ADOPTED IN LOVE

Sisters and brothers, children of God, gathered in the Spirit ...
where do we find our kinship? How do we name ourselves in the world? Do we have a choice? Am I forever bound by nature, or completely free in nurture? The answer is ... yes.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul teaches about the inheritance of Abraham, found in the Jewish Scriptures: the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith… it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us…)
So Paul makes the argument that God’s promise is not merely for the genetic descendants of Abraham … but for the spiritual descendants.
Paul actually uses the word “adopted” in several places, to describe what happens for someone who responds to God’s invitation, someone who turns their heart and their life over to God. In Romans 8, Paul says,
For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as offspring by which we cry out, " Abba! Father!" … this is what makes us new, isn’t it? No longer mine, but thine, Lord. And we are made new, every day, every moment, by this grace of God. Not only our hearts but our very flesh we turn over to God, to be used. We are the same as we always were, but we are also transformed.

As a Christian, I particularly like this word, “adopted.” It isn’t a word we use much in the church, or in prayer. We say we are “children of God,” most often in the recognition of a birthright, or in the cosmic sense of our origins. Normally, when the word “adopted” comes up in daily life, it means something different, something very specific in our society. But that more ordinary meaning should cast some light on our relationship with God.

When we are born – again – in the Spirit, we are, as Paul says, adopted in love. I’m not going to talk about the legal process of adoption, since that’s only a small part of what adoption really is. And I’m not using it as a mere metaphor: it’s a real experience. We have it on a human scale, and therefore it may help us grasp the scope of God’s givingness, and the truth of our birthright.
I’ve done some work over the years with adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents, and it speaks to me of the kind of love that Jesus is trying to teach us. The adoption triangle, as it is called, is also a great illustration for everyone, of the depths – and the limits – of heredity. And also a great illustration of the possibilities of transformation, in love.
An adoption experience is more common than you think. Mention an adoption, or a birth family reunion, and people will pop out of the woodwork with their own adoption stories. I’ve seen it plenty of times. A couple of years ago, I was sent on a business trip with 4 colleagues I’d never met before. … and two of them were, like me, adoptees, and a third was married to one.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the adoptive experience is invisible, and all around us, but we rarely talk about it, and what it means for those who grew up with their genetic kin.

I’ll be the first to admit, that the old ways of considering adoption weren’t always very helpful. The authorities used to try and pretend that an adopted baby ceased to have any connection to the birth family, and instead replaced their own genetic information with that of the adopting family. Well, that’s just denial, right? We know better now: we try to connect adoptees with the genetic promptings within them, and incorporate that truth into the truth of family life at home. Because both are real, both are formative, both are expressions of God’s creativity in our lives.
When Jesus distinguishes between being born of the flesh, and being born of the spirit, he isn’t saying that one is true and one is false. Neither is he saying that the flesh and the spirit must by definition do battle. He is saying, however, that being born of the flesh is not enough to enter the kingdom of God. You must be born again …after being born into the flesh, we may then also come to God by being re-born in God.
We are asked to make a choice, to which will we claim belonging? Merely to the flesh? Or will we belong to something bigger than that, something transcendent and holy, the Holy Spirit? Shall we define ourselves by the limits of our genes, or our emotions? Or is our true self to be found in Spirit, in the constant refreshment of God?

Here I have to mention The Da Vinci Code. It’s worth bringing it up for a minute, because everything that was supposedly scandalous about that book (which I liked very much) has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian life.
BULLETIN: Christians don’t care about the bloodline of Jesus! … Next time the book or movie comes up in conversation, feel free to tell your friends about the bad theology in it. Feel free to tell them that the bloodline of Jesus is utterly irrelevant to any who practice what Jesus preached. Or Amos, or Isaiah, or Paul.

The question about bloodlines, and about belonging to God, is very close to my own heart. I was adopted… by a very Christian family – conservative, working-class evangelicals from the Prairies who made their home in Vancouver. My birth family, I’ve since learned, is more bookish, college types who write and teach – and scarcely religious at all. Anyway, growing up, my spiritual life was very active, grounded in the church, but restless … I was no evangelist, and I’m certainly not conservative. Early on I rejected the evangelical church and wandered off into New Age wisdom and Buddhism and a bit of Gnosticism, anything but the mainline churches, right? But remained in my heart a Christian… even though I seldom used the term out loud.
Well, life happens, doesn’t it? Approaching my 40s, I came to a turning point and found myself called to ministry, and – here I am.
I call that kind of grace, amazing.

