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.

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.

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR is a medical & political commandment

The health care debate in the United States is breaking my heart. I'm a Canadian, and I am battling to keep our universal health care. I don't want a system designed to profit from my illness or accident; I don't want a system that must "choose" profitable disease over expensive disease. Illness is not, should not, ever be an arena of economic opportunism. Surely there are higher values among us than the profit motive; surely we can educate and hire innovators and nurturers who will do very special work for fair remuneration, in a system universally applied to all who are in need regardless of their economic station.

Surely everyday folks can see the wisdom of replacing a sickness-for-profit model with a care-for-all model. In the health care arena, why is profit important? Sustainability is important. Prudence and integrity and oversight are important. Why does it have to be run by and for private profit? Can the American people [in their democratic role as political agents] not conceive of ANY undertaking that should be EXCLUDED from the profit game?
Or do those critics of universal care actually believe that health and healing is only for the chosen?

GOD IS NOT "OUR FATHER"

Language is that special blessing that sets us apart from other creatures on this planet. I’m not just talking about reading here … We are information junkies, it’s true. But language is capable of much more than mere information. It is the stuff of our dreams, our stories, and of course our age-old songs. Poetry is much more ancient than science, and its wisdom reaches different places than science.
So what does language have to do with spiritual life? Well, everything. What we call things directly influences how we experience them. People have all kinds of their own reasons for rejecting church – for feeling “spiritual, but not religious” – but I know that for many, the traditional language in church is a turn-off. And one of the biggest turn-offs, spiritually or intellectually, is God the Guy in the Sky. God as “He.” We might feel limited by language at times … but let’s remember that we may also be liberated by language.

News flash: God is not a Guy in the Sky. God is not “our father.”
What we mean is, God can be like our father.

We have to be careful that we don’t ever think that we know what God is… and yes, we have permission to be playful and creative when we try to think about what God is like. The Bible has given us an enduring metaphor for our Creator: God the Father. It has also given us many other images, but they never got nearly the same press through the centuries. People everywhere in every time have used all kinds of words for God, expressing the richness of our imaginings and intuitions and pictures of the divine.

“Our Father who art in heaven” is not a bad image for God. We may appropriately pray to the supreme fatherliness of God. Fatherliness is a virtue, it is a blessing and a gift. It’s a great adjective. But God is not “he.” God is not the Guy in the Sky, Father of the world. God is like a father of the world.
Maybe we know that, intellectually. We can say, God is like an ocean. God is subtle, like breath... God is like a father. Those are similes, as you’ll remember from Grade 5 Language Arts. If we turned them into metaphors, they would sound something like the hymn that says … “Breathe on me, Breath of God.”
The metaphor is Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne (the Psalms). The metaphor is Our Father who art in heaven (the prayer of Jesus). That’s a poetic image, that is not a description.

For all our lives -- in church, in the Bible, hey, in movies and TV, everybody says God is a he! (If he looks like George Burns or Morgan Freeman, maybe that ain’t so bad!) So even if we know that isn’t literal, it’s just difficult to not talk about “Him” when we’re talking about God. Even when we know a personal pronoun belongs to an individual, a person.
Hmm. Dilemma. Some may say, what difference does it make, if we all understand that we don’t mean it literally? Well, maybe none … as long as talking about God’s good creation, and Her steadfast love, and Her righteous judgement at the end-times sounds just as good to you. Our Mother who art in heaven. Is She your help and your strength, is She a lamp unto your feet? Great, then we’re already there.
But of course, even changing the personal pronoun creates the same problem. A mere man (or woman) does not belong where the Ultimate and Absolute, the Ground of Being and the Mystery of Life dwells in our hearts.

Now we need our metaphors, don’t get me wrong. …“Show, don’t tell” is the writer’s number one rule. Metaphors and similes can help show us something intellectual, or abstract, or unfamiliar. The good ones, as any English teacher will tell you, deliver a little shock of unlikely connection. One of my favourites comes from a master, Leonard Cohen: “a garland of fresh-cut tears.”

So, God as father can be a great metaphor, as we contemplate fatherliness perfected. But some human experiences of “father” may be less than perfect, something other than loving and steadfast. Martin Luther, for example, was a monk who dedicated his whole life to prayer and biblical scholarship. Yet, he felt so unworthy for much of his life because a “righteous” father (like his own) was in his experience punishing, stern, judgmental and fault-finding. He struggled for years to understand grace! He finally solved his dilemma (and many of ours) when he broke through to a different definition of righteousness.

It’s true, the Bible spends an awful lot of time calling God “He.” Jesus himself gave us the prayer, “Our Father…” The Psalms are overflowing with him’s and he’s. Should that make it a fact, is that proof that God is like, this guy with body parts … in the sky? On a throne? No.
It does demonstrate the power of that particular metaphor, it suggests a Creator of fatherly and powerful attributes. What’s more concrete and universal than a family image? But it only works if we enjoy it as a metaphor. The problem is when we stop being amazed and enlightened by this clever or original comparison with something else … and start hearing not a comparison but an equation. “God the Father” after many centuries starts to sound like God is actually a father. What does that do to “God?” Fatherliness stops being understood as an aspect of God, and starts sounding like the shape and extent of God.

There are still many people like Luther who might have good reason to cringe at the idea of a “fatherly” God. They need to know also that God shows us the perfection of many other attributes – mothering, companionship, nature, communion.
The Bible (not to mention ancient and modern sources in other traditions) does provide other ways to imagine God. Our Father who art in heaven is only one impression of God. Here’s another.

