more crying or pain. He was sixty-three years old.

Wimber was spiritual leader to the 450 Vineyard
Christian Fellowships in the United States and to the 250 Vineyard congregations
abroad. He was the senior pastor of the Anaheim Vineyard for seventeen years.
Very simply, Wimber believed that sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, casting
out demons, and healing the sick was simply "doing the stuff" of Jesus. He also
believed in mercy for those in need. Several weeks before he died, raised
$690,000 for the poor and other church concerns.

Before his conversion, Wimber was the keyboardist for The Righteous Brothers. Since that time, his songwriting has been at the forefront of contemporary praise and worship music.
His "Spirit Song" is even found in the United Methodist hymnal.
Much of his ministry was spent traveling around the globe teaching on signs and wonders and
the already-and-not-yet nature of the kingdom of God. Through his books Power
Healing and Power Evangelism, he taught an entire generation of Christians about
praying with faith for the miraculous, all the while trusting in the sovereignty
of God. Years ago, Wimber continued to teach his congregation about healing
despite the fact that they did not see one single person healed for nine months.
As a matter of fact, many of them got worse. Nevertheless, he trusted the
Bible—and more importantly, the God of the Bible.

Paradoxically, he brought
so much understanding to healing and yet suffered so much physically. Wimber
believed in healing and in pain. "Both are found in the Word of God," he writes.
"In the year I spent battling cancer God purged me of a lot of habits and
attitudes that weren’t right, and through it I grew stronger as a Christian.
Some of my greatest advances in spiritual maturity came as I embraced the
pain—as each day I had to choose to allow God to accomplish his work in me by
any method, even adversity."

I was 18 years old when I first saw John Wimber
in a high school gymnasium in southern California. The guys who introduced me to
Jesus went to his church. In my first several years as a Christian, I went to my
dad’s UM church in the morning and Wimber’s church at night. Next to my dad and
John Wesley, John Wimber has played the biggest role in shaping my worldview for
ministry.

A few years ago, I was in Anaheim for a conference and had a friend
introduce me to John Wimber. He was weak and frail but had a glorious smile and
a reassuring twinkle in his eye. I counted it an honor to meet him.

"The economy of the kingdom of God is quite simple. Every new step in the kingdom
costs us everything we have gained to date," wrote Wimber. "Every time we cross
a new threshold, it costs us everything we now have. Every new step may cost us
all the reputation and security we have accumulated up to that point. It costs
us our life.

"A disciple is always ready to take the next step. If there is
anything that characterizes Christian maturity, it is the willingness to become
a beginner again for Jesus Christ. It is the willingness to put your hand in his
hand and say, ‘I’m scared to death, but I’ll go with you. You’re the Pearl of
great price."

That Wimber quote is posted over my computer. Everyday I am
reminded to go forward in Christ, to cross new thresholds, and to hold tightly
to the Savior’s hand. John Wimber was faithful to the Lord until the end. Along
the way he inspired a lot of us to do the same…and to do "the stuff."
http://www.thunderstruck.org/archivevault/Wimber.htm

Trust the helix ; work with it’s economy and angles, especially when the slide-ride seems to costly to continue; take the full circle/helix..the one Kegan and U2 and Beard and Wimber and I are recommending. Do not bail by renting a fast car out of the loop. Enjoy and even buy the Floyd music, but don’t buy the circle they seem to be selling. (Poor guys; they mean well, They just seem to think the spiral is the only shape on the market.) It’s far too costly a spiral…We must take the helix less travelled; only it leads up and on to "the stuff." Okay, we have finally done enough full circling. Let’s land.

BREAKING NEWS: POST-DEADLINE VINDICATION

News flash..Hi! This is Dave, the writer of this crazy tome. This brief "breaking news section" is an after-deadline insertion. I was just putting this chapter to bed and press; when I got wind of the new Rolling Stone cover story on U2, , and I find that Bono has just said better what I have been trying to say above about the "full circle". Imagine that! He even uses "circle talk," , and also the "real" album title I had suggested: Here is the excerpt, vindicating that I was right..uh, excuse me, vindicating that Bono can always say better what I try to say about him:
The band was what I believed in then," Bono contends. "My faith in myself was a different matter. That innocence -- you don't just want to shed it. You want to beat it off you, scratch it off. You think that knowledge of the world will somehow give you an easier route through it.
"It doesn't," he says emphatically. "In a lot of ways, that's the essence of this album -- the idea that you can go back to where you started, that you can start again." To press his point, Bono quotes the last verse of Atomic Bomb's Who-ish blitzkrieg "All Because of You," chanting the words like a prayer: "I'm alive/I'm being born/I just arrived, I'm at the door/Of the place that I started out from/And I want back inside."
"We've closed the circle," he says, beaming, "back to our first album" -- 1980's echo-drenched thriller, Boy. "Maybe we should have called this one Man."
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/6767901?rnd=1103316990450&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1040

Thanks for indulging the news flash. We now return you to the rest of the regularly scheduled article.

I’LL MISS YOU BOTH, SUGARS

In a weird sort of way, I am relieved that the "A Man and a Woman" line "You are gone and so is God" appears, in passing, on the new U2 "Bomb," having snuck past the censors. Not quite the prodigal guy of a few albums ago, who left by his rich Father’s "back door and threw away the key" and jumped in the trunk of a fast car about to spiral into a tree. And not in the ballpark of Floyd; but still a joltingly honest emotion for a "worship album," …oops , I mean "pop album." It’s just not underlined. But it is underscored by not being underlined.

Which may be why I might again(!) propose "Fast Cars" as the real..yada yada

Don’t you worry about your mind
Don’t you worry about your mind
Don’t you worry about your mind
Don’t you worry about your mind

You should worry about the day That the pain it goes away You know I miss mine
sometimes

So runs some of the "Fast Cars" lyric. The "obvious" reference point as to what "I miss sometimes" is "pain," right? Great profound point: I should be in touch with my pain, but I’m not; I have shut it off. I should let God use it, instead I deny it; I take a fast-car away from it.. I thus "miss" the growth I could enjoy if had embraced the pain.

However, grammatically, there is another possible reference point as to what is missed: my "mind." Especially since the "mind" line is repeated, let me hypothesize that, with his wink and tweak, it would be just like Bono to throw this curve in the mix: "I really do miss my mind." Maybe it was..by extension, lost when the pain was. (After all, elsewhere in the "Bomb," this same narrator [the ‘man’ of the "Man and a Woman" ]preaches that "The only pain is to feel nothing at all.") And that’s why I need Yahweh …Just not as the last song on the disc.

For those befuddled by the "sugar reference" in the section heading, I’ll clue you in on some trivia that only die-hard fans (or obsessive-compulsive CD-cleaning types) are aware of. On the bottom the new U2 CD, a cryptic note is etched: "Miss You Sugar." This has been explained in a number of ways (including this amusing but live possibility: www.oxfam.org.nz/MakeTradeFair/Thumbnails.htm), but consider that in Bono’s lavish lyric-language, "Sugar" is often a cryptic nickname for God (far less "obvious" than "Yahweh", huh?) and/or his wife…and/or his dad..and /or his goddaughter (whom he "sugars" in "Original of the Species"). Since he has felt at times he has virtually lost his Heavenly father, has indeed literally lost his earhly one, and ; fears losing Ali; may fear losing his goddaughter (thus a whole song), etc..…it is possible that just as Bono "misses" both pain and mind on one song on the disc; he is sending an SOS on the back of the disc signalflaring us that he in a sense misses both God and family. Not too comfortable a though for a faith-album. Which is why it’s such a footnote.

And why "Fast Cars" is..the ...albeit hidden; footnoted…last song in the record.

OCCASSIONAL ATHEISM: COFFEE, NOT JESUS

"Pastor, can I you come over right away?" came the voice over the phone. " I have a terrible confession to make!" I took the trip across town, the whole way I was thinking "What in the world is she going to confess? She’s a sweet 90 year old saint? What did she do, accidentally swat a mosquito, and now she needs to confess being a murderer?" When I arrived, she sat me down and spilled it out; right to the point: "I am an occasional atheist! Is that okay? " I did not laugh, for I was priest-pastor in a holy moment, but took and shook her hand, signifying that I, too, belonged to that club. And she was freed; even though she was fearful of making that necessary and jolting confession. Bono , he of "Like faith needs a doubt/Like a freeway out/I need Your love," is not. B This is merely confession of our occasional atheism, shocking honesty, and common humanity.

Speaking of humanity, and radical honesty, and "occasional atheism"….that’s obviously a Johnny Cash thing. Two stories about Johnny (vocalist and namesake of U2’s "The Wanderer") follow, the first below by the reverently irreverent journalist Chuck Klosterman, who spent a remarkable day and drive with Bono recently in Bono’s fast car (join that ride sometime by clicking: http://www.atu2.com/news/article.src?ID=3654)

Here is the easiest way to explain the genius of Johnny Cash: Singing from the
perspective of a convicted murderer in the song ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ Cash is
struck by pangs of regret when he sits in his cell and hears a distant train
whistle. This is because people on that train are ‘probably drinkin’ coffee.’
And this is also why Cash seems completely credible as a felon: He doesn’t want
freedom or friendship with Jesus or a new lawyer. He wants coffee.
Within the
mind of a killer, complex feelings are eerily simple.
This is why killers can
shoot men in Reno just to watch them die and the rest of us usually
can’t.
("Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs", page 186)

Usually! The next Cash story is already a contemporary classic:

Cash once got a visit from U2 members Bono and Adam Clayton who were driving
across the U.S. taking in the local colors. The three of them sat around a table
before their meal, and Cash floored the two Irishmen with an incredible prayer
of thanksgiving to God. Then, without skipping a beat, he raised his head and
quipped, ‘Sure miss the drugs, though.’
(Dave Urbanski, "The Man Comes
Around", p, xxi)

All of us have at times wanted coffee, not Jesus. We have all missed our drugs, whatever they were. We have all considered taking a taxi out of Gethsemane (staying in the discoteque, preferring bubble gum to God) ; lead-footinng out of our marraige; but we know that we know that "these fast cars will do me no good." But we don’t know that until we say it. So we say it; and we stay. Even when part of us doesn’t. Even if like I did, in mhy infamous opening story, we actually continue speeding for a mile of two, even after hearing an audible voice of God calling us back to reality/center/home/church/Vertigo/Yahweh/cross...

