A good gig in heaven?

U2 are back on our Billboards, back in our magazines, back on our radios, back on MTV. The release of a greatest hits album (The Best Of U2 1980-90) and a live video (Pop Mart) means that there will be a lot of talk about this band over the next few months. The Christian community are never absent from the discussion. Since their explosion on to the rock scene from a charismatic Dublin based house fellowship called Shalom, Christendom has always been opinionated on U2's spiritual state. Prophets or Christian boys who lost their way? Can the Church claim the best rock band in the world as their own? Can we look forward to quite a gig up there in glory or are we going to have to settle for less than what's best? Did U2, who started off so zealously and evangelical, lose their way? Or did they just grow up? In a recent interview with a Belfast journalist (sadly not this one), guitarist The Edge said that their faith had changed very little over the past 20 years. So what is the problem? Why the intrigue?

A strong clue to the heart of U2's entire career lies it seems to me in the lines of a song that is tucked away, track 10, on the limited edition b-sides compilation available with the Best Of. It is a song called Luminous Times and though not as catchy as other outtakes from their Joshua Tree period, such as Spanish Eyes or Sweetest Thing, this lyric deserves a little bit of work. This song is a yearning prayer and call of allegiance by someone struggling with the pressures of life closing in. Hold on to love is the advice to himself and his audience. Near the end of a meandering moody and haunting track Bono allows us to squint into his soul.

"I love you because I understand/God has given me your hand/He holds me in His tiny fist/Still I need your kiss/Hold on to love"

And there for me is the key that unlocks the seeming confusion. Here are a band, three of whom are Christians, who are very much aware of God's hold upon their lives but even though that vertical relationship is assured they are still wrestling with the insecurities of the world in which they live in. Knowing God loves us is pivotal to any life of faith but it does not make us exempt to the pushes and pulls of a life living as a fallen human being within a world of fallen people. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For has a similar theme based on the foundational doctrinal treasures of "You broke the bonds/Loosed the chains/Carried the cross/ And my shame/You know I believe it/But I still haven't found what I am looking for".

After a decade of songs about faith in a God who holds them in their tiny fist as heard in songs like I Will Follow, Tomorrow, Gloria, 40 (the latter three sad omissions from The Best Of...)and I Still haven't Found What I'm Looking For, U2 felt it was time to look at it all from a different angle. They are artists and artists need to always be imaginative and reinvent themselves. At the Point Theatre in Dublin on New Year's Eve 1989 Bono had said that they were going away to dream it up again. That is what they did and the next decade was spent looking at that need for the girl's kiss.

The past decade as revealed on the new live video of the Pop Mart tour and no doubt to be released at the end of the year 2000 as U2 Best of 1991-1999 was more about the horizontal struggles. What kind of world do we live in? How much say does the media play in our soul's development or destruction? Where is Jesus in the midst of it all? It is not a shift in belief it is a shift on where the light of faith is shining upon. From the worship of October to the western culture of the late 20th century being put under the scrutiny of men who have lived their lives following the radical alternative who is Jesus Christ.

There is the story that Bono told Joe Jackson from the Irish Times after the ZooTV Tour when a girl had got up to dance with Bono on stage and inquired if he was still a Christian. Bono asked why she was worried and she replied that he was dressing up as the devil on stage. Bono wondered if she'd ever read CS Lewis' Screwtape letters and the penny dropped. The Screwtape Letters was a way that CS Lewis exposed the work of the devil by taking on his persona. In the video for the Batman theme Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me, Bono's cartoon character is knocked down by a car and as he falls to the ground a book flies from his hand. the camera zooms in and you've guessed it - The Screwtape Letters. Bono throwing a few clues out to non thinking Christians.

So what conclusion? Are they still held in God's tiny fist? A must read is Bill Flanagan's At The End Of The World. Near the end of the book he confronts them about faith and how it doesn't seem as zealous as the early days. They are not so much expected to make Soap Box statements anymore. Bono responds "It's a nicely freeing position to be into have nobody expecting it from us. We've found different ways of expressing it and recognised the power of the media to manipulate such signs. It's there for people who are interested. It shouldn't be there for people who aren't. I think the Spirit will become the important thing over the next 10 years, when it becomes clear that God is not dead. Nietzsche is." Flanagan sums the whole book up by saying "A singer becomes a soul singer when he decides to reveal rather than conceal. For all the sunglasses and photo approval and image shaping that they have learned, U2 still believe in their hearts that the truth will justify and set them free. They still reveal everything when they play their songs. They are soul singers now."

Justification and freedom in a world of sin and bondage. That's what U2 are all about. Isn't that a bit like life?

(an interesting aside to this piece is Bono's recommendation of Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, in his review of 1998 which appeared in February '99's edition of Q magazine)

Back