I met my birth family 10 years ago. I’ve learned so much about “nature” and “nurture”. Learned so much about the many forces of love. It was obvious right away, I inherited my love of words through my biological family. But it’s also clear that I “inherited” my love of God from Mom and Dad.

Last year, I attended a family funeral – that’s my adoptive family – deep in the Bible Belt. My aunts and uncles and dozens of cousins had only recently heard about my new calling. My older cousin grabbed my hand when she saw me and told me a story –
“You know, when you were still really little, and my Mom and Dad used to babysit you all the time, I remember we’d put you on the bed and tuck you in and then pray over you – that God would keep and carry you, and that he would always be in your life and look out for you.” Then she had to stop and say, “Oh no, I’m going to cry!”

But I said “I think it took.”


What we are made of is not limited by our history, or even by our genetic makeup. What we are made of, is God’s desire, moving in us. We are brothers and sisters … in faith! Use your history, use your family strengths – God gave us those for a reason, too. But we all belong to something bigger than our genetic family tree, bigger than our church history. St Paul said it: we are all adoptees – in Christ. We are all changed by the One who loves us.

THE REASON FOR THE SEASON

I get broadcast emails from some American friends about keeping the “Christ” in “Christmas,” as the argument goes. And I’m reminded constantly as I watch seasonal television every time somebody says oh-so-sincerely “Happy Holidays!”
That’s an appropriate greeting, of course, to a mixed audience … but it’s certainly rather forced when they are talking about “holiday” presents, and “holiday” decorations of wreaths and garlanded trees, which are part of the Christmas tradition, not Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever else our neighbours may celebrate at winter Solstice time. However, I appreciate the bizarre legal world of the public square [broadcast version], and I’ll just grimace a little every time the semantic requirements stretch my patience too far.
I should hasten to add, I am not of the party compelled to lobby to “keep the Christ in Christmas.” Rather, I echo the conviction of Teilhard de Chardin who found “Christ in all things,” and I don't fear he's in danger of getting lost. As a writer, I simply prefer that things be called plainly what they are. The time of year is a season of several “Holidays,” and a suitably open greeting is appropriate; but a decorated tree comes to us from a Christmas tradition, and it’s just fine to call it a Christmas tree, thank you. As a citizen and a theologian, however, I see something much larger and more universal unfolding, and the world is a better place for it… There is no need for the defensive or proprietary tone struck by some Christians at this time of year.

“Christmas” in its popular festive guise has become a secular celebration. By that I do NOT mean it has been de-spiritualized. Rather, it is a celebration that has become a tradition of our society, it’s a Canadian [speaking of my own context; transpose as you see fit for yours] cultural event that the vast majority of us participate in to some extent, whether or not we identify as Christians. The tree; the cards (although far fewer than even 10 years ago); the presents; the feast – some on Christmas Day, others on Christmas Eve; the Santa Claus legend; the exterior lights on malls and offices and homes… we all know the cultural cues.
People – communities – need occasions of shared festival. Public celebrations are as important to our social health as yearly vacations or daily baths are to our personal health. In the West, I’d argue that the broadest and most familiar such festival is Christmas. It is a Season of Light(s)… overlaid on solstice ceremonies, we celebrate the Light at the turning of the year, the longest night signaling the start of the lengthening days.

Early Christians used that ancient festival time to celebrate the birth of their resurrected Christ. Of course we don’t know the birthdate of Jesus … he was a nobody, born to a peasant. Nonetheless, a commemoration of his birth was in order. Therefore, just as the early community “Christianized” much of pagan Rome’s traditions and social roles to conform to their own ethics and values, blending in just enough to avoid persecution -- so they later made the winter festival an opportunity for celebration and thanksgiving.
A lot of history has elapsed since then, for good and ill, as far as “Christianizing” impulses go. It’s mighty hard for us to imagine that impulse as a private, countercultural compromise among believers, an effort by a tiny minority to be faithful and still be citizens and participants in mainstream life. Christianity’s imperialistic history has infused Christian traditions into the most religion-less corners of life; there was a time when whole communities and traditions were buried and suffocated under a universalizing presumption of “the Christian society.” I’m glad, personally, that such a time is passing now.
Those who argue to keep the Christ in Christmas are arguing, I think, from a similar universalizing presumption: celebrating Christmas is an expression of Christian faith and belief, and this belief in Christ the Risen Saviour must not be separated from our public Christmas celebrations. Respectfully, I disagree.