If "Fast Cars" is the last song; then the last line of that last song should be a keeper, and a thematic key, right? But what the last line is all about is hardly clear..or is it? The line on the line: "I’m not used to talking somebody in the body." (at least that’s the way http://www.atu2.com/ translates that line, others transcribe it it as "a body’). Either way, but especially the first way, it is telling.

Here’s what I do with it: Whether Bono had this firmly in mind when he uttered it , I think it means, "I’m having to own up to my growing position as some sort of spokesman for Christianity, even though I always denied being so. I have to get used to speaking to people in the capital ‘B’ Body….the Body of Christ. Because even though, as I’ve always said, ‘God has some weird kids,’ they are my brothers and sisters. We live in the same Body.
We worship the same Yahweh, and we face the same temptation to fast-car it outta his church."

That’s the season Bono is in. In the last few years, and against his friends’ advice, he has spoken to, church groups; Christian groups. Even though it was "like getting blood from a stone" to get them to care about AIDS in Africa, he knew it was his club.

All the above to say that Bono now knows, that whether he likes it or not, he now has a place, pulpit and platform among Bible-believing Christians. He has appeared via video to Christian music festivals, and preached what no less a card-carrying evangelical (and friend of Bono’s) than Michael W. Smith has called a great "sermon." He has, though feeling ridiculous, preached in ( Midwest!) American pulpits!
He’s even been the anointed "cover boy" on Christianity Today ! (Though in another story, in the same issue, the magazine "with a mouth full of teeth" griped about his "paper thin eccesiology.")

Bono, I know you’re busy saving the world and all, but I also know you’re reading this (because it’s linked on Pastor Beth’s U2 Sermons website!) So may I at least ask…since you are getting more used to "talking to somebody in the Body" … …what are you doing Sunday morning at 10:00? Can we book you for "talking to somebody in the Body" at our church? And you can sing in addition to preach. Anything you want, even an unedited version of "Wake Up Dead Man"! . Somehow, I think you might make "Yahweh" the centerpiece of your Sunday morning setlist nowadays, though. Not just because its on the new record, but because it’s where you are. And that’s totally alright with me. Your way is Yahweh.
But if you want to stir things up by singing the "real" last song on the new record, that glorious "God-song" that’s alright with me, too. But could you do it last?

Sincerely,

Pastor Leadfoot

The Bomb Part 1: And Elevation Begat Vertigo

2004-12-13T23:53:00.000-08:00

Elevated Vertigo, A Pair of Doxes, Fish in the Sky, and Holy Helixes:

A Four-Part Theological Blog, Satirical Sermon and Reluctantly Raving Review of (among other topics) U2’s Fourth (maybe) Masterpiece

PART 1 BELOW

(Part 4: http://davestuff.blogspot.com/2004/12/u2-part-4.html
Back to top)
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By Dave Wainscott, a fumbling but sincere disciple, and "chief dreamer" of Third Day (‘3D’) Fellowship of Fresno, a "Jesus-anchored and non-religious" experiment found in Fresno, California, and at www.3dff.com. His bio, straight from the post office wall, is hanging here: http://www.3dff.com/pages/zdave.htm, and, if you want to catch him, he often hangs out at another wall, found here: http://www.3dff.com/php. He has collected all kind of theologically-informed reviews of "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb", the new U2 CD on another page, so if you hate his review below, read all the better ones here: http://3dff.com/php/viewtopic.php?t=32

INTRODUCTION, SPOILER, AND SURGEON GENERAL’S HEALTH WARNING

Since my deck is shamelessly stacked anyway, let me ditch my preferred poker and preaching strategy by tabling my hand of cards at the outset. I much prefer the inductive, winding and weaving, "mysterious build-up" approach to writing, preaching and life, but I dare to believe there are enough of those attributes inherent in the following four theses about the Christ-ward journey and the new U2 CD’s message and music, to merit my gamble that the four U2isms are a serendipitous and winning hand. Here, tumbled out early, then, is where the cards land:

1) By travelling up the delightful but dizzying highlands of Peru, one can learn what one already knew: Elevation leads to vertigo. And there is value in a holy lingering at that second and sacred place.

2) By pondering and plundering paradoxes; especially the definitive mother of them all ("Birth leads to death, and death leads to birth"), embracing them indiscriminately and allowing them in an unhindered and unhurried fashion to craft a creative tension, one can witness the colors, economy and keys of the " Kingdom coming" in a Holy Spiritual way impossible to "get to" via any other route.

3)The occasional "drawing one’s fish in the sky", for the skilled artist whose preferred "drawing board" is sand; far from producing heavy-handed, cheap and cheesy art,
can ironically and irenically generate a gentle yet bold, powerfully persuasive, subtle "stealth" tableau that honors Jesus’ Matthew 10:16 preference that we be simultaneously and Spiritaneously "sneaky as snakes and docile as doves."

4)Tracing and trainspotting lyric/musical references from the new CD to lyrical/musical reference points on earlier CDs , and (interestingly enough) especially to stellar songs axed from the new CD as well as the "optional" book, if done in a systemic (not systematic) way, leads to previously unanswered questions being answered, and perhaps even more importantly, new and perhaps unanswerable questions being asked, (for example, "Does that famous arc actually come full circle?")

Alright, hand spilled. But I realize and relish in the obvious news that I’ve got some explaining to do to defend, let alone interpret or even dismantle whatever the heck I just said. I’m honored; that’s precisely why I’m here. And as you might have guessed, what follows will be a round-table of topics far wider than just the "Atomic Bomb" CD, though U2 (in general), and the disc’s theology (in specific) will be our launching pad. On the journey, as companions and defenders of my case, will be an amazingly diverse crew of theologians: including the likes of Bob Dylan, Tracy Chapman, Jurgen Moltmann, Sponge Bob, chef-priest Robert Farrar Capon, St. Augustine, some porn stars, a beggar I met in Jerusalem, chessmaster Gary Kasparov, and David Letterman. I hope I have got your curiosity up…

My curiosity, radar and eyebrows were certainly raised when I stumbled onto a fascinating and unplanned phenomenon of all four of these proposals , one of many threads that ties them together and interrelates them: Each of the U2isms turns about to be in surprising sync with ancient Jewish rabbinic approaches to prayer and persuasion! Now, I have already addressed (but not yet atoned for!) , my overall deck-stacking theses, but because I am neither smart enough, or versed in Judaism enough, to have noticed or pre-planned the tantalizing Jewish context, aroma and undergirding of all that I have so far said , I am in awe, thinking another Dealer is at work . And even though His ways are higher, He is limited in using my ways and words. So this article might even be mildly profound; and perhaps even wildly prophetic… in spite of me.

That’s the deal. And this honesty that I am trying to cultivate also helps me in my quixotic, Bonoesque (and therefore perhaps doomed) quest to "not be proud of my humility". By arrogantly laying out such simple, (maybe simplistic) ; at best profound and confounding propositional truths, I feel I a bit like the smug Bono in the "Rattle and Hum" film, reading the theologically focused lyrics of "When Love Comes to Town" to B.B. King, characteristically peacocking as he presents his precious lyrics as gifts to the king. And of course it only feeds the "megalomania and messiah complex" that Bono often admits "set in early" for him that BB’s classic response is "That’s some mighty heavy lyrics for a young man." Anyone reading thus far has probably already forgiven Bono for such lines from the new album as the famous "Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby’s head" or the infamous rhyming of voice, choice and… catorce, uh, I mean tortoise. Pathetic or prophetic lines? Groaners or gems? The best answer may be "yes", but only the Bonoman can get away with these lines. And since I’m not in Bono’s wordsmithing league, I must ask that in this essay, you are insistent and consistent in following Bono’s advice in "looking for baby Jesus under the trash." Anything I say may have some "Dave" attached, but I’m convinced there are divine truths…some baby Jesus…to be divined, culled and kept in this discussion of the latest disc by Bono and boys ( which by mere intrinsic virtue of being a U2 product, can point us towards a deeper and more theologically-informed walk of faith) . Another Christmasish Bono quote relates: in the book accompanying the "deluxe" edition of "Bomb" (I believe the book is "required," so consider yourself deluxe and shell out the bucks) he scribbles (literally) and marvels that "the Almighty God…the same force of love and logic" that created all there is could condescend to become "a child born in s___ and straw." (Great line for a Christmas card sold in an evangelical store!!) So if there’s any s___ and straw in what follows, glean it out. But watch for Jesus in its midst and manger.

In light of the "in-house" talk of the "baby Jesus under the trash" (an allusion to a 1997 U2 lyric from the song "Mofo"); and because a wise cad (Steve Sjogren) once said "It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission", another warning and "heads up" to any gentle readers unimmersed in U2: This essay… because typed by a type unabashedly addicted to at least three lethal substances: God, U2 and a (hopefully) holy sense of humor… will be unapologetically peppered with bad U2 puns and poor plays on U2 lyrics and mythology. So, like a literal "peppering," take this for its intent: a flavoring accent, which for those who like or understand its gift, it adds a little bonus "life" to a meal which is, we admit, already complete and edible without it. So, if a crazy or cryptic reference in the chapters below seems to makes no sense, taste terrible, or makes you gag, you might reasonably conclude:

a)It makes no sense, tastes terrible, and should in fact make you gag
b)It’s yet another poor and pathetic U2 pun, which can be deleted without missing anything fundamental to the content and taste of the essay
c)Maybe you should become more conversant with the back-catalog of the world’s greatest rock-n-roll band, for your own spiritual enlightenment, and also so you can groan at the dumb in-house jokes.
d)All of the above
Onward, then…

U2ism #1: ELEVATION LEADS TO VERTIGO

ELEVATED VERTIGO MAKES ME SICK

This chapter may feel like it spends an inordinate amount of time on "Elevation," and U2’s overall place in the church/culture mix, for what claims to be a writing focusing on the new "Bomb" CD. The last three chapters will focus more on the new CD, and even include a "review", but integral to my first thesis is that a short course in "Elevation" is prerequisite and integral to an informed understanding the new material, and maybe even life itself! So let’s visit this background…by way of South America. I congratulated myself on remembering to pocket the airsick bag from the plane. I recalled how Bono had scrawled early versions of lyrics on airsick bags as lyrics came to mind; but my mission in shoplifting the bag was more basic and less profound…

It all happened on a bus in Peru; where I (literally) lost my lunch, but found the revelation I was looking for. And I mean in that very act of elevated (literally…high altitude) lunch-losing (literally…regurgitation, OK?) , the vertigo; the sickness; and the revelation hit. It just spilled out..uh, the revelation, I mean. I didn’t write it on the bag, but from that point on, it would be written on my pysche. The revelation, albeit in a reductionistic nutshell, is this: ELEVATION LEADS TO VERTIGO.