Upon my bed at night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
‘I will rise now and go about the city,
in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves.’
I sought him, but found him not.
The sentinels found me,
as they went about in the city.
‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’
Scarcely had I passed them,
when I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go
until I brought him into my mother’s house,
and into the chamber of her that conceived me.
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
by the gazelles or the wild does:
do not stir up or awaken love
until it is ready!

[The Song of Solomon 3.1-5 NRSV]


There are some things our culture has traditionally focused on as “biblical,” and other things completely ignored in the stereotypical understandings of faith. “The Song of Songs” from the Old Testament might be one of the latter.
The Bible has many voices, and when we neglect their diversity, we dim the illumination we might find there. We risk forgetting that these are all only impressions of godly experience – not statistics about God.

God as lover? God as a soul-mate, a companion, even a spouse, on the human journey of growth and discovery? Does this not ring true at some times, in some circumstances? Consider the glory of being alive, of feeling all your senses tingling, or of being overwhelmed with something you cannot contain – an epiphany, or a wave of tears: those can be God moments.
God is like all these things, because God IS all these things – but not limited to one of them. For Christians … faith does have a human face, in our brother, Jesus the Christ. But God was also known to our Hebrew ancestors in a pillar of fire. God was known to the biblical poet in a lover’s skin. God may be known to you in your child’s eyes.

“Our Father who art in heaven” is not a required password for knowing grace, or for being loved as God has loved us. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable, creative, subtle and sometimes overwhelming. It tells you, You are not alone, and you are made of beauty and wonder… and it will tell you in the language that your own heart knows.
I wish you grace and peace today, in unexpected shapes.

And please, thank God for whatever true fatherliness has blessed you in your life. Happy Father’s Day.

"Bless Us With Discomfort"

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Adam Lambert is …

on the cover of Rolling Stone! “And it should come as no surprise to anyone” that he’s gay, says he in his own words.

How will his audience, or the general pop audience, respond? We can only wait and see. His career will be something of a social experiment, as we are clearly in an age that is increasingly accepting of alternative self-identifications. Certainly social acceptance is demographically patchy at best: LA, Vancouver, the big cities, yeah, maybe it's kind of all right being yourself. Arkansas, or Alberta, maybe not so much. If you're 20-something, maybe it's no big deal; if you're in your 50s or 60s, maybe it's a little more difficult to wrap your head around. At least that’s what statistics are telling us about the current state of things.

The appearance of someone like Adam Lambert on the scene is still cause for cautious optimism, as I suggested in my last post. Our community is finally capable of raising such an assured young man (kudos to his parents, of course); and the likes of American Idol is prepared to support him -- if only for the dollar signs in their eyes. But we know too well we have not fully exited a time or place when all the dollars in the world would not breach the wall that went up when "homosexual" was whispered about you. Come to think of it, that wall used to spring up pretty fast when someone uttered so benign a word as "divorced" -- you baby boomers might remember that, when you were kids? And never mind the whispers, you weren’t even on the guest list if you were brown-skinned.

There was likewise a time (not yet past) when it was considered "not natural" to marry outside one's own race (operating on the flimsy assumption that each member of each race could remain “pure.”) It was once considered in certain quarters not "natural" for a woman to have desires, or to have them fulfilled. It was once considered not "natural" for women or people of African descent to be educated. And it was once considered "natural" in some circles to keep certain classes of human beings as slaves. All of these things have been changing, over the generations. Painfully slowly, for everyone crushed or crippled in the machinery of collective fear and oppressive policies. But visibly changing, nonetheless.

Society – the great collective of souls with hearts and minds indelibly marked by each other – is a fluid, living organism. It changes, adapts to new stimuli. It changes, because growth is life, and stasis is death. Norms change. “Normal” changes. Painfully, often with great sacrifice and also with great celebration.

Mostly, though, it changes one person, one small moment at a time.

Last January I had the privilege of being invited to preach at a local church on the Sunday following President Obama’s Inauguration week. (Oh yes, I am in Canada, but the world shared in that party.) I had been particularly captivated by the furious debate surrounding Obama’s inclusion of three very different clergymen, who were to lead prayers accompanying the public celebrations. Public prayer on such a scale doesn’t occur very often, and when it does it’s nearly always in response to some horrific tragedy such as 9/11. For once, we as a world community were held together in joy and thanksgiving, in not just one moment of public prayer, but three. That is a powerful force – to unite so many in an invocation, in a wish, in a sacred vision for peace and affirmation. I wanted to reflect on that in church that Sunday.

Oh, I noticed these particular clergy were (1) all male and (2) all Protestant (or at least, non-Catholic Christians), which was a gross oversight if one actually wants to make a statement about inclusiveness. But that sorry misstep was countered by other stark differences in their social locations.
Pastor Rick Warren (evangelical author of The Purpose-Driven Life) offered the prayer for the Inaugural moment itself; Rev. Joseph Lowery, lion of the civil rights movement alongside Dr. King, powerfully closed the Inaugural ceremony by invoking memories of a darker time in the American family, contrasted with the breaking light of a new day.

But the week had begun with an opening prayer for the Inauguration Concert at the Lincoln Memorial, for which Obama invited Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson. Rt. Rev. Robinson is a politicized, if not controversial public figure because he is openly gay. His prayer was conducted in advance of the concert’s live telecast – discuss that unfortunate coincidence amongst yourselves – but it was all over the internet.

