All Because of You, I Am
It is a unique phenomenon for sure. You need to be in the high echelons of rock n roll for twenty five years before they will consider inducting you into their Hall of Fame. No band has ever been inducted in the same month that their current tour broke box office records. U2 are legends but at the same time the hottest new thing! This Dublin band has quite an extraordinary story. Then you add that they are Christians and that their singer is a political activist literally trying to Make Poverty History and the story gets thrown another intrigue. We could write a book about how their faith and music and social justice agenda intertwine (in fact I have!). To cut to a long story short let us home in on the last encore of the recent Vertigo Tour and from that narrow focus uncover their deep spiritual centre and then how South African theology has shaped their recent work and maybe the entire Vertigo Tour.
The last three songs in U2’s set list as they tracked across America and Europe has most nights taken two song sequences. In north America it was All Because Of You followed by Yahweh and 40. In Europe they have dropped 40 and gone back to the first song, starting and finishing the gig with the first single from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, Vertigo. U2 never throw a set list together, nor are they only interested in starting musically high, dipping down and climbing towards crowd pleasing crescendo. Every moment of a U2 live concert is meticulously mapped out like a theatre show. The lights, the spoken links, the back drop visuals, the sequences of songs. This is a band with an intensity of intention. So why finish with these three songs?
Well the north American version could be seen as literally a testimony, a prayer and a Psalm. All three find their roots in the Old Testament Scriptures. The complete line of the chorus is “All Because Of You I Am” and has a plethora of meanings as is a custom in Bono’s songwriting. However, those eagle-eyed Christians who speculated on whether the I am could be the name I AM that God uses for himself in his engagement with Moses at the Burning Bush are absolutely right. There is a clue to this in the book edition of the album which hint that an original lyric might have been “Take off your shoes/Who are you said Moses to the Burning Bush/I am the great I am/All because of You/All because of you.”
From one Old Testament title for God to another as the prayer Yahweh officially finishes the concert. This could be seen almost as a rewrite of the old hymn “Take My Life and let it be consecrated Lord to thee.” It is a prayer of commitment and has perhaps the most un-rock n roll ending to a concert or album that there ever has been. Here are these four men, among the richest and most famous on the planet, working in an industry that is supposedly all about the wanton hedonism of sex and drugs and party. What is their punch line? With U2 the punch line is a prayer that Yahweh would “take this heart, take this heart, take this heart… and make it break…” And they move quickly into their version of the Psalm 40. It is an upside down message, a radical jarring of what is expected.
There was a period of time where I thought that changing 40 to Vertigo changed the dynamic. I even wondered if U2 were doing what I am arguing they don’t do and finishing thoughtlessly with the hit! It was at Live 8 that I realized the errors of my ways. Vertigo is a sonic explosion of spiritual shrapnel pummeling the soul with every line. It is dizzy with the temptations and dark whirlpool of choices, the devil’s seductive promise of everything with no one getting hurt if you give in to him and a crucifix round a girl’s neck bringing rescue and salvation. It ends as Yahweh with the rock star learning life’s most necessary lesson “how to kneel…how to kneel.” It might be louder in noise and faster in beat but it is another U2 prayer of humility.
For some the depth of this spiritual message might come as surprise. Many will drop me an email to tell that they can’t believe that U2 are Christians. Much more frightening, for me, are those who say that they have been listening to the band for years and never knew that they were Christians. My fear is not so much what they haven’t heard in U2’s lyrics BUT what else in the world of hedonistic pop music they have let through their soul’s radar. Marshall McLuhan once said that “anyone who thinks there is a difference between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.” Entertainment whether film, soap opera, novel, play, advertisement or song has all got something to say and Christians need to listen and watch with the Bible constantly caressing and colliding with the messages that are shaping the spirit of the age. Complacency is dangerous and a more acute listening will be of real value in forming faith and contextualizing faith into the contemporary world. As I tell me students – every movie, novel and album is a chance for Bible study asking what the Bible has to say about every issue raised.
To miss the message of U2 over the past 25 years is a sad loss. This is a band that has come out of a sheltered evangelical and charismatic fellowship Church to try and make sense of their faith in the big bad world they found themselves in. If the eighties were about that then the nineties were about trying to expose the senselessness of the world and to warn against the dangers of unchecked television and consumerism. They have said themselves that in the eighties they sang about what they believed and in the nineties about what they didn’t believe in. The turn of the millennium saw them reverse again and be much more explicit about their Christian faith. Themes like heaven and grace were very evident on their 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind and the 2001 Elevation Tour had people waxing lyrical about transcendence and Church. Last year’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was full of prayers and spiritual depth charges. Bono even stepped into the evangelical world with talks at Wheaton College and lots of Churches as well as endorsing Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Bible – The Message.
In April of this year a book called “Bono In Conversation with Assayas Michka” was published and it became the clearest statement yet of Bono’s Christian beliefs. Assayas is a French journalist who has known the band since 1980 and has a relationship with Bono that allows him to ask tough questions but he is also skeptical enough particularly about Bono’s Christianity to not just set Bono up to say what he likes. There are some wonderful engagements about the divinity of Jesus where Bono takes on CS Lewis’s apologetics, there are clear explanations too about grace and the cross and how the two connect and are our only hope.