"Big fat atomic deal, Captain!," I hear the fans say. "Anyone with a bonehead background in U2 knows that!" (For any souls sans that basic background, here’s the connect: The keynote song/concert-opener of U2’s previous CD/tour was called "Elevation"; the keynote song /concert-opener of their new CD/tour is a called "Vertigo." Thus: Elevation came first; then vertigo. And the new CD, as the second release in a row hallmarked by a "return to roots" vibe and value, has widely been recognized as "All That You Can’t Leave Behind"’s sequel and successor not just chronologically but logically speaking)
But, hang on; I’m not even talking U2…at least not directly…at least not officially…not yet. And though this is indeed a theological commentary on U2’s possible fourth masterpiece, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," let’s join the bus ride, and pursue this first thesis.

Winding roads and grinding gears, both heroically maneuvered by a much prayed-for Peruvian bus driver led me to (against my will) contemplate the theory, and road-test the reality, of my twin theologies of elevation and vertigo. Having braved an eight-hour bus ride up to the huge and holy heights of the Andes mountains, on a ruthless road with no name, I am a living (barely!) witness to the simple but profound fact that, as I previously and pretentiously proffered, "elevation leads to vertigo."

"Donde esta?, " I would often ask myself in English, or my Spanish-speaking bus-mates in Spanish, as I prayerfully and carefully poked my head out of slumber and sweater while on this breakneck bus ride.
Occasionally I would peek out the window, just to tell myself I was man enough to do it, or to get some sense of where we were; I would catch a glimpse of the railroad tracks that sometimes paralleled (That’s the wrong word….no straight lines in sight) our road; the tracks belonged to the famed "Ferrocarril", the highest railroad on the planet. I thanked God that at least I wasn’t on that train, but I still didn’t know the answer to my haunting question: "Where in the Peru are we?" Inevitably the answer was an annoying rerun of the previous hour’s: "Climbing even higher up the Andes, dude. We have the oxygen and alcohol ready if you need it." (Seriously, every bus or train that dares to elevate itself up the high[literal]way from Lima to Huancayo, boasts an onboard medical kit well-stocked with the only two cures outside of drastic divine intervention that soothe the sickening physical effects of travelling the high and winding road: oxygen and alcohol…and to clarify, the alcohol is to smell, not to drink; though I’m sure more than one pilgrim has been lead… despite repeated and retentive recitations of the Lord’s Prayer… into the latter temptation).

CATORCE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER (IN THE ANDES, ANYWAY)

I think it hit me at about fourteen thousand feet. We had started at a kind and cozy 411 foot elevation in Lima, and before we knew it, we were seeing signs in Spanish announcing elevation, counting the height in thousands: "Uno"("one"), came the first sign, but no sweat or sickness yet at 1000 feet; then around the curve, a "dos"("two") sign, a "tres" ("three")…and then it seemed, out of nowhere and out of sequence, to appear: a sign that with Latinamerican machismo and matter-of-factness, numbered the feet at "catorce" (fourteen!) thousand feet! Unless you count some "don’t want to go there" drug-induced trips, never had I been elevated so high so fast. What came over me was what the locals call "soroche", or sometimes with a well-meaning wink, "the gringo sickness." Being an involuntarily but now inveterately sick gringo myself, I called it lots of ungracious things as I was ungraced by it. The medical textbooks coin it "vertigo," a term that has suddenly lept out of dusty textbooks and invaded the living rooms of much of the world via a relentless and repentless IPOD commercial featuring an Irish-looking silhouette of the biggest rock star on the planet dancing himself dizzy while confessing with reckless and pulsating abandon that the place he’s at (and U2 are at) is so elevated and exhilirating; yet so damning and dizzying, that it just might be Vertigo on earth. Since this very commercial commercial has so sufficiently saturated society, my greatest fear is that citizens are so prematurely sick of the word and song "Vertigo" that another spin of the tune..or the prospect of my spin on it will ironically invoke fullblown vertigo itself…

So, let’s pause, take a break and breath (you’ll need it before rejoining the ride), and define our terms, just to be sure we are on the same page and planet here. A dictionary definition of "elevation" is so elementary as to not need spelling out; but just to be sure the significant spiritual application of this term is highlighted; let’s take our time to work out this definition with fear and trembling; for I maintain that "Vertigo" (and the CD it kickstarts) cannot be fully tasted without the backdrop of its next older brother. So we are about to spend some time in the elevator; stay with us. After we define "elevation" at some depth (pun intended); we’ll define "vertigo" until you’re dizzy enough to kneel.

SEX LEADS TO ELEVATION

All right, let’s get to the elevation of "Elevation, " because as you will recall, it’s the only path up to Vertigo (I promise we’ll get there!) . To my amazement and delight, I stumbled upon a stunningly insightful commentary on U2’s song (and therefore prayer about, and theology of) "Elevation." I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, as theological analysis of U2 is all over the world and web. (Even as scholarly papers at the business meetings of the "I guess they’re not so square and stodgy after all" Evangelical Theological Society…Baptist PhD’s contemplating the theological catalog of Bono!) . But this particular piece grasped and grappled so well with what U2 are (in Bono’s phrase) "on about" in "Elevation, " and in general, I cannot anymore hear or pray the song without this review at hand. It has rocked my world, theology and prayer life. I had always intuitively felt the song was about, indeed was, prayer. But to definitively second that motion it took these words, which should be read slowly, and with "Elevation" playing softly (!) in the background:

Prayer is not something (Bono) just recites...it is an
experience he enters into. There is no room for inhibition; singing and dancing
are essential means by which he expresses his emotional cleaving to God….but
such ardor/desire for God has to be so overwhelming that any extraneous thoughts
are excluded…If distractions are erotic in nature…and (Bono) faces up to the
predominance of the sexual urge at both conscious and subconscious levels, and
its capacity to intrude even during prayer...then he has learned to take
measures…by introducing the (ancient) doctrine of the "elevation of strange
thoughts." This is a Chasidic Jewish technique not of sublimation, but of
thought conversion, whereby the beauty or desirability of the woman is latched
upon and used not as a sexual but rather as a mental and spiritual stimulus. We
are taught to "elevate" these thoughts by substituting the beauty of God for the
physical beauty that is currently bewitching us. (Bono) has learned to
immediately contrast the pale reflection of beauty that humans are endowed with,
on the one hand, and the supreme Divine source of authentic and enduring beauty,
on the other…This is not sublimation; This is elevation.

Wow! Surely anyone who re-reads the lyrics to "Elevation," (or ventures and voyeurs a watching as Bono sings/prays/dances/incarnates it on concert DVD), will surely fall at the feet and conclusions of the reviewer, admitting that he astoundingly accurate. And I (seminary grad!) didn’t even know until I found this review that "elevation" was the official name for an ancient and established style and form of prayer. Surely this is exactly what Bono is fundamentally "on about" in this song; even in wider life and mission. Just for starters, lets interlace the lyrics to the song "Elevation" itself, and the review thereof:

Prayer is not something (Bono) just recites...it is an
experience he enters into. There is no room for inhibition; singing and dancing
are essential means by which he expresses his emotional cleaving to God….but
such ardor/desire for God has to be so overwhelming("You make me feel like I
could fly") that any extraneous thoughts are excluded…If distractions are erotic
in nature…and (Bono) faces up to the predominance of the sexual urge ("I’ve lost
all self-contol")at both conscious and subconscious("Digging up my soul/Going
down/Excavation") levels, and its capacity to intrude even during prayer( "Tell
me something true/I believe in You"")...then he has learned to take measures…by
introducing the ancient doctrine of the "elevation of strange thoughts." This is
a Chasidic Jewish technique not of sublimation, but of thought conversion,
whereby the beauty or desirability of the woman(the corner of your lips/the
orbit of your hips")is latched upon and used not as a sexual but rather as a
mental ("I need you to elevate my mind") and spiritual("you elevate my soul")
stimulus. We are taught to "elevate" these thoughts by substituting the beauty
of God for the physical beauty that is currently bewitching us. (Bono) has
learned to immediately contrast the pale reflection of beauty that humans are
endowed with, on the one hand, and the supreme Divine source of authentic and
enduring beauty, on the other. This is not sublimation, but
elevation.

Because it so convincing, I hope Bono read the review I quoted, and I’m guessing he may well have. Not because I found it in Rolling Stone, or another obvious publication that Mr. Vox has been known to frequent, but because it’s in a classic book called "Blessed are You: A Comprehensive Guide to Jewish Prayer," by Rabbi Jeffrey Cohen, copyright 1993. That’s right, a commentary on U2’s "Elevation" written long before the song. (And of course, "elevation" as the name of a prayer-vehicle has been around for centuries). No, I didn’t truly trick you; though I did keep that card up my sleeve (All I did to the text was insert Bono’s name where the author had "the praying person" and the like). But surely this passage is radically relevant review..uh, preview..of the record. As much as we can often find more God in the lyrics than Bono (or God) intended; this would be a case where, even if the song is about different things on different levels, it at heart revolves around this technique of prayer. It is too close a match that it’s precisely "the orbit of the hips" that catapult elevated (versus sublimated, in the rabbi’s terms; "excavated and going down" in Bono’s) prayer into action. Whether or not Bono has the "Blessed are You" book in the mad stack by his bedside or not; there can be no divorcing this song’s inspiration from its interpretation by the rabbis; or from...

TWO ROCKING BOBS, TWO JEWISH APOSTLES, AND THE ELEVATED "I AM"

Yet in the fluidity of interpretation we have necessarily granted Bono, there are other intriguing ancilliary (not alternative) reference points regarding the word/prayer/song/lifestyle "Elevation"; no divorcing "elevation" from the two Bobs who apart from his literal dad, Bob Hewson, are key among his spiritual fathers Bobs (Dylan and Marley); and two Jewish ( of course) theologians Martin Buber and (an even older and more well-known fellow) an apostle named Paul.

