Tryin' to throw your arms around the world (3)

All That You Can’t Leave Behind

To understand this spirituality and its embodiment more fully I wish to examine its underpinning concepts and biographical roots.

The keynote of U2’s spirituality is affirmation. Hoskyns summed up this central aspect when he wrote:

“U2 do for him [Hoskyns] the most that any pop music can do, which is to fill the head with glorious noise and CELEBRATE LIFE NOW. For ‘I Will Follow’, ‘Gloria’, ‘New Year’s Day’ and ‘Pride’, perhaps the four most uplifting anthems in the history of pop, he takes U2 “seriously”.”

Fundamentally what U2 do is to make hopeful, celebratory, anthemic music. ‘Beautiful Day’, the opening track on All That You Can’t Leave Behind, was a significant song for the band because it heralded a return to what they do best. Accordingly, that album opens with classic U2 chords and a lyric celebrating the beauty of the world. Their affirmative stance, however, is not a straightforward love of all that is around them and does not result in a simplistic spirituality. There are contradictory affirmations that underpin the celebratory ethos of their spirituality.

First, they affirm the possibility of transformation through grace. Bono has said, “The most powerful idea that's entered the world in the last few thousand years - the idea of grace - is the reason I would like to be a Christian”. In their view, grace is a forgiving, healing, transforming force that leaves its own parameters in order to change the world:

“What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things”.

They celebrate the possibility of becoming one, of building a bridge between the sea and land, of coming home, of going where the streets have no name and, of believing in the Kingdom Come when all the colours will bleed into one. Theirs is a Philippians 4: 8 and Via Positiva type of spirituality, one in which everything can be affirmed because everything can be transformed by grace.

Second, theirs is an affirmation of the ugliness and failure in a world, and in people like themselves, needing the transformations that grace brings. They recognise, acknowledge and affirm their failings and inability. These are part of the reality of human nature, the reality of themselves. They affirm, too, because that acknowledgement is necessary for grace to begin its transformative work. So, they sing of falling down, of being out of control, of losing their way in the shadows where boy meets man, of falling from the sheer face of love like a fly from a wall. In common with the Psalms, they mourn and rail at the pain and division experienced in the world - Ireland’s bloody Sunday, El Salvador’s bullets in the blue sky and Argentina’s Mother’s of the Disappeared.

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U2 - Grace.