Tryin' to throw your arms around the world (7)

I Will Follow

In looking to explore reasons why U2’s spirituality communicates effectively within popular culture I wish to focus on three factors: contextualisation, postmodernism and inclusivity.

U2’s spirituality emerges in the course of their work and is embodied within their context, the entertainment business. What is primarily being sold and bought is not spirituality, but music. Making music is their job and, for millions like me, it is a job that they do well enhancing our lives with music that is affirmative and uplifting. Their spirituality is expressed and embodied within their work and the fact that the order is this way around means that their spirituality is shared, not sold. The Church, though, has often been more concerned about ‘The Message’ than it has about either the means of conveying the message or the context within which it is to be received. The result has been that people encountering the Church do not feel that anything has been shared with them. Instead they feel that they have been sold something which, instinctively they feel, should not be sold.

An additional problem is in determining the context within which the Church is attempting to communicate and embody spirituality. Is it primarily communicating through local communities at the parish level or as a national church communicating through the national media? Both require different strategies and what is appropriate in one context is often inappropriate, impacting negatively, in the other.

One possible way out of this dilemma, is to focus not on the Church as organisation (whether local or national) but on the Church as people and those contexts within which the people who form the Church live and work. The Church as organisation would then exist to help the Church as people develop effective spiritualities within their specific contexts. One of the disappointing aspects of the U2 story is that their church was unable to help them do this, instead forcing them into an unnecessary dilemma in which they felt forced to choose between their faith and their vocation.

In developing their spirituality while establishing themselves within the music industry, U2 have contextualised their spirituality and have been concerned to make their use of the medium consistent with their message. In doing so, they have often made what they would acknowledge to be mistakes but have been willing to learn, change and develop throughout. There is an honesty about this that their audience warm to. They have also been astute in identifying how to express their spirituality in ways that both challenge the industry ethos and gain them commercial advantage. Their loyalty to members of their organisation and their re-investment in their home city, for example, have been both demonstrations of the community element of their spirituality and have provided them with solid foundations on which long-term but gradual success could be built.

It is also necessary to recognise that U2 have developed their spirituality within the context of Western capitalism and globalisation. Despite their commitment to liberation, theirs can never be a spirituality of liberation in the terms defined by Gustavo Gutierrez because to move outside of Western capitalism would be to disown their work and vocation. But being part of capitalism does not mean that it is not being challenged and subverted while it is also being embraced. If translated to the economic sphere, their approach would be closer to what John Atherton calls the Social Market Economy, than to Liberation Theology.

Atherton and Gutierrez have both produced contextualised theologies that challenge each other from different perspectives. However, the example of U2 would seem to suggest that it is not enough simply to challenge but that the limitations of such theologies must also be acknowledged simultaneously with their embodiment. That there must be a continual openness both to challenge and to the absurdity of our efforts at the same time as actively putting our theologies or spiritualities to work.

Contextualisation leads into postmodernism as contextualised stories and spiritualities cannot be over-arching meta-narratives. U2’s spirituality is postmodern in that it derives from fragments. As with their working method which links disconnected chords, riffs and rhythms into larger sound patterns that are then fused with others to create the song, their spirituality has developed from the disparate local communities to which they initially belonged. This has been an organic process into which new material has regularly been introduced and where they have frequently aimed to re-invent their band but all within a flexible, expansive and expanding framework that was established before they became recording artistes. David Jones said of The Anathemata that it was composed of:

“Pieces of stuffs that happen to mean something to me and which I see as perhaps making a kind of coat of many colours, such as belonged to 'that dreamer' in the Hebrew myth".

This is a statement with which U2 may feel some synergy and an example of the way in which their expression of Christianity connects with postmodernism.

However, in addition to reflecting aspects of postmodernism U2’s spirituality also poses challenges to postmodernity. This is primarily through the way in which their embrace of different communities and contradictions forms a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts. This suggests that micro-narratives by themselves cannot and do not tell the whole or a fully satisfying story and that it is in the combining or reconciling of micro-narratives that human beings experience fulfillment.

This brings us finally to inclusivity. Popular culture emphasises affirmation and embrace but generally in the self-centred, selfish desire to have everything on offer in consumer society and to have it now. U2 combine embrace and affirmation with community and their spirituality is therefore inclusive in a way that moves beyond individualism while retaining
elements of individualism that remain important within popular culture.

U2’s achievement has been to throw their arms around the world of popular culture from a transformative motivation and as a harbinger of grace. Unlike the Church in this context, that world has returned their embrace.

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U2 - Tryin' To Throw Your Arms Around The World.