While active practice and public confession of Christian religion is much less visible now than a couple of generations ago, it is still safe to say a majority of people accept that Jesus of Nazareth existed as a historical figure. Whether or not he was the Messiah, or whether he was resurrected to reign in glory at God’s right hand, these are questions of theology and faith commitments. On the other hand, the teachings that we read about in the Bible stories of his life and ministry do not require a faith commitment to absorb and accept. Jesus as the popular “Prince of Peace” can be accepted as such as a teacher and an “evolved” spiritual being. His teachings, his example according to the Gospels, his “love ethic” as it is known, has become part of the Jesus lore even for those who are not religious. This love ethic has been absorbed into the fabric of our winter festival, into the traditions of Christmas – the public holiday, apart from the religious observance.



As an active Christian and public theologian in a post-Christian world, I’m completely okay with the notion that peace and grace and the eternal Light of Love -- the message and mission of Christ … are the “reason for the season.” For me, that is embodied in the holy messenger Jesus Christ, whose birth we acknowledge in the word “Christmas.” But if the secular world wants to pause in its dispassionate frenzies for a couple of weeks and actually practise goodwill and generosity in the name of self-emptying love … then God is indeed alive in the world, and the Holy Spirit is moving, touching, and changing people by other names.

To that I sing, Hosanna in the highest.
Merry Christmas to all, and may grace and peace abound in 2010.

Adam Lambert: DID YOU SEE THAT??

Okay: The Voice was a little rough but that was TOTALLY NOT THE POINT.

25 yrs ago Motown celebrated its 25th anniversary on TV (pretty novel at the time) and Michael Jackson blew everybody's mind with his moonwalk. This weekend Motown celebrated its 50th anniversary, and coincidentally everybody’s mind got blown again– but not by Motown. That happened on the American Music Awards, of all places.

America, meet Adam Lambert. Again.

Wow. Wow wow wow. ABC Television did its best to “bleep” some of those visuals but Adam was operating waaaay over their heads. The producers gave him the finale – maybe because they figured the kiddies would be in bed by that time? – which comes with the weight of its own expectations, on top of the promise of the boy’s sheer talent. The pressure on Adam was significant. But he is a pro – seizing the moment, recovering a slip seamlessly, layering shock on top of surprise.

Do I like s&m as a subject of art? Not especially. And yes, there’s an unapologetic s&m theme, both in the lyrics and unsurprisingly in the choreography, but Adam Lambert’s message to his audience is not just about sexplay. Imagine all those people who haven't seen him since he "lost" Idol? The next message they get from him is the unequivocal “For Your Entertainment” (pardon the paraphrase, I'm going from memory) -- you thought I was so soft and sweet ... it's gonna get rough for you ...
If that song isn't a shot across the bow of everything everybody thinks of American Idols, nothing ever could be. I DID NOT GET ON TV TO BE AN AMERICAN IDOL, I GOT ON AMERICAN IDOL TO BE ME.

I applaud him for every career-risking (career-making) step of it, and damn you I WON'T even stumble, I'll roll with every hazard you throw at me... That was breathtaking. In part because it was on the typically bland and pandering American Music Awards. If his much-celebrated vocal technique was a little ragged last night, well, we can forgive him: his vocal performance was quite secondary to his arrival as a significant cultural force.

Bono's had rough vocal nights that made people cry. (Hell, he's had laryngitis!) Springsteen has had rocky technical nights that he carried on sheer passion. And that's what Adam did, on adrenaline and voracious creativity. And you know what? that kind of go-for-broke, to-hell-with-pretty attitude onstage is where his rock'n'roll lives... there’s a little bit of punk in that brand of audacity. It proves his cred, for all the clubby buzz about the album.

The guy’s got ****ing stones, man...

The queer community's gonna be, Yay, Adam, standing up for us! and the artsy community's gonna be WHOA, Adam, what a throwdown! and the AI tweenies are gonna be too embarrassed to say they don't really get it to each other, but they might just ask their moms why Adam's got those boys on a leash ... and the rest of us rock'n'roll grown-ups are just gonna say, okay, the boy's got more balls than I was willing to give him credit for. AND THEY WILL ALL BUY HIS RECORD. Even if some of them have to smuggle it into the house (like my dad wouldn't let me go see Rod Stewart only after he saw him on Midnight Special in pink spandex. I guess a lot of little girls won't get tickets to Adam's first tour. LMAO)

Wow, again. That was insane. That was the "insanely good" his fans wanted it to be, but even they couldn’t have expected this. He didn't have to prove he could sing pretty. The whole world already knows that. What he needed was to break through every last box that people thought they could put him in. The enemy of the Artist is the very idea of "nice." People now know ... or at least, suspect ... that as gentlemanly as he may be, his art has no intention of being nice.