-Bob #1: Dylan, in a parallel to Bono’s "Turn each song into a prayer," has said, spiritually speaking, "The songs are my lexicon." Looking into that lexicon, we find that smack in the middle of his "Jewish era" he produced an entire song entitled "I and I," the very same; very obscure but decidedly Jewish in origin (sometimes adopted by Rastafarians; thus the Bob #2 connection) name for God that Bono chose to address God in the prayer "Elevation.".. Thus Bono might well be intentionally if implicitly importing some clues and context from the Dylan song, right? Sounds like it, Sherlock…especially as the Dylan piece is framed by a very common Bonological emphasis: the "femininity" of the Spirit/Shekinah; made most overt perhaps in a signature U2 piece "(She Moves In) Mysterious Ways," of which the accompanying in-concert dance is a prime example, even acted parable, of "the elevation of sexual thoughts," if ever there was one! Bono is seduced by, but pointedly and purposely refrains from touching, the female dancer; and ends most live versions with an incredibly ecstatic and elevated ejaculation of praise to "Jehovah" ( this divine name being a variant translation not only of "I and I," but of "Yahweh," another new U2 song! And we won’t even mention, "All Because of You....I AM" …Oops!) This is addictive, endless, but instructive, and I am convinced intentional by a certain sly lyricist who loves it "when God walks through the room when we’re making a record". By the way, more theologizing on Dylan’s "I and I" is found
here: http://www.radiohazak.com/Dyl-IandI.html

-Bob #2:Marley, and other Rastafarian types, have historically avoided , in conversation with humans and the divine, language like "you and me; " which they deem too distant to represent the interconnectedness of all persons (Of course a line from "Bomb" comes immediately to mind : "I am you, and you are mine. Love makes no sense of space. And time will disappear."); thus the phrase "I and I" for them refers ultimately to God, who is complete unity within Himself; but also to dialogue among "mere mortals." Or "mortals and the divine" (Steve Beard’s great phrase). And of course, "Elevation’ is about all these interwoven relationships, and hinges upon their unifying to empower true elevation.

-Jewish apostle #1:Buber’s seminal "I and Thou", makes the case that "I do not fully become who I am, until I interact with; even find myself in another." And certainly the definitive finding of self is clinched as we find ourselves and others in Another: God, Thou, "I and I" How could Bono not have Buber by the bedside stash when:
a)This finding of self in a Thou is the very essence and soulful "goal of elevation".
b).The quote "The greatest insights I have ever had into myself have been through other people…looking after people, you find yourself," is the very message of Buber’s book, but it is from Bono’s book (the book accompanying "Bomb")
And follow this trail of crumbs toward Buber’s table: First, you have Bono in "Love Comes Tumbling":
"Find yourself in someone else/Don’t find yourself in me." On to "Love Rescue Me" (note; penned and played with Dylan): "Many lost seek to find themselves in me." From "Always: "Don’t find yourself in someone else." Then on the new disc (well, almost…the song "Are You Gonna Wait Forever " song was cut, but adds the final crumbs): "I’m getting closer to what’s true/Gonna find myself in You"…..These trace a path actually to and through Buber’s door, directly to "Elevation"…(and eventually, by divine design or detour, to a very different and vertigoed place)

-Jewish apostle #2: Where are you right now? Would you believe that if are a Christ-follower, the apostle Paul would outrageously and correctly claim that you are not really here ("I’ve been accused of that!"); you are—in essence, in ultimate spiritual reality—right now, in the elevated language of Ephesians 2:6-- "seated with Christ in the heavenly realms." Whatever that means; and wherever that is, the fact that "heavenly realms" is sometimes translated "heavenlies", "heavenly places" or (watch this) "elevated places" should cue and clue us in to it being a "place" that Bono wants "lifted up" to. No wonder the Christ of this place "makes me feel like I can fly/so high."

Having a God’s eye perspective in life (Does this sound familiar? It’s exactly the quest captured by loaded lines like "When You look at the World" from the song of the same name from the previous, and again highly prequeuled link to the current, CD) would sure benefit us in daily life: we could navigate traffic jams by "looking down on them", since Jesus Himself is in the next chair, we can with no distance clearly hear Him "tell me something true", and we could expose see the orbit of hips for what it is and can be become; an invitation to intimacy with another. And Another. In the sky. But on this lowly earth; as it is in elevated heaven. In a hot quote to "Hot Press" a few years ago, Bono expressed it this way: "I love that bit in the Lord's Prayer about being on earth as it is in heaven. Now we could all do with a whole dose of that." No wonder Bono can’t help but work himself into a Chasidic frenzy at the end of this song in concert; he moves and morphs the phrase "elevation" into "jubilation." He dances uncontrollably. He’s high. He’s finally found more of what he’s been looking for; and he’s got a "whole dose of that."

AND AN OLD TELEVISION SHOW?

One cannot leave "elevation" without proposing one final, if minor, and maybe musical more than lyrical. Reference point. Asnyone who has done hoework on U2’;s early self-confessed early influences will stumble upon the "Marquee Moon" record by the band Television; which includes a title..you guessed it; "Elevation." And it may be that Tom Verlaine and boys are at least praying "in part" when they complain in word and song: "you give me no trouble and you give me no help...Elevation, don’t go to my head."
So if this is a God-reference at all, perhaps U2’s same-titled song is "stealing from the thieves..and got caught," or more likely "This is a song Television stole from the rabbis; we’re stealing it back’, and reversing the curse? See, as invigorating as being elevated it is, there is an intuitive knowing (or better a feeling, which is "stronger than a thought" in this realm) that the crash and burn is inevitable. And where you land is "everything you wish you didn’t know," but the only place to earn your stripes and right to kneel. I am getting ahead, but that’s because….

SPIRITUAL VERTIGO: JOIN THE CLUB

It’s not just a U2ism, but a multifaceted truism in all of life and faith: it’s a spiritual sequitur and sound syllogism; and maybe even my fundamental thesis about life, God, and all things spiritual and U2 (or at least this chapter). In more direct words: "When you’re elevated, vertigo happens!" Vertigo follows and flows out of elevation. The progression is as obvious and organic as one, two, three…uh., maybe the flow is not that obvious.

We have quite defined and refined a working definition of "Elevation"..or the state of "spiritual elevation." Define "Vertigo" then? You might have fun researching "Spiritual Vertigo," a song released in 2003. (hmmm, datecheck) by a group called "Sonus Umbra’ (meaning "dark area of a solar eclipse" ..hmm, follow "sun" and "eclipse" in U2’s lyrical toolbox) but I couldn’t help pointing you to the connection; though since I don’t know how far the rabbit hole goes, so I’ll just throw out the tip if you want to chase it down. Just one more example of the hundreds of quotes, sermons and references to "spiritual vertigo" that a quick and cursory "googling" will find for you; this from Craig Gauker’s review of the C.S. Lewis (a very key U2 influencer) "Till We Have Faces" novel:

The story is laced with that looming uncertainty which
haunts the deep parts of every descendant of Adam... the intuitive sense that
there is something wildly amiss, though strangely hidden in the very nature of
the many puzzles we encounter ... something which can only be brought to bear
upon our conscious minds through sacrificial leaps into the experience at hand.
If we are ever to have a hope of overcoming the infirmity of spiritual vertigo
we must search for the balance (or proper blending perhaps) of these colliding
worlds of thought and perception ... of myth and logically ordered analysis.

Isn’t that what the song, and the phenomenon of "spiritual vertigo" is all about? Well, let’s get back on the bus momentarily, and explore this some more…

Just in case your kids haven’t already driven you crazy and to the dictionary with the incessant and inevitable question of our times: "What the heck does ‘vertigo’ mean?," a question prompted by either the 348th viewing of the aforementioned commercial, or reading this far in my essay in which I have rudely refused to flat-out lay it out, here’s a telling and textbook entry for "vertigo":

"A condition in which one has the disorienting, decentered feeling of whirling, or having ones surroundings whirling around them, so the sufferer tends to lose ones balance and become dizzy and/or nauseous ; sometimes related to inner ear or vision problems, but often caused by looking down from an elevated place….or by extension, a confused, disoriented state of mind; mental, psychic or spiritual imbalance"

Whew! No wonder Hitchcock called one of his celluloid nightmares "Vertigo", and no surprise that Bono, who in his "stream-of-consciousness," "speaking in tongues and uncensored honesty" style (which at best yields brilliance…like one of his influencers, John Lennon, Bono may be inspired a cathartic Janovian approach to indiscriminately unearthing the inner stuff/s___/ straw of the soul., and at worst the run-on paragraphs and verbal diarrhea of some interviews and songs that may "run" on so long that they stand still; ) shares , without editing , prejuidice or "prettying-up", his dreams and nightmares with the world, would name a piece of his art (and soul) "Vertigo." A slow re-reading of the above definition will note that nearly every word is important. What more articulate a word-picture do we need for how many of us feel in these days of cultural, spiritual, and world shifting, transition. And many words tie threads to the song lyric: Connect dots for example, from the primacy of "feeling" to the dictionary definition, onto the primacy of feeling (over a cerebral thinking) in the lyric; not just in the negative "feeling" of the elevation-vertigo sickness, but the positive-side "a feeling’s so much stronger than a thought," "your head can’t rule your heart", "I can feel your love teaching me.." Certainly the "elevation" of feelings, passion and emotion has been the trigger for many debates within theological circles..from Augustine to Jonathan Edwards to the amazing pages 25-64 of Moltmann’s "The Trinity and the Kingdom," which I hope Bono has literally bought, as he has in large part already "bought" its creative theology, anyway. One can trace and lace these two theologians endlessly (Someone take up that torch and challenge, and write a doctoral thesis on these two men, since they are some of the most necessary and "real world" theologians out there).

On the state of "spiritual vertigo" that many people, religious institutions, and nations have been plummeted into, and forced to deal with, note that Bono is clear on this being inextricable from the vibe and feel of the song:

"

Fear, paranoia, these are the type of things we wanted
from 'Vertigo'. The album ends in quite an ecstatic place and, so we wanted to
start off with a little bit of electric shock treatment. It's a club maybe, and
you're supposed to be having the time of your life, but you want to kill
yourself (laughs)….it's a light little ditty. These are nervous times, they
really are, you turn on the news, you think 'Wow, who's next? My brother, my
sister, my uncle, my aunt …nervous times.' 'It's a dizzy feeling, vertigo, a
sort of sick feeling, when you get up to the top of something and there's only
one way to go - that's not a dictionary definition, that's mine. And in my head
I create a club, called Vertigo, with all these people in it, and the music is
just not the music you want to hear, the people are not the people you want to
be with. And then you just see somebody, she's got a cross round her neck, and
you kind of focus on it because you can't focus on anything else, and you find a
little, tiny, fragment of salvation there."