The book also sends hints about Bono’s many Christian influences. He name checks the Biblical pacifism of Martin Luther King, the Liberation theology of Oscar Romero in El Salvador and the South African influences of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Though I see Martin Luther King very much present in U2’s 2005 Vertigo Tour I believe it is the latter men who we need to look to find the engine that drives the message of these concerts.
When I came to name the chapter that I wrote about the Vertigo Tour the only word that I could use was EVERYONE. As the band take the stage that word is ringing out across the PA and the rest of the show is about unity, equality, oneness. The song One itself takes on a new dimension. There is a dramatic eerie shift in the show where Bono during Bullet the Blue Sky and Running To Stand Still wears a bandana which comes down over his eyes as a mock blindfold to enact the torture being carried out among the different ancestors of Abraham. The moon of Islam becomes a C. The star of David becomes an X and the cross of Christ becomes a T to spell out COEXIST. It is not about all religions being the same, it is about finding a common Father in Abraham and saying we need to stop what we are doing to one another these thousands of years on.
Africa is central to the Vertigo mandate. Bono’s campaigning for Debt relief, trade justice and a response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic is again fired by his following of Jesus but meets his music full on during this tour. When it comes to Where The Streets Have No Name there is the most amazing mass of colours dropping down the millions of multicoloured light bulbs that make up the band’s back drop. All the flags of Africa keep on descending in the most moving of light shows. During this Bono makes his claim, “From the swamp lands of Louisiana to the high hills of Kilimanjaro, from the bridge at Selma to the mouth of the Nile…AFRICA…AFRICA…AFRICA…the journey of equality moves on, moves on…AFRICA…from town centres to townships…sacred ground, proving ground…” The link between the Doctor of the deep south’s inequality to the Archbishop and President of Africa’s inequality are joined.
As I watched the show in Vancouver, Canada I found myself in tears as the South African flag appeared on the screen. Then there was a moment of revelation as I came to believe that it was from that country that this entire thesis originated. Let me take you from Vancouver 2005 to Cape Town in their dry, sunny winter of 2004. No matter where we went it was the word on everyone’s lips. A township discussion in Guguletu, a sermon in another township Masiphumelele and in the much plusher offices of the vice chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Alex Boraine in Claremont. We were the Northern Ireland Chaplaincy group looking for some answers as to how South Africa has progressed in the decade after democracy. Most important of all why had the oppressed 80+% not retaliated against their oppressor but woed much of their youth to ride down the Rainbow towards a rich eclectic nation of true promise. Ubuntu everyone said.
So we got home and compared notes. What did Ubuntu actually mean? Had we taken down any definitions? “I can only be me through you.” “I am me through you” “A person is a person through other people.” “I cannot be fully human without you.” We got the drift and the truth was profoundly powerful. A people who believe in the importance of the other person even their enemies being crucial for the authenticity of their humanity will show unbelievable tolerance, forgiveness and grace to everyone. We were still longing for a more succinct definition though.
A few months later many of the same group of people are home from Cape Town and in the Queens University Chaplaincy in Belfast they are having a communal first listen to the new U2 album how To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. And there it is. Track 6 – “All Because Of You I Am”. Now there is a perfect definition of that Ubuntu thing. We are back to that song where Bono is declaring first and foremost his dependence on God. He speaks of being a child of grace. He declares his belief that God can make him perfect again. Yet, in the context of the Vertigo Tour it is even more than that. I firmly believe that this then moves out from his dependence on God to his dependence on those around him. It could be Ali his wife who without doubt has been a reason that Bono has become who he is. I believe though that it goes wider than that again into his new understanding and adoption of Ubuntu. Bono told, Chicago Sun journalist, Cathleen Fulsani how Archbishop Desmond Tutu had introduced him to the idea of Ubuntu. He said, "Essentially, what it means is 'I am because we are.' And it's about the interdependence, how we need each other and we have a stake in each other. One part of the community can't thrive truly while the other part of the community is in the dirt. In tending to them, we will be better off ourselves. It's that simple. Ubuntu."
Ubuntu has its roots in Xhosa philosophy. Yet, it is profoundly a Biblical concept that challenges the individualistic selfishness of our modern western world. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself.” On this Jesus told us all the laws of God are kept. This, the Jewish child learned, was his purpose in life. Without it the world falls apart and inequality will destroy our humanness. As Bono’s mock torture or reference to racism in Louisiana or Apartheid in South Africa or division in Northern Ireland. Bono recognizes that only when the child dying on the Cape Town township is perceived as equal to the child living in plush wealthy Washington DC suburb will we make Poverty History.
The Biblical idea of interdependence, captured in Africa’s idea of Ubuntu was the secret of how Nelson Mandela reconciled his people with the violent criminals of the cruel white oppressor in post apartheid South Africa. Co-existence was vital not only to the peace of the nation but to the very identity of his people. Archbishop Tutu took Ubuntu the springboard of his thinking and turned it into a theology that the world needs to hear, waken up to and start living. U2 have heard it and are spreading the word – “all Because of you I am.” Everyone! Everyone being one is crucial to the wholeness of our humanity.
Back