I also wanted to share Rev. Robinson’s lovely blessing litany in church, since many probably missed it. And because I was addressing an active Affirming Congregation, it seemed especially pertinent.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people…

At that point there was a bit of a commotion in the pews, and a man stood and shouted out in protest. He wasn’t completely coherent, at least from where I was standing, but his voice grew strong enough to say something to the effect that he would never be coming back, because the presence of gays in the church somehow spelled the end of the church … To which one of a gentle gay couple in the front pew replied rhetorically, “But we’re still here.”
The sanctuary door slammed behind the man, and a breathless silence hovered in the church. I resumed reading Rev. Robinson’s prayer where I had left off:

Bless us with discomfort –
Yes, that was the very next line, the place erupted in laughter, God smiled (I think) at the teachable moment, and I continued the service.

…at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.
Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.
Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.
Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

During the communal prayers, later in the service, someone made a point of offering up the angry heart of the nameless man to God’s mercy and understanding. I think the rest of the congregation felt as compassionate and realistic about the conflicts we daily face, in small ways and in big ones.

“Bless us with discomfort.” This is a powerful prayer. Prepare us to be changed. Unbuckle our certainties and prepare us to grow. Discomfort is actually a critical part of creativity. My very spiritual friend, a creative writing teacher, calls it “divine discontent.” Adam Lambert pulled the tooth, popped the balloon, yanked the grist of speculation away from the media. Now he just wants to be a musician, create something worthwhile, and hopefully sell records.

Meanwhile the consumers and the pundits will have to squirm and twitch and decide if their horizons have grown broad enough for the likes of Adam Lambert … and for all those artists and executives and mechanics and clerks and students and regular folks behind him, who just want to be themselves, living and working among us.

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.

James Weldon Johnson (1871 –1938)

WE GET TO CARRY EACH OTHER

Kris Allen has my vote … for the classiest man of faith on prime-time television.

Oh yeah, he won that Fox TV talent thing last month? Yeah, that one. But the real drama, the storyline that put some reality in “reality” TV for once, was and is his new friendship with the runner-up, Adam Lambert. The understated Mr. Allen probably wasn’t looking to change the world when he auditioned for American Idol – he apparently wasn’t even looking to win, God bless him – but I think he and Adam together will deserve some credit for having altered the cultural landscape. I’m well aware that the lion’s share of press has gone to Adam Lambert, not to mention the stratospheric numbers he’s generated on Google. Yet, if Kris hadn’t played the part he did, Adam’s story would have been quite different. And not nearly so powerful.

Adam Lambert is completely magnetic, and not only because of his astounding voice. He has charisma, he has star power; and he has what many "stars" do not: manners. Grace. Thoughtfulness. And did anyone else mention he's as beautiful as a screen goddess (hair and makeup by The Cure)? Oh, you probably noticed that.
I had never watched an American Idol episode in my life. But one of my Fave Fab Females started sending me cryptic notes and pictures: "You have to see this guy. Click here, and here, and here...And oh, wait ‘til you hear him sing 'Brigadoon!' " 'Scuse me, Brigadoon? Sure, and there's internet footage of Adam in an elegant suit, singing The Prayer at the Yitzhak Rabin Tribute concert; there's him upstaging Val Kilmer in The Ten Commandments; there's some extraordinary clips of him vamping some hard-rock burlesque surrounded by dancers of various sexes and persuasions... the boy is clearly a club creature, openly glam, proudly theatrical, but also well-trained and a serious professional.

So he struts into American Idol's carefully contrived world, and apparently blows it apart, one sector at a time.

Week after week, he kept showing up and wowing his audience, and probably drawing in more and more people like me, who otherwise would never watch. I don't know what American Idol usually looks like, but it was pretty thrilling by ANY standards to see the likes of Glambert in full-throated sex-machine howl on Whole Lotta Love -- and props to the band who also rode it hard -- in American prime time.
Yet, at the end of every Idol performance, he steps out of his hellcat prowl (or purr) and instantaneously becomes the boy next door. He's articulate and self-aware, shrewd about his career but spontaneous enough to gush about the cool outfits he gets to wear for work. The world is his oyster now, and he will be one to watch for the next few years (especially once he's off the Idol leash, after this year's tour).

Adam is a compelling personality because he appears so completely at ease in his own skin -- and in this world. He knows what he's good at; he knows what he has to work at, he's educated about his medium. His confidence -- however hard-won it might have been -- is ... well, kind of infectious. He treats everyone with respect and puts people at ease. In a word, he is likeable. Flamboyant, theatrical, goth, guyliner and all, he is genuinely likeable.
But he is more than just "nice." So much more. He doesn't speak in spiritualized terms, but he does speak with disciplined positivity and, I dare say, a certain sense of mission about acceptance and inclusion of difference. Given a new and vast platform, he's using it to encourage parents to applaud and support their children who are a little "different," who want to be creative. Send them to dance class, give them vocal training. "Artists are a little bit special, they need the support," he says.

Now, the (pink) elephant in the room is nudging me to mention the difference that all of America is talking about, and it ain't about practicing scales. But Adam has been more honest than any of the speculators or gossips, because all of us know of some poor boy who was taunted and tormented and called "gay," NOT because he yet had any carnal inclinations at all, but simply because he was different. Adam's is the most relevant message we could hope for, because he refuses to let anyone be reduced to labels and be filed coldly in some moralistic category.
And he may just be the most effective messenger we could want, a goth boy of the demi-monde who is perfectly comfortable with Middle America (read: American Idol); but one who respects that audience enough to offer them "something maybe they didn't know they wanted." Creativity is his message, more than cultural disruption. He isn’t Marilyn Manson – he wants not to bludgeon his audience, but to woo them.