Watching him sing made it clear for me that he wasn't after all singing about S&M, he was singing about his art, about creative freedom, and the imagery was his symbol for the rough and dangerous ride ahead (and okay, yeah, he also likes naughty sex). I am so thrilled for him, and proud of him, and a little protective of him -- because he was naked out there, man -- that was 110% of him.

This morning I caught his little post-show interview with Access Hollywood. Completely calm, assured, a little cheeky, and utterly unconcerned about any viewers he might have alienated. “If you were offended … then maybe I’m not for you.” Shrug.

I think we are witnessing the making of a superstar. Done and done.

The legend begins…

IT MIGHT GET LOUD; or, a Note of Contrition to Edge from a Rock'n'Roll Penitent

File under: ZooTV Confessional.

I think I’ve been taking Edge for granted all these years. Not his art, or his virtuosity, or his unmistakeable personal style … we all know Edge is as much “the sound of U2” as Bono’s vocals. But I think – well, this is Confession, so I know – that I have failed to connect Edge the man (read: his heart) with the interplanetary fire, rage, and tenderness that come out of his guitar. It's as if the guitars were playing the man. I’ve failed to feel the soul of Edge as I have so painfully and gratefully felt the soul of his literate bandmate, Bono.

Until I saw this movie. If you’re a guitar freak; if you’re a rock’n’roll fiend; if you’re a fan of White Stripes OR Raconteurs OR U2 OR Zeppelin, you will love It Might Get Loud. It’s built on a High Concept: find 3 rock guitar icons of 3 distinct generations; let each of them talk about The Guitar; and then put them together in a room, with a bunch of their favourite instruments and amps. It’s a little bit precious, a little bit self-conscious… but the 3 musicians are young Jack White, Renaissance man and demographic representative of a generation that knows not the liberating magic of the electric guitar; Jimmy Page, snowy-haired Lord of the Sex-Drugs’n’rock’n’roll Manor; and our beloved soft-spoken guitar geek, Edge.

Purely from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven angle? Jimmy Page picking a mandolin while sitting at the blustery gates of Headley Grange nearly 40 years later? Crikey. You tell me what happens to you, but I got chills and hot flashes and little starbursts behind my eyes watching him. Not only for the surreal flashbacks to Going to California and Battle of Evermore, but for the new appreciation of the depth of his mastery and the breadth of his musical voice. What a thrill.

Similarly, Edge gives us typically understated commentary on his visit back to Mount Temple Comprehensive School ... after so many years of reading about the place, I confess it was a total fan-thrill to actually see the ordinariness of the linoleum hallways, the lockers and the little classroom that he and Paul (soon to be "Bono Vox"), Larry and Adam, used to learn how to play their instruments. Edge takes us to THE bulletin board, where Larry put up the notice ... and he kind of smirks at the anti-climactic banality of the thing. Very Edge. Very Irish. Delicious.

Jack White was a bit of an unknown quantity to me, going in. I knew a couple of White Stripes songs, and liked them a lot for their unapologetic guitar-rock thrust. There isn’t a lot of that in hit music these days … not that I listen to radio much anymore, except by accident. However, my movie companion is a fan of Jack, and set me up to expect to like what I saw. I did. Having spent some valuable time on my own spiritual journey with Robert Johnson and the hellhound myths of the Delta, I instantly wanted Jack White to succeed at whatever he next attempts. I liked getting to know him.

But our dear Edge: who is every bit the cultural icon and innovator that Jimmy Page is, but with a much LONGER Top 40 resume! – our dear Edge … the zen guy. The techie guy. For all that Jack is an upstart (just 10 years in the game), he and Jimmy were clearly guitar kin, both reincarnations of Delta bluesmen handed Marshall stacks and MTV. U2 has never been a “roots” rock’n’roll band, Rattle & Hum notwithstanding. Their basis was never the blues and 3 chords, a sex-thrust and a bent blue note. No, the evolution of U2 was a military punk tattoo out of the clouds, a swirl of sensation resolved into a growing-up boom-cha! Edge is not historical kin to Jack or Jimmy. But he is like them, channeled through his guitar music.
In this movie we learn a lot about Edge the U2 member, and a little about Edge the wealthy rock star (yoga accessorized with a Blackberry?), but he talks relatively little about his “feelings” about things. The most heat you will hear in his voice is nearer the beginning of the film, when he is trying to explain that the guitar “… is my voice.” As compared, we should infer, to the ubiquitous Bono’s verbal and theatrical arsenal, i.e. Himself.