As many rabid fans (oxymoron?) of U2 have discovered, the club in Bono’s mind may well be one in "reality." There apparently was a seedy joint named "Vertigo" in Los Angeles which looked much like the Million Dollar Hotel that existed for awhile in both places (Bono’s roomy mind and L.A.), as well as in the "Million Dollar Hotel" movie Bono helped script. But perhaps even more in the front of his mind, and explaining the much-debated meaning of the Spanish lyrics: There is a place and club called Vertigo in Costa Rica, whose website reveals a mirror-ball of the style very familiar to 1990s-era U2, and suggests that this club majors in electronic dance music, and is exactly a place where that girl swinging and swaying Jesus and the boys who don’t dance so well might congregate.

"Hola!" I would manage, with an unspoken "are we there yet?" accent. My travelmates would return the smile and hola, but we all knew we were bracing ourselves as the inevitable curve and climb happened. As we graduated from the lowlands, and the bus climbed and catapulted, rocked and rolled, and as my prayers to the Almighty were soundtracked and saved by U2 (of course) on the headphones, I finally grasped the logic and reality of the flow from spiritual/cultural elevation to spiritual/cultural vertigo. I lost my innocence (and my aforemented lunch), but gained the insight and hindsight only grasped by the ruddy ride of experience: Elevation (literal or spiritual), though a good and God thing, would seem to seem to inevitably lead to (literal or spiritual) spiritual vertigo. The catch is, since there is no turning back to Lima; to lowland ("going down, excavation" ,) it’s a waste of time and prayer-breath to attempt to thwart vertigo and all that it entails. Might as well hang on and embrace the ride, vertigo and even the test of the temptation. "Temptation" is a key word in all of this, all of this…

THE LAST..MAYBE ONLY.. TEMPTATION

"All of this..all of this can be yours," as you likely already know, is a direct quote (OK without the stuttering) of the Tempter himself to Jesus in Matthew 4:9 and Luke 4:6 (Sorry, fans who claim one can read too much God and Scripture into U2, this time the reference is slam-dunk; .it’s no eisegesis, it’s all about Jesus and Satan in the desert (well, jungle in Bono’s version). And we are thus encouraged to do our Bible homework for context. The temptation that Satan offers with this very sentence (to succumb to satan-worship) is perhaps the mother and microcosm of all temptations; which is probably why St. Matthew places it last (to climax and encapsulate the other two temptations), and St. Bono singles it out, and (on some video versions) grows that menacing face and (on other) video versions) , a "slowed down" satanic voice as he sings it. This is MacPhisto, his 1990s devil figure; back in a guise more appropriate to the new millenium appreance, without horns and makeup. Bono has also over they years confessed to viewing the third temptation, "All of this can be yours..all these kingdoms..if you will worship me." As being the definitive demonic temptation (which is one reason the quote "Fear of the devil is devil worship," kept coming up in 1990s interviews when he was probed as to the McPhisto/devil costume and the "Mock the devil and he will flee from thee" motto that flashed onstage during "The Fly"); this is especially manifested by the frequent referrals in lyrics ("Always") and conversation to "putting you head over the parapet" ("parapet" sounding like a Bono-tongue, but actually an archaic King Jamesish word for "pinnacle of the temple." Mel Gibson, who starred in Bono’s "Million Dollar Hotel;" flick; remembers Bono being endlessly fascinated with the "pinnacle of the temple" temptation as a picture of the test and leap of faith. Check songs and scenes from the soundtrack, for more, like "Never Let Me Go"…

Now watch me throw another curve ball, which as a cursory internet search has not been yet publically thrown out there into the arena of U2 lyric discussion. There is an old story, I don’t know for sure if it’s an urban myth and "preachers license" story (translate: fabricated), but for our purposes, it may not matter, as it is so widely told that Bono could easily gotten wind of it. Especially if it happens in a French art museum, where many versions of the story place it…as he has within the last few years spent "hours of fun" in France; and has been so frequently inspired to lyricize based on the emotional impact of art museum pieces that we need only suggest these episodes run from (at least) "The Unforgettable Fire,"
an album named after an art display; to the newest Anton Corbjin display that bleeds over into the "Bomb" songs and mood by Bono’s own admission (Beth Maynard blogs well about the latter example here:
http://u2sermons.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_u2sermons_archive.html)

CHECKMATED BY MACPHISTO?

The story is told that in the painting "Checkmate," the MePhisto character (an alternate name for Satan that we have already eluded to Bono co-opting and tweaking the spelling a bit to MacPhisto) is gloating over his winning chessboard move over the only other character in the painting, Faust (Hello? Recognize that name from operas? The "Bomb" CD is a virtually a tribute to Bono’s dad, Bob Hewson, who is "the last of the oper stars," Bono sang on "Kite" on the "Elevation tour; and .the "reason why the opera is in me," his son sings in "Sometimes You Can’t Make it on Your Own"); which is also the name of the painter. The point of the piece is that sometimes man is checkmated by the devil. The legend accompanying the painting is that one day, a Russian chessmaster (in many versions, Gary Kasparov), noting the theme and the title, but having scrutinized the chessboard to the sudden realization that by the artist’s accident, the game does not have to end in obvious checkmate (He sees a possible move that Faust could take and win), yells out in the museum to the shock of the other observers: "It’s not true! It’s a lie! He’s not been checkmated!" Of course, this story "preaches," and has for hundreds of pastors over the years(one example: http://www.catonsvillepresb.org/sermons/20010114.html), that: Though it may look like the devil has won, Jesus (and the Christian) do indeed have the victory after all.

Nice story, you say? Good point, even if a bit cliché? But it is the same story and same point as the "Vertigo" song/sermon. Christ’s love is "teaching me to kneel" and defeat the satanic temptation to make "all of this" mine. So the joke is on the devil, God used the enemy’s plans and temptation to make me stronger, invoking God’s sovereignty, just like Jesus did in the wilderness "vertigo" temptation in the elevated place of the temple pinnacle. It was tough, taxing; swaying and dizzying; and I may have excaped by the skin of my teeth (or the crucifix around the neck), but I made it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ….that’s how the song and the Scripture and the story ends..The devil does not have us checkmated after all.

By now, all intelligent readers, the kind who dig for profound symbolism sometimes occurring in Bono’s more spontaneous/singing-in-tongues (the band calls it "Bongolese"), scat singing moments; those sections that don’t always make the lyric sheet and show up in concert in varying versions; will have already answered the question: "What moves this theory about a direct connection between the "Checkmate" painting and that deceptively simple IPOD-selling song? Note well, even the "official" CD lyrics, for once, quote Bono’s spontaneous scatting lyrics in the midsection of "Vertigo." And they agree with what he seems to be clearly (!) saying in live television versions so far: "CHECKMATED!" (usually followed by "Hours of fun!" and something else not as easily decoded. Some have heard, in alternate versions, "shots fired/shots fall or "gospel!" Interpretation of scat-tongues-art references, anybody?)

Oh, it shouldn’t go without saying that Bono, as an avid chess player, who surrendered dreams of being a professional chessmaster years ago, as those passions were channeled and steered towards… I should say elevated (But remember the Rabbi Cohen would warn that "elevation is not sublimation," so "chess" references are allowed to resurface)… into rock stardom and Kingdom-preaching. And in a very fun and perceptive article, Angella Pancella goes as far as to suggest that chess strategy is Bono’s overall life-strategy. "No really; that’s my theory," she winks. Pay this perceptive ‘hours of fun" article a visit here: http://www.atu2.com/news/article.src?ID=2603).

All this to say: It’s a spiritual sequitur, a logical syllogism for all of life: Elevation leads to vertigo. And as we flow with that process, we find that Christ, and those of us in Christ on this ride, win and checkmate life and Lucifer through hard-won kneeling persisteverance. It does flow. Yet it’s not a shoe-in that we "go with the flow" of all that the Bus Driver has been hired to rabbinically teach us through the crucible and crisis of vertigo, and thus come out stronger. Passing the twin tests of elevation and vertigo ; and the truth itself , is designed to set us free; but sometimes it is sovereignly destined to first make us miserable. Freedom, though free indeed, has a pricetag indeed. And on this particular temple-bus at the pinnacle of the elevated Andes , that freedom had a scent which, though in reality the aroma of heaven, had me begging for a barf-bag and a miracle drug. And a "fast car" off that mountain (Oops, yet another new U2 song relates here! More in chapter four)

VERTIGO HAPPENS! HALLELUJAH!

But when the reason is righteous, and the season is right, one should invite and even invoke vertigo! "If it be Thy will," of course, but more times than we have guessed or gambled, the will of God WILL will it.

I occasionally enjoy playing devil’s (uh, I should say "angel’s") advocate when I preach and teach. I often ask a group "shock-value" questions as a wake-up and shake-up call to the necessity and validity of the vertiginous (yes, it’s a word!) encounter; the test of temptation. In light of the fact that "sometimes we can’t make it on our own, " and need to go with Jesus to hear, and experience, a challenging and dizzying "Sermon Way Up the Mount," disciples need to remember to remember that in those disequilibrating times when elevation gives birth to vertigo, let the Spirit be midwife, and what will mercifully be born again and again in you is untold freedom and hilarious strengthening. Here, then is the first question I might cast out: "How many ever pray the Lord’s Prayer, including the line ‘Lead us not into temptation?’"
And since all answers are a nodding "yes and amen," the subsequent question has earned a hearing: "Would, or could, GOD ever lead anyone, then, into temptation?; especially since we have been taught by Jesus Himself to pray it would never happen?" Since most have detected that, by my mischevious inflection and sly smile the expected right answer is "Of course!," it’s an appropriate time to take holy advantage of the stunned to silence room and have them turn from their shock to either Matthew 4:1 or Luke 4:1. Either verse reads right on the lines that "God, the Holy Spirit" is without apology recognized; indicted as the Agent leading someone into a very real and literally demonic temptation. And just who that Someone is, is telling and is troublesome: "Then the Holy Spirit lead Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil." Granted, and important to highlight: God does not do the tempting; the tempter is clearly the devil, but in God’s stunning sovereignty, he has personally arranged the time and place of the temptation; He Himself has set the boundaries and parameters of the boxing ring; He himself is out in front ushering Jesus..and often us..right into a head-on . What in heaven’s name and hell’s court is verti-going on?