But none of that fully explains why he's on my blog.
It’s true that audacious creativity and originality and self-awareness like Adam's does alone merit spiritual reflection. The creative process is a deeply spiritual process, even in those who would never call it that. So I'm not presuming anything about Adam's beliefs.
I do think he’s an old soul. Yet, prudently he has no pretensions to Deep Thoughts or Political Statements (in public), he says he just wants to sing, and be judged on his art. Of course he’s more sophisticated than that, and he knows full well that asking to be judged for his art alone IS his political statement.

Countless commentators wanted the Idol competition to be about more than just singing. With Danny Gokey rounding out the Top Three, many wanted to make it a tally of endorsements for, oh, shall we call it “lifestyles?” You know, Danny (and likewise Kris, the dark horse bringing up the rear), the card-carrying Christian versus Adam the flamboyant one who hasn’t said he’s gay.
Let us pause to decode that snapshot of American pop culture. In social shorthand, those characterizations imply juxtapositions, i.e. a Christian can’t be flamboyant, and the one who “looks gay” can’t (or wouldn’t) be Christian; or, the one is restrained, temperate, and “good,” the other is … not. (Alternatively, the one is open, creative, and "good" -- while the other is not!)

Whatever. Moving on now, to real three-dimensional people, and the reason Adam Lambert and Kris Allen are important to our spiritual health.

Now, it is American Idol after all, folks: it is a popularity contest. And in the end, maybe the guyliner was a little more than America could stomach in its new American idol. But the punchline in this story is that it wasn’t squeaky-clean Danny whose votes ousted Adam. The showdown finale was between Kris and Adam – tagged respectively, Christian and flamboyant, yes, but demolishing the rules of American hit television by refusing to stay in their boxes.

I know next to nothing about Kris Allen’s non-musical life, except that he’s married, he calls himself Christian and he’s done missionary work across the world. I heard about the exchanges among the other contestants that made reference to what is supposedly “godly” and right in relationships, but Kris’s name wasn’t part of that. I don’t know what kind of Christianity he practises, or how he envisions his God. I do know this: he declares himself Christian to the television audience – i.e. to the world; and he freely, publicly, verbally, and especially non-verbally, loves Adam Lambert like a brother.

The blogosphere of Idol fans --"prolific" hardly suffices -- have dedicated millions of keystrokes to the warm relationship between Adam and Kris.
I needn't reiterate what everyone from Rickey.org to the New York Times and Ryan Seacrest have had to say about the contrasts between the two men. There’s the obvious: LA glamboy, Arkansas country boy; but also their personalities could not be more distinct. Kris was self-effacing even in his moment of triumph, while Adam was eating the Idol soundstage for lunch with Feelin' Good and Whole Lotta Love. Meanwhile they were assigned as roommates in the mansion midway through the season, and they obviously clicked.
They’ve both spoken freely about becoming friends, and joked publicly about their differences. Online fans have dubbed their relationship a "bromance," which is charming and maybe not inaccurate; nonetheless it is flip and much shallower than the bond that is apparent between them.
In an interview the day after the finale, Adam departed from the usual breezy soundbytes required of him to emphasize what he felt was most important about the competition -- that the friendship and respect between himself and Kris might be an example for others in transcending difference, for the reward of becoming enriched by it. Both of them become animated when they talk about how much their new friendship has meant to them. Still, their words never exceed generalities.

But pictures do.

One blogger dedicated a whole .jpg- and .gif-stuffed page to the story of the “bromance,” which brings together all the images (collated from a hundred other sources online) that speak more eloquently than any interview. Kris really isn’t much of a talker anyway, and Adam is nothing if not deliberate and professional in his public comments. But body language is like soul-talk, direct and poetic. Certainly between Adam and Kris, it has been.

Watching them together, both before and after the results, we saw no wariness or distance between them (compared with, say, Danny’s cold, take-no-prisoners duet with Kris). And heck, didja see those hugs?? Sure, there’s a lot of hugging on Idol, and I take most of it as genuine: the 5 months of competition are grueling, especially for the finalists, and I’m sure many of them feel a bit like comrades-in-arms. Certainly Kris and Adam must have felt like that.

But their physical way with each other is more than social or circumstantial.

And let me make this abundantly, loudly, perfectly clear: I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT ROMANTIC ATTRACTION. Kris obviously loves his adoring wife, and Adam is quite capable of feeling platonic love for other men, hey, just like regular folks. So let my words not be misconstrued in any way, shape or form. End of Disclaimer.

A brilliant (and hilariously insane) male blogger from the equally brilliant website Television Without Pity summed up the sub-cultural tremors we are feeling this way: And if that's the choice that America's handing us -- the choice between these two men who are soft, but manage to be anything but weak, and are the only two out of the whole Top Twelve you could say that about -- that's the best news I've heard in a long, long time.

Say amen, brother. It’s joyously evident that Kris has no qualms whatsoever about his trust in Adam, or about the message he’s sending to viewers. When they hugged, they hugged for real – there was none of the typical back-slapping not-too-close! hugs between men in public. To pick just one, there’s a telling moment in front of the press corps immediately after Kris’ win. Adam is patiently doing his post-episode 10-minute Q&A beside the Fox logo, when Kris comes around the corner into camera range and nearly tackles Adam with a broadside bear-hug. It’s spontaneous, genuine, and affectionate, for the world to see.

They’ve had each other’s backs. They’ve learned from each other, and they’ve advocated for each other. With and for each other they are respectful and generous. Open. Trusting. And loving.
Adam Lambert could not be happier for his friend, Kris Allen, American Idol 2009. And Kris Allen admires and celebrates the extraordinary gifts of his larger-than-life friend, Adam Lambert.