And so, taking him at face value, I endeavoured with the film’s considerable help to hear Edge at the centre of U2’s songs – to hear not merely “the guitar sound,” but Edge’s song within the collective that is U2. (After all, it’s just as important to sift out Bono’s own “songs,” his poetic impulse, to better appreciate the collaboration that is a U2 recording.) My favourite scene is the source of the film’s title, when Edge is standing in a small room, guitar strapped on and encircled by electronic boards and cords and switches and pedals. He explains that most of what people hear is his experimentation with the effects of amplification. Magically from his fingers comes that rubbery pogo-spring riff that opens Elevation … until he turns off everything electric, and picks the same strings on the guitar. *pinggggg?…. pinggggggg* Chuckling, he enacts a mock meeting with the band: “Hey, guys, listen to this great new riff!” *pinggggg?…. pinggggg*

Immediately I was reminded of the many live versions of Bullet the Blue Sky we’ve heard and seen – Edge’s solos like an apocalyptic judgement of rage and death, which never fails to chill my viscera, from a shadowy source that sometimes scares me. But the chasm between that sound and the gentle demeanour of the guy in the toque breaks off the emotional connection that should be made between me and that artist. And that does an injustice to him.

Not that one ever forgets that Edge’s sound is front and centre … but since seeing this documentary, I’ve consciously listened to those sounds in the same way I listen to the lyric-less Beethoven or Mozart. My weakness is for words, so I readily default to sympathies with the lyricist. But we already know that often, Bono’s words come after the music has started to take shape; that Bono finds words that reflect the essence in the band’s musical sketches. So now I’m listening for Edge’s voice, within the orchestra of U2 sounds. How does Edge feel about, for example, the Spirit’s Mysterious Ways? How does he feel about information overload – in the graceless squawk of Numb, or the breathless seduction of (Even Better Than) The Real Thing? In every song there’s a man in dialogue with his world, musically; a man who is clearly a reservoir of deep connection to pain – hear in the patient chick-a-chick of Bad, the unconditional love of the friend who lets you cry; a man whose read of the world’s senseless waste aims his machine-gun guitar at the people who can make it stop, in Sunday Bloody Sunday.
And Mofo – I can’t even.

Edge’s book of poetry is in many ways more graphic and profane than Bono’s, even as they serve the same sacred Muse in musical praise and prayer. Against Edge’s characteristic personal restraint, his creative voice is a gift I never properly received, until now. (Forgive me, Mother Muse, for I have sinned…) Thanks to Davis Guggenheim, the director of It Might Get Loud, I have repented. And thanks truly to a humble man who lays his heart out in a global spotlight, without strutting, posing, embarrassing himself or imploding, an artist of conspicuous audacity who draws no attention to himself …
Edge, you are an enigma and a master I haven’t properly honoured, not really. But that’s changed now. Thanks for letting us in.

Okay, everybody, we all get to do penance: Turn it up.

GIMME SHELTER

Wow.

(Read about it here.)

U2 360 - live in 2009 (part II)

Beginning with the end...

There were 2 encores: the first one, not unpredictable: megahits One and Where the Streets Have No Name with a little surprise in between. The second one was much less predictable, hearkening back to the unnerving appearance of the devil MacPhisto in his platform shoes at the end of the Zooropa concerts -- an astounding alter-ego with a different kind of message and even a new sort of sound: U2 as pure, delicious, theatre; theology as performance art.

At the end of Wednesday night’s U2360 show, after the conventional encore of Big Hits, the band and their singer reappear -- or rather, a shadow wrapped in a suit of lights where the singer should be -- to sing Ultraviolet. Not a big hit by any stretch, not a selection included “just for the fans.” Not going through the conventional motions. Pay attention, folks.
Sometimes I feel like checking out

I wanna get it wrong, can't always be strong…
Feel like trash, you make me feel clean

I'm in the black, can't see or be seen
Baby, light my way
…sings the shadow in the suit of red beams, into a glowing ring of light that amplifies his plea and physically lifts his weight as he dangles out over his audience.