THE DEVIL IS GOD’S DEVIL

"The devil is God’s devil!," a much better theologian than me, but one also famous/infamous for "shock value sound bytes" quipped a few hundred years ago. By that biting byte, Martin Luther has not more than he could chew in hand..er, mouth. He meant simply that God is so supernaturally and sovereignly ‘in charge’ that he is even in charge of, Superintendent of; in fact he created, "Ol’ Scratch."..Satan himself. Which is why the Spirit can risk, allow, even set-up our wilderness temptations with Satan. He can trust, that like Jesus, who "at the end of this satanic temptation, came out of the wilderness stronger and more full of the power of the Spirit, and more prepared to minister than ever, " (Luke 4:13-14). We who follow in the footsteps of Christ, even and especially when they lead to the devil’s door and an "elevation plus" vertigo test, we pass the test! And the joke is on the dumb devil, Ol Scratch scratching his damned head as we..the eternally undamned and newly undammed…come out stronger in Spirit. And if Romans 8:28’s al- inclusive sweeping claim that "God works all things together for good for those who love God, and are the called according to his purpose" is taken at face and faith value, that "all things" includes "all" all things, including satanic temptation, and Satan himself. With that Romans verse in mind, a more modern theologian, one who is in league with Luther (and U2) in that she was also earthy in a heavenly way, one tested and tempted in the evil vileness and extreme vertigo of Ravenbsruck concentration camp, one Corrie Ten Boom, offered this prescription, "When the devil sticks his gun of accusation or condemnation in your face, just stuff Romans 8:28 in the barrel of that gun, and turn things around by stuffing it back in his face."

THE MOST SHOCKING SCRIPTURES IN THE BOOK

Let’s take the test. Only two possible answers for each question below: A)God or B)Devil. Choose only one each time. Sounds easy, so take the test, without looking up the accompanying Scriptures until you have turned in your exam. (Number two pencil only, please):

1.)Who sent an evil spirit to terrorize Saul? (1 Sam. 16:14; 18:10)
2.)Who sent a deceiving and lying spirit? (1 Kings 22:22)
3)Who authorizes satanic harassment of Job (Job 1:12)
4)Who can destroy both body and soul in hell? (Matthew 10:28)
5)Who sent a deceiving influence, so that wicked people are damned? (2 Thess. 2:11)

How did you do? Isn’t it obvious that the only correct answer to each of the above is..God!?
Huh? Is that the good news or the bad news, you ask? Whose side are you on, anyway? Cool down, mama! Now you can look up the Scriptures, and triple check that I am not just making this up, or nuts. I think the lesson, though so much more should be said to be sure our theology is biblical and balanced, is: God is so sovereign that he uses..and even though we are not as comfortable as these Scriptures sometimes are in saying so, He is some sense "sends"…. evil, and wrings good purposes out of them. He is not evil, nor the author of evil; and does not enjoy our suffering and evil; he does not want AIDS, cancer, rape, slavery, etc…...but the devil is God’s devil. God is either good and sovereign or not. These Scriptures, stretching and shocking as they are, actually steer us towards his radical "in charge-ness," He is ridiculously sovereign. The devil is active, but he is on a leash…a long one, granted..but God’s grabbing the other end.
OK, four more questions. Ready? Of course not! Same two possible answers, God or the devil, for these below:

1)Who sees to it that a sinner is saved? (1 Cor. 5:5)
2)Who is the god of this world? (2 Cor 4:4)
3)Who helps keep Paul humble? (2 Cor, 12:7)
4)Who teaches Paul not to blaspheme? (1 Tim 1:20)

All done? You got an "A" of course, if every answer above is, as verified by the verses, .the devil! Don’t get me wrong, the devil ain’t good, but he works for God at the end of the day. Church folks don’t get this. Bono gets it. As much as he hates, and campaigns against the devil’s evil (and he and we should) …God uses evil. He wins. Satan is trumped and checkmated in the End. This is the full-orbed gospel, an the message of Elevated Vertigo.
Yes, these are the other shocking questions I love to ask at church gatherings. Did they work?

HOLY LINGERING OR LUNCH WITH THE DEVIL: THE WISDOM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE

"This generation will be remembered for three things: the Internet, the war on terror, and how we let an entire continent go up in flames while we stood around with watering cans. Or not," Bono preached to evangelical congregations on his Africa awareness tour, hoping for crumbs from our generous spread and table. "Let me share with you a conviction," he often challenged a hushed church, " God is on his knees to the church on this one. God Almighty is on his knees to us, begging us to turn around the super tanker of indifference on the subject of AIDS."

He is right. Even though we can lean back on the lavish and wild sovereignty of God to work good out of evil, nowhere does that justify us doing nothing so that evil (temporarily) prevails because we know that it will (at the End) be vanquished. And there is enough evil and suffering in the world..and in us; we don’t need to ask for any additional of either, even if we know they force us to grow. Yet, when it is a God-thing, and a "Holy Spirit set-up," there is wealth and wisdom in a holy lingering and loitering at "a place called Vertigo," again, as/ if/when God leads. This is not a passive indifference, this is an active trust that when we are forced, by God and/or circumstances, we can fall to our knees (of course, a wise theologian/activist is quick to add there is a time where God calls us to "please, please, get up off your knees" and butts, and battle evil) in know Who is in charge.. But these activist times to be an enemy of evil in practical ways, is not what I mean by lingering in Vertigo. Even though the unease and suffering we submit to, and absorb there, might feel the same brand as the evil we are to fight, it is not. Another caution: the lingerer in a personal vertigo season of testing, must be prayed up in Vertigo , or s/he will be preyed on. A "just passing through" temporary resident of Vertigo Heights must be intrinsically and insistently motivated in that lingering by a Holy Spirit-inspired calling and quest to plunder and sqeeze and seize life-lessons about oneself that can be learned at no other locale. The joke is on the devil. His bomb is defused and dismantled. It is of course easy to cross the line, and stay too long, as St. Bono has often admitted; either because it feels like God is still wanting you there; or just because "swaying to the music" is fun. "I might sit down with the devil, but I’m not going to have coffee with him". More recently quoted in context of raising AIDS awareness and taking teasings and flack from mates for courting of politicians, popes and presidents , "I’d have lunch with the devil, if it meant money for Africa." Bono is characteristically first to admit "I’m not the best commercial for Christianity", and readily owns up to the truth that his discernment radar has not aways tracked, especially in the disorientation and dizziness of fame and spotlight. Fame might be a gift from God that the devil is quick to distort (remember Mirrorball Man…or MacPhisto to the fans: "You’ve made me very famous, and I thank you"); but "celebrity is (also) currency," Bono tells Oprah, the church, and anyone who listens. The devil’s jokes always backfire, Corrie. Every good gift comes from God. Including one of the often dissed and dismissed gifts of grace: Vertigo.

DUELING DEMONIC DUALISM

C. S. Lewis, as previously mentioned, is such a lamppost for Bono (What other theologian is referenced in an animated music video for a "Batman" movie song…only U2 could be behind that! ) that we probably don’t need to link you to any more examples, except to say if you don’t know the story about the "dancing Squeaky" and how a common love for Lewis saved the dance and day for her, and her dancing partner, a Mr. Paul Hewson with horns, here’s the scoop: http://www.atu2.com/news/article.src?ID=2015&Key=Christian&Year=&Cat.

Lewis was at his best at reminding us of eveything we should’ve known: there are not two gods, God and the devil, who have always existed and are opposites in the all-American "good guy, bad guy" scenario. This ridiculous theology, though, is often our default, unconscious understanding. Many evangelicals will actually suggest that the devil has always existed, and always been bad; forgetting that "Evil is only fallen good," and God made Lucifer; made him good; he simply chose to fall and attempt to claim God’s throne.

That is Christianity; the "good and bad eternal opposite" jive is dualism, related to the hell of extreme Hellenism. But the radical monotheism of Christianity, in which we and three forth of U2 live, move and have their being there is by definition , and design a one-God deal; and He so big that the buck stops with Him, meaning laments like "Jesus.. I know You’re looking out for us..but "sometimes Your hands aren’t free?" are doubts cased in honest faith, which can stand up in Gethsemane, Vertigo or hell-on-earth.

It is no coincidence that both signature songs we have been feasting on here, "Elevation" and "Vertigo" have been accused of being throwaways, musically and lyrically. The deceptively simple rockroots music and fun melodies/riffs, and our inherent Western lens of dualism, may cause some to altogether miss the glorious depths of the lyrics of each, and the holy linking of the two: Elevation leads to vertigo. I hope it doesn’t take the bus ride from hell..I mean Lima to Huancayo…for many to make the link and leap.

INTRO TO THE OPTIONAL CHORAL SECTION: EVEN DAVID LETTERMAN SINGS

Of course, interpreting these two songs as "very Christian", and debating demonic dualism, both open up wider issues of worldview, church and culture. Some religious folk, I am sure, do not appreciate the beauty of U2 being (in Leonard Sweet’s wonderful triad: "in the world, but not of it, yet no out of it yet either." And some may doubt their faith solely because they choose the world as their arena; and not the evangelical circuit. And, is spite of all we have just said in a fairly exhaustive theological survey of just two songs from a large U2 canon and cannon; some will still complain "I don’t think they are Christian, " or "They are just not Christian enough." I want to address that question by ignoring it; or resteering it to:
"Is there such a thing as Christian music?, a question that begs to be wrestled with:

"Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands" Is that Christian? Whatever it is, it’s I Samuel 18:6-7, it was even put to music as a "joyful song".

Book of Ruth? Is that "Christian"? Doesn’t mention God!

And besides, this discussion will naturally lead to a bit of challenge to the church to at least consider, and refuse to prematurely dismantle, another on-target Leonard Sweet bomb: "It may be that for the first time in history, God is more active in the world than the church." If you love and amen that quote, and are already exorcised of every evangelical legalism, you may legally skip the entire last section ( Skip the next eighteen or so worthy paragraphs, "pass go," and pick up at chapter, and truism two. But if you just feel like releasing a few more amens out of your soul, or are seduced by the equally provocative heading below, read on. We bring out the big demon-bashers and dualism-dashers: Johnny Cash, T-Bone Burnett, Peter Gabriel Steve Taylor, Father/chef Robert Capon, Radiohead, E. Stanley Jones …and Evangelist (!!) David Letterman. It all end with a singing rock as proof of quantum physics and the existence of God! I wouldn’t miss it!