Kris Allen is my kind of Christian.

ORIGINAL OF THE SPECIES

Now, where were we before I was interrupted?

Hmm, I was having significant qualms about my relationship with my workplace and the work I was doing there, and then U2 came along and lit a fire underneath me about originality and authenticity, and speaking one’s own word truly and faithfully into the world. And then I quit my job and went on vacation.
Now the dust has settled, and I’ve returned to the job in retail from which I’d taken an indefinite leave (thank God for collective agreements). It is not a creative or powerful job, but it’s a good one that pays the mortgage and most importantly, pays my way through grad school.

The questioning I’d been doing about “authenticity” did not begin when I heard U2’s No Line on the Horizon… but it’s not unreasonable to say the album provided the beginning of some answers. The work I was doing for a year and a half (having taken a leave from school) was important work for social justice – but almost from the start of it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this job wasn’t mine to do. It felt like I was doing someone else’s work. So I constantly debated myself:
social justice! Just what you’ve wanted!
Countered by: But not this! My strongest skills – writing, speaking, teaching – aren’t even in play here!
-- But this work matters, affecting people where they live, in their day-to-day lives!
– but you want to open their eyes to their spirits, to examine what love really is, in their day-to-day lives …

And then there’s Bono, shouting to the world: Magnificent! I was born to sing for You – I didn’t have a choice… Daring to be original, daring to make his work in the world BIG. My biggest fear was that returning to my old job would make me, or my calling, smaller somehow. But now after a month back at it, nothing could be further from the truth. The retail job leaves me as soon as I leave it after 8 hours; my mind has room again for theology and creativity. This school year I will take 4 courses, which nearly completes the requirements for my degree. And I feel like myself again: I don’t feel like I’ve given myself away.
God’s call sometimes takes surprising forms, eh? I heard the call to do the work of God’s love in the world, and I thought I would know what it would look like. Intellectually I concluded that I’d landed in the right place to develop an appropriate form of “ministry” (not to be mistaken for traditional evangelism!) in the secular world. But my heart, my guts – my frustration – kept informing me otherwise. An unexpected but very rich lesson. God kept calling, even after I thought I had “found what I’m looking for.” And it took me awhile, but I listened – not knowing for sure that everything would be hunky-dory on the other side of it – but it couldn’t be ignored. And now, I couldn’t be happier.
I have no regrets, mind you: certainly the experience and skills I gained on the job are invaluable. My mistake was in thinking that I’d reached my destination. Apparently I’m still on my way there…
… in some very good company. (see below!)

If I could, you know I would...

6. A LOVE YOU CAN'T DEFEAT

Entering the final movement of the album, things turn kind of cinematic ... Word-pictures blend vivid snapshots with hard reflections on the trajectory of one’s life. I’ve heard that White As Snow is destined for use in a film about a soldier in Afghanistan. I try to avoid such information in advance of hearing a song, but this is one of those cases where it really does enhance what is already powerful in it.

O Come O Come Emmanuel, for starters – the melody on which this lovely, painful song is based. U2 has never done such a thing -- borrowed a traditional tune, or been so direct in Christian references. You can't help but think of The First Time, an equally audacious gospel reflection on … well, cynicism, really; plainspoken and purely sung in an era of irony and overkill, I know that The First Time is a touchstone for many Christians among U2’s fanbase. White as Snow takes on a third-person voice – clearly, as Bono describes a childhood landscape that is nothing like Ireland – of someone far from home … and far from the certainty he once knew. If only a heart could be as white as snow…

Many years ago through a dark night of the soul, I heard Amazing Grace in the most unlikely, incongruous setting. Having run off to a strange town where I knew no one, I attended a dinner theatre for a one-woman show about the life and music of Janis Joplin. I like Janis for all kinds of reasons, and I certainly needed the input of a ballsy artist at that point in my life. But when out of the blue (or out of Janis’ own dark night), the singer-actress offered up Amazing Grace … I was so overcome I sobbed through the last 20 minutes of the show. Way back then, I had no idea what a hold the Holy Spirit had on me. I only knew that the song touched a very raw and defenseless place in my soul.

I’m a little more self-aware now … but just the same, when Bono the carefully nonsectarian activist poet sings Who can forgive…?/Only the lamb as white as snow, to an ancient devotional tune, I’m unprepared. Like Amazing Grace that night – when somebody else, especially a distant stranger, reaches into the intimacy that Christ shares with me (as with each of us) there is no covering my nakedness. There is no other response but to weep. This song tells the truth about the pain of distance from our faith ... or more to the point, about our loneliness for God. Bono's measured, unaffected performance is a gift (if he'll indulge me) of faithful confession.
The road refuses strangers
The land, the seeds we sow
Where might we find the lamb as white as snow?

The nearly-final song makes the big noise that we're more accustomed to from U2: guitar and keyboard capturing the world's teetering, flailing off-balance me-mania -- I wasn’t gonna buy just anyone’s cockatoo…Would you?? -- And then flooding it with the light of our choice to love.
Breathe – I know the title’s been used elsewhere, but no other song sounds like this. It truly came alive when I caught the band’s appearances on Letterman, to introduce this material. It was spectacular – Bono was working to reach those new notes, but throwing his body from a jaded sneer into this gospel shout:
Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn/Every day I have to find the courage to walk out into the street with arms out/Got a love you can’t defeat, Neither down nor out…

Countercultural in all the best senses, the song careens through a tour of a slippery, slimy, frantic world that tries to tell you who to be, and what to buy to get there. It takes work, brothers and sisters, to be in the world but not of it, you have to think about it, you need courage, like he says, and in the end you’ll remember --There’s nothing you have that I need/I can breathe, breathe now…What a defiant, fireworks finish to an extraordinary ride.