Then the shadow takes on the dark ambiguity of With or Without You –
My hands are tied, my body bruised
She's got me with nothing left to win

And nothing else to lose

And you give yourself away

He is tired, cynical, maybe angry … his face is obscured, his voice is drained of feeling. With or Without You has been an emotional centrepiece on previous tours; it was profoundly moving in the concert recorded for the Elevation DVD. It’s a fan favourite, it’s a hypnotic love song, it is all these things, and the band is playing it as sweetly and seductively as ever … but the current rendition of it is a jarring, unsettling deconstruction of whatever we think this song is supposed to be.
As the heartbeat of the song quiets behind him, the shadow removes his suit of lights, methodically places it on its hanger and hooks it to the radiant microphone, and very deliberately bids it goodbye: here we have 3 songs for the price of 2.

On the under-appreciated album Pop is a track called Gone, which Bono dedicated to his friend Michael Hutchence shortly after he died (see the Popmart DVD):
You wanted to get somewhere so badly

You had to lose yourself along the way…

Goodbye, you can keep this suit of lights

I'll be up with the sun
I'm not coming down
And I’m already gone…

This final sequence, really a keening coda to a buoyant, triumphant show, seems to me to be a mini-suite of songs purpose-built to frame the concert’s final number, the new song Moment of Surrender. Months back, when I first heard that this was their show-closer, it made me wonder what was afoot. Oh, it’s a very special song (as I wrote earlier), but certainly an unlikely send-off. (For that matter, MacPhisto closed his little concert with Love is Blindness, an anti-anthem if ever there was one.) It had to be deliberate, designed to provoke. Some reviews (fans and professionals) expressed confusion or a shrugging disappointment in the lack of a Big Happy Finish … not surprising. U2 doesn’t want it to be easy: they’re asking us to think. Pushing us to feel. Why -- how -- do they make it hurt so much?

Back to the start

Plenty of people have written their reports of these shows, so I don’t need to do that. But I must try to transpose some of the impressions, some of the marks they left on me.
The show opened with a song most people (if sales of No Line on the Horizon are any indication) don’t know, Breathe. It’s a song about feeling crazy and finding sane. It’s a wall of suffocating noise, and a window on a way out: “I found grace inside a sound … and I can breathe now.” The sound quality inside BC Place is less than perfect, but way better than average for the venue. It’s a concrete cave with an inflated pillow roof. The bass and grinding guitar dig into your sternum … and it feels good.

Three songs in, I find myself in a vision, a living prayer, with Bono on a little bridge – reminds me of the kind that hangs over ponds in a park – hovering just above a sea of faces, singing, “I was born to sing for you … my first cry, it was a joyful noise.” Magnificent. It wasn’t preacherly, it wasn’t explicit. It was instead, reflective. That’s when it occurred to me how Bono has come to make it look easy, in the sense that for him and the wave of music he rides on, it looks so natural. Like a magician who matter-of-factly reveals diamonds in his white-gloved hand, Bono can pause and pray on a tower of joyful noise: Edge, Adam and Larry will hold him up as high as he needs to be heard.
When they get to I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, the noise is deafening. The entire audience sings the first verse. Bono closes the song with Stand By Me, and the crowd picks up the chorus and everyone is lifted by the compassion they find on their own lips. Bono and Edge take it into a gentle duet on Stuck in a Moment – and Bono’s final soulful phrase quotes not his own recording but Scripture: “It’s just a moment, this too shall pass.”

We were especially blessed by a shimmering, swirling and rare performance of The Unforgettable Fire – Willie Williams’ set and lights seemed to take centre stage, giving us a multimedia interpretation of fire and pain and separation and confusion – the band seemed to be almost completely obscured, but I didn’t mind. It was like watching a 3D video, with the band playing live – the Claw is a stunning canvas, designed for dreamy beauty as well as harrowing contortions. It was a perfect interpretation of the song.

The new album is represented by 7 songs, all but one from the in-your-face front half of the record. They are brilliant live. The title track is a pile-driving buzz-saw of disorientation (also unfamiliar to its audience, but no matter—Bono is clearly inspired by it) that U2 uses to take us next into Elevation – which proves once again to be without question one of the best stadium rock songs any band ever created. It’s got beat, structure, balance, sing-along simplicity and substance, all in a magical euphoric brew that lifts the band as much as it lifts all of us. The same should be said of Vertigo, designed for maximum catharsis and defenseless enlightenment – “all I know is that you give me something I can feel/your love is teaching me how to kneel…”

And then the band pushes all that giddy release into a flailing, vertiginous re-mix of a whimsical little pop song called I Know I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight. In the middle of the new album, Bono sings about the importance of lightening up and cutting loose especially when you’re fighting to undo some of the damage in the world. It’s cute and catchy. Most of the audience don’t know it. But that doesn’t prevent the band’s attack on it from cutting us all into little cubist bits – the lyrics are mostly lost in the noise and feedback, but Bono’s challenge is loud and insistent: Will you sing for your sanity? he shouts. The song is long and psychedelic, almost too long, almost out of control and uncomfortable – when abruptly they gear down into images of Iran’s protesting citizens and a straight-no-chaser dose of Sunday Bloody Sunday. Without commentary, without prompts. And the song is more potent and more universal than anyone realized. The band’s outrage is more than Irish.