IS THERE CHRISTIAN MUSIC?: FLOTSAM, BATHWATER , HOLY KISSES, AND CUT-RATE CLAYTON CIGARETTES

Sweet’s sweetly provocative quote above explains, in part, why one of the most powerful, biblical and Christian prayers ever prayed was prayed over the world’s airwaves, and not the church’s. Without being overly dogmatic, or framejacking its context, I must maintain that "Elevation".. IS first and foremost about prayer; no, IS first and foremost prayer. I think I have stated a convincing case for such a sweeping claim, we must agree that in all things art and U2, there is an necessary freedom and fluidity in lyric interpretation. Always. We must honor and unleash that, wherever it takes us. But even though many interpreters will shut me down, I say "Elevation" has to be, at heart, heartfelt and honest (which is why it may not fly in many churches!) prayer. I do allow all kind of breathing room for other and complementary interpretations, other steams of meaning that are vital and valid. And this is an excellent time to insert a wake up and shake up call: some songs are "Christian" if not even "about God" at all; or even if (God forbid!) not written by a "Christian" at all. Last time I checked, all truth is God’s truth.. T-Bone Burnett, one of the band’s spiritual and musical "pastors," was once thanked in U2 liner notes for "the truth in the dark." Which is exactly where Truth often hides and is brightest…but we miss its brilliance and blessing because we are afraid to "go there." And God has been desperately trying to get us to stand under the light and blessing of His "light bulb hanging over my bed." (That last quote, of course is from Bono’s, in the same song/prayer["Ultraviolet/Light My Way"] where the Lord faces the accusation ..some say from Satan…that "You bury Your treasure where it can’t be found"..accurate, unless we are bold and believing enough to "go there", that is.)

"You can write two types of songs as a believer," Burnett says. " You can write about the Light, or about what you see by the Light." His point is that since he tends to circulate more naturally in the latter type, some have pre-judged him as not even being ‘lit" (That means he flunked the church’s "lit"mus test, huh?) The church, of all people, has not easily blessed and baptized the truth of that classic quote. Just as some Christian radio stations appear to actually have a minimum "J-word" count to let a given song in the door, and on the airwaves, we evangelical types have been trained to fine-tooth (the church has a "mouth fool of teeth" with which we "eat all our friends," a certain St. Paul… uh, St. Paul Hewson, once said) everything; ditching Baby with bathwater. We need to be retooled and retrained to enter into the subtle layers and levels of lyrics we feel "may not be Christian" just because they lack enough "J-word" namedroppings (or drop the unpardonable and atomic "F" bomb.!) . I have a yearning to to free Christians , not to violate their own conscience, but to trust it to lifeguard them even out in the "deep (read "forbidden" ) waters, where the swimming and drinking of this deep Kingdom water is exhiliratingly edifying and splashworthy. If you’ve never ventured far enough offshore to swim with the likes of Chagall Guevara, Bruce Cockburn, and of course Burnett: come on in, the water’s fine!"). In the words of one frustrated blogger, "Sometime the best Christian music can’t be bought at Christian stores.")

Perhaps it’s only "attempting to justify ourselves" and our "under the radar" listening to, and loving, a "secular" band for Christ’s sake; and for art’s sake, that we feel religious relief to hear that a certain song "really is about Jesus after all." Yet is it comforting, or afflicting, to hear Bono admit that "Our songs are either about God or women, and sometimes we confuse the two."? This rugged and ruddy honesty about confusing the two…because it labels what all of us experience but are afraid to admit...in "church," anyway… is precisely why "Elevation" as a prayer tool is such vital component of our tool belt. It would be a gnostic betrayal of Jesus, and St. Bono’s own "hermeneutical key" to NOT "turn each song into a prayer." "Each" is a wonderfully all-encompassing, and dangerously all-inclusive word…shamelessly sweeping in songs about..well, "sex and love and faith and fear" (not to mention "sex n drugs n rockandroll"); much in line with the reckless Matthew 13 fishnet of Jesus that chef-pastor Robert Farrar Capon recklessly and delightfully describes thus:

The word used here is used only once in the New
Testament..it is a particular kind of net, namely, one that is dragged through
the water, indiscriminately taking in everything in its path. Accordingly, the
Kingdom (and by extension, the church as the sacrament of the Kingdom) manifests
the same indiscriminateness)..As the net gathers up everything in its path—not
only fish but seawaeed, flotsam, jetsam and general marine debris—so too the
Kingdom..So the church as fisherman should not get in the habit of rejecting as
junk the flotsam and jetsam of the world—the human counterparts of the old
boots, bottles and beer cans that a truly catholic dragnet will inevitably
dredge up. (Parables of the Kingdom)

Not to "trash" Bono’s..or any deep-water believer’s… sometimes "secular" ("fishy") lyrics, just the holy and wholly opposite: it’s all about being brave, brazen and Christlike enough to inkingdom, bless and baptize all of them, and let the King to sort them out, but not us, and not now: not until "the very end of the age" "(Matthew 13:39). Because in this age, the church and its net needs to be stretched enough to hear prophetic and pointed words from real-world "dredges"; saints and sinners (from Radiohead to REM to Over the Rhine and beyond) that the church would rather not let into the net, even if they are only visiting.
Interestingly, Bono comments on what killed Elvis, and it relates:

I

I really think he was trying mostly to escape the pain
of the guilt, thepain of believing that he was tapping into voodoo and the
spirit of the devil.All of that must have affected him because of his
Pentecostal upbringing. And hemust've known, instinctively, that when he sang he
was touched by the spirit ofGod. And he apparently did read countless books
trying to figure out suchquestions., but I don't think he ever got a
satisfactory answer. It's the thingthat Bob Marley lived, and not just in terms
of the sex and the spirit but interms of the politics. He had that three-chorded
strand. That's the wholeness I'mlooking for. It says in the Bible "the
three-chord strand cannot be broken."That's a reference to the Trinity,
obviously, and the Trinity is God the Father,God the Son -- which is the flesh,
Jesus wanting to understand what it's like tohave a body -- and the Holy Spirit.
That's what we must aspire towards. But Elvisdidn't reach that state of being,
he was crushed under the weight of not figuringout how to draw together those
three strands. And crushed under not being able toaccept that God loves him,
loves his creations as they are, and where they are.That's the tragedy. Though
the problem also is learning how to live with the tensions between those forces
and the thought that you may never pull themtogether. Maybe even feeding off
that, which I think is what I do in terms of allthe music I create, and my life.
Elvis was left with those two great energies,sexual and spiritual, and even
though he never resolved how to draw themtogether, with the the third strand,
his music did help so many of us to pulltogether at least two of those strands.
That was his greatest contribution torock 'n' roll and to our cultural life in
general. That's his greatest legacy.
http://www.u2station.com/documents/variousarticles/irishtimes_article.txt

The question "What makes music (or lyrics) Christian" needs to be pursued, wrestled with prayerfully and carefully and maybe even eventually (only post-wrestling)..left abandoned and unanswered, or at least left uncomfortably open. On the other (third!) hand, maybe it can be…after the hard theological work and crucible, be dogmatically closed. Whatever the ultimate answer, and meaning of , "case dogmatically closed", it cannot .include either sibling of the following twin and tempting heresies: 1. "As long as it's not_____(fill in supposedly "satanic" genre: rock, rap, Gaithers, Elvis, opera, U2, whatever) , or 2. "As long as it satisfies the minimum count/quota of the 'J-word'. And just maybe Jon Foreman of the band Switchfoot, (whom I recently saw at the local fair ; they book fairs and arenas more often than Christian festivals) settled it once for all, if only our ears would hear: "I am Christian by faith, not by genre." At any rate, a quick and cursory "goggle" for this exactly phrased question {'What makes music Christian?'} yielded no less than 92 links, representing nearly as many articles and essays asking and probing the depths and rabbit-trails of this at first all-too-obvious "answer in the question" question.

Often the very asking of this focused, perhaps ridiculously rhetorical, question grows out of the evangelical disequilibrium we are reeled into upon hearing passionate and bold Christian musicians..from Foreman to P.O.D. to Jars of Clay... say things like "We are not a Christian band. We are a band of Christians." Or "our love songs are just as Christian as our worship songs...because all of life is sacred and Christian". Take the following defining example as a microcosmic window into this forced sacred/secular dichotomy...and be prepared then to unashamedly but gently throw a brick through that dichotomy and window...in Jesus’ name of course:

The Christian in-house debate over ( and at times near ex-communication of ) " Sixpence None The Richer" and their Steve Taylor-produced (pastored?) breakthrough single on the "secular" charts, "Kiss Me," was both humongous and hilarious; both necessary and fruitful on one level, and ridiculously unneeded on another; both intrinsically-motivated in some, and extrinsically and Pharisaically-so in others; both appropriately Christian at points and sub-Christian and unadulterated Gnostic at others ("all matter is inherently evil", "clear distinction between secular and sacred", etc).. at others. Said song may have not mentioned the " J" word . or even a generic "G" word (maybe that can be snuck and danced round by substituting "Yahweh," or maybe, "I AM", ..someone oughta try that!), but who is to say whether it is ultimately..or simultaneously..about a human romantic kiss , and/or a kiss between our Divine Lover and us…and as you know by now, Bono has recently invoked a Song-of-Solomonic kiss on his Guiness-tainted mouth by none other than Yahweh! ), but it sovereignly led (in a way a "straight-up" worship song couldn't have) to an amazingly Spirit set-up moment between Sixpence singer Leigh Nash and David Letterman on Letterman's show, where God convicted Letterman, and not only literally turned him red in from of millions of viewers, but momentarily turned him into an articulate evangelist, who theologized aloud about God and salvation through the lens of C.S. Lewis before his studio and worldwide "congregation". Is that "Christian"? (Rejoice and read more of "the rest of that story" and a proposed answer by clicking: http://www.fischtank.com/ccmarticlesdetail.cfm?ccmarticleid=46).