How scary is the world, anyway? What’s it gonna do to you? Choose the finest risk of all, choose love – as loud as you can.
Walk out, into the sunburst street
Sing your heart out, sing my heart out
I’ve found grace inside a sound
I found grace, it’s all that I found


BONO, ADAM, LARRY, EDGE: NAMASTE, BROTHERS

…Let me in the sound: I found grace, it’s all that I found…
He actually said that. And I thrill every time I hear him shout it, every time I recall the sheer size of the performance I saw on TV… they are as thrilled with this music as I am, I think. They should be. It feels like vision has broken open, and the Light is getting in. The ghosts aren’t real.
I’ve found grace inside a sound…
And I can breathe
Breathe now

...



But unexpectedly, the album ends on a coda, the evocative Cedars of Lebanon. On first hearing, I wasn’t so sure I liked the abrupt turn away from the road we’d just travelled. It didn’t take long for the song’s hard-bitten ironies and pensive insights to hook me, though. Bono’s deadpan talk-singing wrapped in silky, undulating layers of sound – and punctuated by that same floating “Sunshine…” chorus from Unknown Caller. As an alienated reporter ponders the spiritual contribution of his enemies, voices from above implore, Return the call to home…
This story’s not over yet.

THE STRENGTH OF HEAVEN: ST PATRICKS BREASTPLATE

The Pilgrim's Path (Clonmacnoise, Ireland)

St Patrick was a great evangelist, because he spoke the language of the people he served.

(a non-trinitarian adaptation of the prayer traditionally attributed to him.)




I arise today Through the strength of heaven;

Light of the sun,
Splendor of fire,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of the sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.


I arise today Through God's strength to pilot me;
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's hand to guard me.

Afar and anear,
Alone or in a multitude.
Christ shield me today
Against wounding:

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in me.


I arise today Through the mighty strength Of the Lord of Creation.

Amen.
Happy St Patrick's Day.

4. FREE ME FROM THE DARK DREAM

Act II... A respite. Three songs filled with light and levity, and music that is (at this point) comfortingly recognizable. But even the fun is in the service of something higher. I Know I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight is a sweetly cajoling call to "Lighten up, everybody!" Because the work of changing the world is hard, long work and you know what? We need spiritual and emotional nourishment.

Every beauty needs to go out with an idiot/How can you stand next to the truth and not see it? For all its cheekiness, Bono fills this song with beautiful couplets apparently inspired by all those footsoldiers in the NGOs, in DATA, in Children of Chernobyl... A change of heart comes slow/it's not a hill, it's a mountain when you start out the climb... Listen for me, I’ll be shouting/Shouting to the darkness/Squeeze out sparks of light...It needn't be dour work, people! Let joy be our sustenance.

Then it's a tumble into the outrageous and visionary Get On Your Boots. After a couple of hearings (before the album's release) I picked up the roll-up-your-sleeves message in the title...it took a few more listens to hear what else is going on.

I think we're revisiting Mysterious Ways, and dozens of other more oblique references to the Divine Feminine -- and the divine in the feminine. Never seen a moon like this... I can't help thinking of Ali, Bono’s radiant wife, in a song like this. I think Bono referred to her once as an inspiration for When I Look at the World, a more sombre meditation on how "you" see things so differently from me. The spirit of Get On Your Boots is similarly deferent, but we should probably add, goofy as only men can be goofy around a beautiful woman. Satan loves a bomb scare but it won't scare you ...

Women of the world, unite! you have nothing to lose but a whole world in chains. It's great fun but also a great homage ... Bossy boots, yeah! (And no, I don’t take that as disparaging.)

Stand Up Comedy carries on subverting political slogans: Come on, ye people, stand up for your love. Love and beauty really are the greatest political causes. I LOVE IT. Say ‘amen,’ somebody! How can you not grin like an idiot to this song?
I feel compelled to comment on what I hear are criticisms of our Rock Star deluxe for comparing himself to Napoleon. I won’t pretend to know Bono’s mind, but Bonaparte happens to be a favourite subject of mine, and the natural (intended) association I made with
Stand up to rock stars
Napoleon is in high heels
Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas…
was with Napoleon’s imperial ego! He would have loved to be a rock star, are you kidding? The great “man of the people” declared himself Emperor once he took the stage. Hug Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me made a similar, if darker, point. And by the way, Bono isn't exactly a strapping lad himself. Like the man says: Lighten up, people.

Bono gets in a couple of other digs that I personally really enjoy, because they do have serious substance underlying them: But while I’m getting over certainty/Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady. Bull’s-eye! He sings (making like a choir way off in the distance), God is love/And love is evolution’s very best day.

God and evolution in the very same sentence, how ‘bout that? Again I say, AMEN, brother! There’s an emerging concept of God out there that says, Reality is a fluid, relational, ever-changing dynamic – not a fixed order of existence. It says that God is the process of change itself, not the static Absolute around which things change. And that same school of thought/faith says we have to learn to accept ambiguity and uncertainty. "Truth" is not the point: perfect love and thriving life is the point. Love and the urge to newness is God’s nature. This notion of God suggests that God is becoming-ness, rather than static being-ness. Uncertainty is holy – get used to it.