This is the tour, by the way, where U2 finally dropped Bullet the Blue Sky as a political set piece. It shows up in every concert DVD since Rattle and Hum, and as great a piece of agitprop as it is, it’s been done to death! I cheer its absence on this tour … when they have so much great political material to mine.
The set didn’t give much more than a hat-tip to the overtly political, though – it was wonderful to hear MLK, along with Bono’s dedication of it to Aung San Suu Kyi, as a “peaceful revolutionary,” followed by Walk On, written expressly for her. As the last song of the main set, it was sweet, but not yet euphoric. The band saved that for the first encore.

It began with a charming video introduction by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, on the meaning of the One campaign as a prelude to the song, One. That song may never grow stale ... it's as urgent as the day it arrived to illuminate the band themselves after weeks of discord in 1990. Bono closed out the song with a naked prayer, "Hear us coming, Lord, hear us call!..." The music soars around his voice, the hands of the audience surrounding him are raised in a sea of affirmation. The song crashes to a decisive finish, and as the ovation subsides Bono begins an unaccompanied, ragged but sweet proclamation: "Amazing grace... How sweet the sound that saved a wretch ... like me." Unexpectedly – at least to me – the audience joins him, singing along with the entire verse.
Stand By Me, I expect them to know. Amazing Grace? – anything after the first line? Wow. I am proud of my compatriots for finding those words, and daring to sing them aloud together. Finally, the Big Finish is the incomparable Where the Streets Have No Name. “I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside.”

I folded to my knees...

In hindsight I will realize that virtually all of these songs have been about the battle to know oneself.

With the sole exception of the sweet In a Little While, dedicated to the families of touring rock stars and roadies, this concert contains no simple love songs. (And With or Without You is anything but simple, especially this year.) Instead, all of these songs express the soul’s hunger for clarity, for release, for union with the Source or the Destination, or both -- being stuck, seeking some light, getting lost, being found. Certainly this is a regular theme in U2’s music, but this particular setlist is built, not around political calls to arms, but almost entirely around this inner longing to be truly known. We want to know our place in the world, we struggle to belong, to be loved.

U2 has long understood the political implications of spiritual wounds, and the media’s emphasis therefore has been on their politics… because God knows that’s easier than spirituality. But on this tour it seems the band has chosen to focus on the spiritual work required to change the world – consistent with the tone of No Line on the Horizon.
The coda at the end of the show, the shadowy suit of lights, mimes our hidden story of fatigue, futility, and emptiness. Maybe it also says something more oblique about U2’s life as rock stars – certainly critique of the Pop Life is not new to their work. I don’t know.
But either way, say goodbye to the suit of lights. On your knees, boy.

Bono's performance of their final song, on this night at least, is as guileless and exposed as that first take they captured on the album. This is not Bono the cheerleader. This is a man in confession, as earnest as I've ever seen him:

my body's now a begging bowl,

begging to get back to my heart ... to the rhythm of my soul

Moment of Surrender is unequivocally about being broken … and it is unequivocally about being free. This is the paradox of faith, of spiritual surrender. I cannot imagine a more un-rock’n’roll note on which to end the biggest rock show ever mounted. It is so U2. It’s why I love them.

All the media can talk about is this show’s size, because of course they don’t know what the hell to say about surrender. But U2 made very deliberate choices with these songs. They sent off their audience – young, old, lifers, newbies, rockers, atheists, believers – with the message that ultimately, it isn’t about flash, sound, fury, stardom… On the contrary, their farewell each night was a kind of abdication, a step to the side. That second encore seems to say, “It isn’t about us. We are not at the centre of this. We are not the point of this.” The point of it … is the moment of surrender. That is their gift to us, a broken prayer that is an invitation to freedom ... wrapped up in ambiguity and shadow and a chorus of joy.

And when I go there, I go there with you. It’s all I can do.