One should also celebrate the good company of the very same Steve Taylor (Sixpence producer and frontman of the most missed band around that almost opened for U2: Chagall Guevara), whose credentials speak for themselves when they include being kicked out of the Christians stores and club for (all but literally) putting on MacPhisto-like horns and driving an "ice cream truck" loaded with bombs with intent to "blow up the clinic real good". Accused of advocating the bombing of abortion clinics by playing a character who advocated it, even though the tongue in Taylor’s cheek was as ridiculously oversized and obvious as the horns on Bono’s head, he was dutifully bounced out, by the left foot of fellowship, of the very club he was trying to speak to. Of course, this resume resembles that of another band. Anyone hear of certain well-meaning fellowship in Ireland that very early on questioned that their most famous members (3 of U2) could actually be a Christian band, or a (worse!) a band of Christians...

To coin oneself a " Christian" band may sound like a good and God-honoring thing to do (and it may well be), but nowadays can get one relegated/ banished/ shelved (literally) in only "Christian" stores (where few pre-Christians haunt) or the "religious" sections (ghettos) of secular stores, which "forgets to remember" that the point of Christianity is to give it away. The last time I remember seeing a U2 record in a Christian store was so long ago that it WAS literally a record (the "Wide in America" EP), and the price tag was strategically placed over the cigarette hanging out of Adam’s mouth! What a picture of the church’s sincere but sincerely wrong strategy. And of course, you may have guessed by now that the record was buried...in the cut-out rack..the comparable "ghetto" of the Christian stores! About the same time era, I remember having to bribe a Christian store employee (thankfully, it was my wife!) ..to sneak me a contraband copy of a 77s record that was conveniently stocked for all customers to see (not!)…in the storage room!! And the church is not yet over that disease, I see, having noted recently at that same store... under "L" section, Lifehouse was indeed available…behind the counter!….I assume alongside the cigarettes and condoms.

Bono, in his liner notes to Johnny Cash's glorious "God" CD (which, despite its title, is presumably sold only in stores that DO also sell cigarettes and condoms) , admitted he always felt like Johnny, though saved, was "not only singing TO the damned, he was singing WITH the damned...and sometimes he preferred their company." The fact that Cash's "God" record was one of a trilogy/trinity of discs named "God", "Love" and "Murder", revelates that the late Cash was right on time and in unfortunate touch with the pseudo-reality of much "Christian" music. Maybe the following lyric was included and spotlighted just to tweak the Pharisees: "I shot a man...just to watch him die." Cash belts out this line on the "Murder" (of course!) disc, not because he ever did such a thing or sanctions it, but because he was honest enough...meaning Christian enough, E. Stanley Jones would add....to say (and thus pray) publicly that he had flirted with such a thing in his heart. So it is confession…but the confessional is in the marketplace, not the meeting place. U2 of course picked up a play from this book in the 90s with their shortlved but longsighted "video confessional," in which audience members waiting in line were invited to film their confessions, which would be presented onscreen during the concert for the whole congregation..uh, crowd..to see and forgive (Something about the priesthood of all believers?). And how about Jimmy Carter’s infamous confessing to committing adultery in his heart, in a Playboy magazine interview presented between pages designed exclusively for men to commit adultery in their heart? God bless Rosalynn Carter and June Carter (no relation but except through the Christ-tribe and a common Kingdom honesty) Cash for letting their husbands bleed honesty in the marketplace..the world is waiting to see such fearless honesty. And of course Mrs. Bono likely smiled and smirked knowingly, when her husband responded to an interviewer’s question as to why they announced their "Pop" tour at a Manhattan K-Mart, and why on Ash Wednesday, with "Ash Wednesday and K Mart..that about sums us up!" As does Romans 7, which paints a perfectly imperfect view of (even the redeemed) human heart. But we prefer, for whatever reason (maybe we sickly prefer to "kill our inspiration and sing about the grief") , to jump to Romans 8 and prematurely find what we’re looking for: victory. .But this is nor right; not realistic nor real; it is rape..it is Easter shorn of Good Friday. Where’s the glory in that? In fact it is denying that some Sundays are bloody Sundays indeed. Wouldn’t we rather honor God and reality with gut-level, gut-wrenching, resplendent, refreshing, rare Kingdom honesty?

Another honest theologian (may the tribe increase), E. Stanley Jones, has often keynoted the theme that reality itself is Christian. The Kingdom of God is ultimate reality; wherever the Kingdom is, there is reality; therefore..hold your breath and your heresy gun...wherever reality is, there is the Kingdom (in however a veiled, pre-Christian singer or player; or no matter even how flotsamic or demonic the wrapping or wineskin.) "The people of the Kingdom have the whole universe backing them up," he would say. So, anything that is in essence real; honest, is by definition or by default Christian/Kingdom, at least in its purest genesis. "Evil is only," Lewis suggests "fallen good." Music, no matter how twisted, tampered with or tweaked: , no matter how later demonized by anti-Christ lyrics, is, at heart, at first, and at nutshell, a gift of God.

Bono: "Songs are the language of the Spirit...the melodies are how you sing to God. It's a deep language. But they can't explain everything, because really great songs touch places that you can't explain." In another interview, he tips his hand:. "All our songs are about God or women..and sometimes we confuse the two," he confesses with a casual, almost "throwaway" honesty which shocks, but which would benefit, traditional Christians. Part of the honesty of his confession stems from his fear of fans idolizing him, not just as a rock star, but as a professing Christian (or "Christian singer"..if there is such a thing): "I am a believer and I have faith in Christ," he is quick to put on record. "But I am not a very good advertisement for God." The band in fact, "went into the baptismal waters..and almost drowned" when, against their church's advice, they felt called to stay in the "secular" music industry and detour and Dovetail around the ghetto of "Christian music" .

"I'm just drawing my fish in the sand", Bono offers. And "every great song", he reflects, in perhaps an ultimately even more accurate quote than his God/woman confession, "is either about running to God, or from God". I ask: Is a song about "running from God" Christian? I dunno, but try some of the Psalms on for size. The shoes may fit. How about songs honest and real enough to be "agnostic prayers"?. Psalms again.
Such anthems cannot be anathema. . Aa heartfelt, heartbroken Bono lyric, responding in part to the death of his mother:" Jesus! Jesus, help me, I'm alone in this world, and a f____up world it is, too." Blasphemy or Christian? You decide, but to hear Bono pray/ sing it, one does not walk away saying "Bono swore," but "Bono just articulated, -psalmlike, something I had felt..and may never feel comfortable saying aloud..but in an odd way..maybe a God way..I find myself healed and worshipping afresh as I listen."
(For follow-up, you will be stretched by the column that the editor of Worship Leader magazine wrote, carefully entitled "Why I Would Follow Bono into Hell", kept here: http://www.3dff.com/discus/messages/49/215.html?1070127997 ).

Very often a song by a person who is likely not a Christian by our (or their own) definition (Peter Gabriel, for example; a friend of U2), may animate and articulate (untainted by Christianese) a heretofore-latent worship emotion or expression. Thus: "This old familiar craving/ Don't know who the hell I'm saving anymore/ Let it go, let it pass, let it leave/ from the deepest place I grieve/ This time I believe..And I let go.." is a song (Gabriel's "Love to be Loved") with more passion and raw honesty than many an official or self-proclaimed "Christian" song or church "prayer"...yes, despite, maybe even PRECISELY BECAUSE OF the unedited "h" word...even at the expense of not naming the "J" word, which one might make the case is in between every line. And how about his belting out for life and death, in the song "Supper's Ready" (named after the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation! ): "There's an angel standing in the sun/Crying with a loud voice?/ This is the supper of the Mighty One...The Lord of Lord , King of Kings.. returns to take His children home/To take them to the New Jerusalem!" There is something in Gabriel that believes this with all his heart and more. Is he Christian? I do not think he would claim it. However, his lyric and voice do! Are his music and lyric "Christian?" Take a listen. No wonder his songs (like "In Your Eyes": "In Your eyes, the light, the heat/ I am complete in Your eyes/ I see the doorway of a thousand churches, the resolution of a thousand fruitless searches" ) have been recorded by "Christian artists" without a need to baptize the lyrics. Is "In Your Eyes" "Christian", even if Gabriel sometimes wonders if the words are written to God or a woman? Here I can only speak for myself: I fall on my face and worship Jesus to these lyrics. Do they come from a flawed even non-Christian messenger? Of course. But the music and lyric is Christian to the core and reached and teaches the core of my soul And as a result, God’s "love is teaching me to kneel" to a degree I wouldn’t have gotten to without a "secular saint" being a doorkeeper into the House of God.

Is there such thing as "Christian music"? I dare to believe the answer may well be yes, but not in the way the typical evangelical might frame question, or mean the answer. I don't believe I am "frame-jacking" to believe there is Christian music everywhere...even from the mouths of babes, the mouths of backsliders, and more often than we have admitted, the mouths of pagans. Leonard Sweet again,( this time from p 163ff of "Eleven Genetic Gateways to Spiritual Awakening") makes the case that life is "at its very base" music: "Scientists are finding that they are no different than theologians...They are finding that...Music does more than help us experience God as spirit as we experience life as spirit . Music is more accurately the essence of who we are created in the image of God. If the most elemental and elementary aspect of life is "energy that vibrates" (as scientists say they have discovered in quantum "string theory"), then life is at base music...For anything that vibrates gives off sound…so...you and I… are at base a song.. There is no one who isn't musical….My personal definition of Jesus is 'God's perfect Pitch.’ It is in our genes to see (God's Words) as musical notes....As Pythagoras said, ' A stone is frozen music.'" Rocks cry out?
Whew! Maybe the starting point is now not "Is there Christian music?", but "Isn’t music Christian? Alternatively "Is life Christian?"

Besides, a wise non-Christian(?), Adam Clayton, outted and uttered this astounding observation about "With or Without You: "You don’t expect to hear that song on the radio. Maybe in a church." " Maybe marriage of radio and church, if done well (as Larry Mullen has said, "not at an angle"), could and should work. If it is moving in the right direction, and is not a hijacking. As Bono once told me (OK, me along with the other 30, 000 fans in attendance at an "Elevation" tour concert), "I’m going to take you to church!" He took us; no hijacking; it was holy. So about this marriage: What God has joined together; let no reviewer; no radio; no church, set asunder.

END OF CHAPTER ONE…See you in chapter two (of an eventual four !) where we discuss a pair of paradoxes orbiting around birth and death, making me thrilled that the Atomic Bomb (the disc, I mean) was mantled in the first place; and I come close to calling it U2’s fourth masterpiece.