There is more than one affirmation of uncertainty on this record. There are many acknowledgements of being born, and reborn … And it is not talking about being “born again” in the popular and misleading sense. (That’s a problematic theology we’ll discuss another time.) It is about growing, reaching past the known, about "being busy being born," as Dylan says it. God is a fresh encounter every day. This album is all about the shock of that, about both the treasure and the cost of being made new in God's love -- or new in Christ, as we say in my tradition.

Only love can leave such a mark.
Only love can heal such a scar.

3. THAT I MAY SPEAK

Like One; like I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For; like Bad, Moment of Surrender is a moment perfectly distilled -- musically, prayerfully, vocally, it will pierce you to your core. It captures brokenness, the collapse of the illusion that we are independent. It touches the profound compassion the band called up for Bad (a revelation in Rattle and Hum); the difference is that while the older song came from a friend looking on helplessly, the new song comes out of the one who is broken.

What have they done? What Grace touched them, all 6 of them, to create in music the sound of a soul in ecstatic disintegration? They say they did it in one take! That's raw, that's live -- Bono’s voice is choked with all the fears and burdens of living too long in one’s skin, of trying too hard; his pleas are naked and raw against a heartbeat bass and a pulsing organ … until each chorus resolves into an unbearable sweetness -- at the moment of surrender I folded to my knees… accompanied by a harmony of men, a little like angels. I did not notice the passers-by, and they did not notice me…

what is that moment of surrender? Is it, as in Bad, an addict hitting bottom, finally giving up the delusion? Is it the sound of a resurrection, a whisper of eternal joy reaching in from Paradise? Is it death … or is it new birth, in the shock of love, in humility? I was speeding on the subway through the stations of the cross/every eye looking every other way, counting down ‘til the pain will stop… It reads like a song of despair, perhaps, but it sounds… oh dear God, it sounds like a hymn of absolution. The greatest terror we can know is the crumbling of the self, even as we are yearning to break free.

This extraordinary music is...how to say it?? like a glimpse of Heaven – of vision over visibility – a soul in terror collapses, and is lifted up, fleetingly, into homecoming and peace.

The wordless cries, the chanting through the last break recall Peter Gabriel's elegy for Steven Biko. Somehow it is not an inappropriate allusion.

And still the song ends on a fading dissonant chord, hovering in the tension between autonomy and surrender – between will and Grace – not pretending to resolve it.

I have never felt more exposed before God.


How do you follow a sequence like that? The first time I listened to this record, I was tingling, almost shivering after those three songs. But the fourth one made sense. Sunshine, sunshine… apropos of nothing, that gentle opening phrase brings you back to yourself, to meet yourself and to have a chat … with an Unknown Caller. Edge’s guitar recalls that giant victory riff from Walk On – yet this is a song not about walking through an open door, but about hitting a wall. It contemplates the limits of the flesh, and possibilities of the Spirit. All these songs roam all around the unseen and the ineffable, while touching down naturally on the concrete and mundane. Force quit, and move to Trash … You can have a moment of surrender at a bank machine. God reaches you on an unconnected cell phone. Prayer is a password: you know your name so punch it in … God is calling, to remind us of joy, of the still small voice, of new birth … and of God. Restart, and reboot yourself/you’re free to go. It’s whimsical and loving, all at the same time.

Having taken me to the heights and to the depths, they have deposited me lightly back on earth – with a mighty tabernacle amen echoing -- or is that a memory? -- high off in the distance.

2. MAGNIFICAT

The album seems to unfold in three acts … for a full 25 minutes, the first four tracks comprise a suite that is as masterful as it is epic. This really is a musical journey...
The second song roars in with this clubby, techno Popmart-y shimmer, and then Bono croons, I was born to be with you... I was born to sing for you... and then heating up, he sings fiercely, Justified, till we die, you and I will magnify the Magnificent... it’s a Pentecostal moment, lemme tell you. It’s as if Bono’s hallelujah chorus at the end of Walk On was just a foreshadowing of this burst of Light.
Y’know, once upon a time, a young man grasping for words sang, Oh Lord, loosen my lips ... Twenty-eight years later, that boy is a man who is not begging for God to give him something to say, but instead has turned his voice over, to sing whatever song you wanted me to.

It gives me a chill, to hear him overflow with it like this – I remember having an epiphany one afternoon while sitting at my computer and listening to the B-sides of ’80-’90. Everlasting Love, the old Sixties hit, had seemed such a bizarre track to include, let alone record for a band like U2 who don’t do covers. And then --*ping!* suddenly I got it: Everlasting Love was a PRAISE SONG from them – and suddenly Bono’s breathless performance made perfect sense! He sang with a rush of joy, almost giddiness. After that I could listen to that track for hours at a time, like a mantra.

Magnificent is a different kind of praise: it’s grown-up. It’s humble. But it is also a rush of joy. It’s a celebration of knowing God will use you for God’s purposes – not your own: you and I will magnify...is there any finer prayer?? and the dizzying beat will make your blood rush as you listen to this rough man of faith in unapologetic adoration. I can already feel the moment when I join 50,000 other faithful in shouting that refrain along with him … come on, you’re gonna throw your hands in the air with me. I rejected my family's Pentecostalism out of sheer adolescent embarrassment, but I confess it sure comes natural under the right conditions.

Magnificent, indeed.

But that’s only 10 minutes in -- you will still not catch your breath, because Moment of Surrender is ...
Well. Moment of Surrender is a song you must hear before you read anyone else's response to it. If you plan to get the record, then stop reading and come back later. Let your response be as personal as mine was, and is.

But you must know: Moment of Surrender is something special.