U2: ALIVE AT 33 (part I)

U2 doesn’t go out on the road to trot out the hits and keep the fans interested. After 33 years together, they mount shows the same way they make albums: with warriors’ determination to win the battle against alienation and apathy. To make a work of art that is worthy of the time and carbon footprint it asks of us.
And make no mistake: art is indeed worth our investment of time and resources. God knows we ought to take our pulse and our blood pressure every so often to see how we’re doing … that’s what art must do. It broadcasts our collective pulse and blood pressure, paints pictures of our pain and our victories. So that we know they’re there. U2’s medium is performance art, from their earliest days as misfit kids in Dublin. Street theatre and high-concept multimedia are as much a part of their repertoire as Adam’s bass and Larry’s drums.

So the one thing they have never done in their guise as rock stars is go through the motions. Even when they stumble (yeah, that giant lemon: WHAT were they thinking??), it is in the attempt to shock us awake, to make us see something as we’ve not seen it before. But not merely for art’s sake – no.
To see something fresh, to make a new connection, that’s to wake up! to see things as they are. But first you must be disoriented, must lose the relations of things … before you can suddenly see new interrelationships where you saw none before. Creative people know this sensation well – they can’t always live there, but they are comfortable passing through it because they know it brings them closer to the Real. It breaks through a layer or two of the illusion of isolation and separateness. As the pulse of Life throbs in all things, sometimes that pulse becomes visible to us. Sometimes by grace, sometimes by spiritual discipline… sometimes in art.

Here’s what I’ve learned after witnessing U2360: going to see U2 in concert, at this stage in my life and in theirs, is a risky venture. It’s a leap of faith. Because they give so much, and they ask so much – that is, I know they’re taking me to a deep place, where they will ask me to feel. If they succeed in going deep enough, and if they ask the right questions that touch the right nerves, I know I will feel… very deeply. Tonight, 24 hours after we departed each other’s company, my heart hurts. I ache.
I threw myself into a sea of sound.
Lights go down
It's dark, the jungle is --
Your head can't rule your heart
A feeling's so much stronger than a thought

To begin with, the face of this ocean of sound is Bono. His mastery as he matures is something to behold. He is older, sure, but more than that, each phase of life that he himself enters seems to contribute something to his performing gifts. In 2005 he was less chatty than in 2001; while in 2009 there is a truer stillness within him as he moves around the stage, as he pulls the voice up and out of him. Rev. Beth [see U2Sermons at right and the book Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalogue] made the observation some years ago that where once Bono the front man took on a prophetic persona, he now strikes a more priestly tone – these are biblical terms, having to do with the manner of exhortation rather than any personal moral attributes. He’s less likely now to climb a scaffolding and wave a flag, and more adept at persuading 50 000 people to lift their voices in praise. He shepherds the crowd, even as he hurls his vulnerability into their arms in complete trust. Dare I say … his ego (about which he’s always been completely candid) is less visible while his strength is moreso.

My dear friend and concert companion (and more casual U2 follower) put it beautifully in her morning-after email: I just love that feeling Bono gives me of being in the presence of greatness. Or more like Greatness, actually. The larger than life-ness that he's got while he's just this little guy walking around that huge contraption, he just ... doesn't look little. Like there's SO MUCH SOMETHING I DON'T EVEN KNOW in that one body, that it's like he's all crowding up in my business even from as far away as he was…

So much something. That's probably always been true of him, it's just that now the "something" is a little harder to name -- Bono's not trying so hard to put the words in our mouths. He's much better now at letting the songs, and the animating spirit of the songs, speak through him.

Which is why I was first dismissive and then perplexed when I read several fan reviews of different 360 shows that mentioned specifically Bono's performance of With or Without You. They reported that he was "bored with it," "tired of it, like he just doesn't care anymore after singing it so much..." Well, accuse the man of a lot of things, but never of forcing himself to sing something every night that he no longer likes or feels inside! With a catalogue like theirs? With the missionary zeal that they bring to building their concerts? It just didn't make sense. So let me begin my reflections on last night's concert at the end of it -- With or Without You is the second-to-last song in the set.
By now, most fans will also have seen it whether they attended shows or not, since the band so generously put up the entire LA concert on youtube. I avoided the live stream of that show, knowing my own show was coming up just 2 days later.

Now I know what those fan reviewers were referring to, and I forgive those who so completely misunderstood the point of that performance -- because they moved me to take a closer look at the entire setlist and find something there more deliberate than I otherwise might have appreciated.
My head is catching up with my heart...