1. I KNOW A GIRL WHO'S LIKE A SEA

Heavy guitars, intense sound. Grinding at the bottom and soaring overhead. Bono is doing things with his voice that are new, elastic, exciting. He hasn't sounded this good since Achtung Baby, before he had health issues with his throat. I never thought we'd get to hear him way out here again -- he's pushing himself, hurtling himself into these songs. It's exhilarating.

U2 has never disappointed with an album's opening track, and this is no different -- the first song, No Line on the Horizon, is deceiving with a little electronic hum for its opening measure, and then an onslaught of Edge lets you know you have entered a U2 world of a different shape...
The sounds coming out of them in this record are new. The songs occasionally nod to the past -- Edge's chiming guitars… Bono's crying tenor …plus Eno's swirling atmospherics -- but only to make their present impact stronger... They are not the same band they were in the Eighties: Larry and Adam have become a powerhouse rhythm section that adds an earthiness and structural grandeur they never had in the old days.

The new album's first single, Get On Your Boots, is a funky attention-getter (just like Vertigo was for Atomic Bomb), an unorthodox sound for them ... But so is everything else on the new album! I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight could sit comfortably on All that You Can't Leave Behind, and maybe Stand Up Comedy could have come from Atomic Bomb. But everything else is at the Unforgettable Fire level of experimentation, and at the Achtung Baby level of substance. And I should add, at the Joshua Tree level of soul.

No Line on the Horizon is no small achievement. I can't help feeling things are different for them -- they actually added Eno and Lanois to the songwriting credits. Maybe that’s a belated acknowledgement of their longtime collaboration; maybe it’s a new way of being in the studio. In either case, U2 sounds like they have stretched, like they are new to themselves... like they are discovering new music within them, rather than honing sounds they've already learned. It's thrilling to hear.

And conceptually: these songs are challenging, and often powerfully impressionistic without being abstract... Bono the lyricist is on his game here. Much less cleverness, much greater poetic reach. The message of disorientation from the girl who's like a sea...always changing every day for me is not about feeling dizzy -- it's about how things in (H)er world are not measured according to the same gauges we are used to. "Time is irrelevant, it's not linear," then she put her tongue in my ear... Bono's tense protestations as he tries to figure her out give way to a low, unison chorus intoning, No line on the horizon, no line.

So just let go -- just let go! and you will be moved...

GLORIA EXULTATE (REWIND)

The last time I felt like this, I was sitting in a car on a romantic lookout with a [platonic] soulmate, each in respectful silence while the other absorbed the spiritual journey we had just shared … It was the spring of 1987, and my friend had come by my place and said, “You have to hear this.” He had the new U2 cassette in his car, so I piled in for a long drive and he put on The Joshua Tree.

I think I listened to that album every single day for 2 years … Prior to that, I had spent most of 1983 with War, U2’s third album, while trying to learn how to be an adult in the world. The hook in that addictively listenable album was those defiant, unlikely references to scripture… I scarcely acknowledged it at the time, but their Top Ten hit, Sunday Bloody Sunday, along with those other lyrics scattered through the album, were a huge affirmation of the Sacred in the world … in my world. The real battle just begun to claim the victory Jesus won …
And they had already scored a hit a couple years earlier with Gloria -- not a song about a girl, but a Latin liturgical prayer! Gloria, in te Domine [in you, Lord]...
Who says that on MTV??

Hold on, hold on tightly
Rise up, rise up
With wings like eagles
You'll run, you'll run
You'll run and not grow weary …from Drowning Man;

If I want to live
I've got to die to myself someday … from Surrender ( -- surrender! That’s not very rock’n’roll, now is it??)

And of course, War's closing track, ‘40,’ U2’s rock’n’roll paraphrase of Psalm 40. Clearly, here was a young band who made music not only with a pelvic thrust, but also with a big heart and a restless intellect. So I was primed for The Joshua Tree when it arrived a couple albums later … but I wasn’t prepared for it. It is no overstatement to say: it changed me.

The great thing about not being 25 years old anymore, is that you get the rich benefits of your own history … Like Springsteen, U2 has been a companion on my journey since I was barely out of high school. Bruce is a generation older than me; the guys in U2 are my contemporaries. Makes for an interesting relationship with an artist [collective], who continue to produce relevant work. I have been watching their movie for more than 25 years, and they have been participating in mine. That longevity is meaningful, it weights everything I hear from them. I will never pretend to hear their new music “objectively,” because it is inevitably a new chapter in an ongoing saga – theirs and mine. That is as it should be.

Now it's 22 years and 7 albums after The Joshua Tree altered my world, and we've come to expect the unexpected from U2. They shocked us in 1991 with Achtung! Baby. They scandalized the rock world in ’97 with a so-called “dance” album, Pop (it wasn’t), and a costly, over-conceptualized tour. They “came back” in 2001 with a sweet rockin’ soul album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, forever bound to us all for its healing powers right after 9/11.

In the years since, Bono turned in earnest to his political advocacy for Africa, and the band released How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. That album was as close to a conventional rock record as U2 had ever made, tight on structure, low on irony, and more explicitly theological than we’d heard before, thanks to the prayerful power-hit Vertigo, the Top 40 worship song, All Because of You, and the unequivocal Yahweh. Every single song on it knocked standard rock songwriting off its ass, but the album as a whole never did completely capture my heart.

With a new album, maybe I was expecting some more intelligent, kick-ass, spiritually literate rock’n’roll, a sort of All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Part III. I hoped to like it, because I trust them, wherever they might take me.

I presumed too much, presumed to know them too well. No Line On the Horizon is not a record that pleases me.
It’s a record that breaks me apart. And then offers up all the pieces in prayer.
I wasn't prepared for this.