U2 NLOTH song by song - MOMENT OF SURRENDER

Moment Of Surrender is a big song in the U2 canon and I don’t just mean long as it weighs in at seven and a half minutes. It is a hybrid of One and Your Blue Room, meandering and moody, certain proof of Eno and Lanois in the writing process. This epic journey song past fires that burned, black holes and dark altars through “the stations of the cross” seems to conclude in a transcendent space where only the redeemed and the Redeemer are in focus; passersby go unnoticed.  Surrender is a common theme threading through the entire U2 canon given its big name check on the song of that name on War but I Will Follow to Yahweh and now obviously onto NLOTH has this spiritual sense of surrendering to something higher.

There are a few blinding spiritual truths that will leap out at anyone prepared to meditate on this soul music. “Three” to quote Breathe! The first is “Two souls too smart to be in the realm of certainty.” On Stand Up Comedy Bono will again speaks of this danger of certainty, “While I’m getting over certainty...” This is the lesson of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For still at play where faith is assured but a journey ahead recognised. There has been much damaging baggage that has arrived through the post modern spirit of the age, just as there was good and bad that arrived and needed deciphered in Modernity. One of the things we can now let go of is Modernity’s seamless and arrogantly dangerous certainty. That’s where faith kicks in as we become aware of our human frailty with finite minds to try and define a God that is beyond our ability to describe. U2 spoke of that as far back as their use of Latin in Gloria from 1981’s October when they said words failed them in their praise to God. For the band their exposure to intransigent arrogance of North American right-wing Fundamentalism in their first early eighties’ tours made them step back from comfortably calling themselves Christians. It is those “espresso shots of self righteous indignation,” as David Dark names them, that causes ungodly things to be done in the name of God. U2 would recognise that such ungodly acts could spring from distorted absence-of-doubt Christianity as easily as from Islam or whatever other faith view.

The second lesson is a straight lift from the first letter of John. The lyric “it’s not if I believe in love/but if love believes in me.” Again a clue to this and the rest of the album and the work of U2 is found later in the album and again it is Stand Up Comedy when Bono declares, “God is love” and we know that we were right to read “God” as “love” into all those belief songs like God Part 2 through the past thirty years. 1 John chapter 4 and verse 10 reads, “This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son and atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Similarly the same John writing his Gospel records Jesus telling his disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit.” (John 15 v 16). When you are not gifted with absolute certainty but are peering through a glass darkly then it is good to know that it is not about our certainty of belief as much as someone who believes in us, not about the merited total score of our love but of a bigger love reaching out to us. Bono prays, “Oh believe in me.”

Finally, and most sensationally for me, is a line of just four words that I think makes up one of U2’s most powerful depth charges  - “Of vision over visibility.” Can I ask people to forgive me already for how many times I will quote those words over the next five years! The world would be a whole lot different if we took such advice. The Church would be a different place too... and my life... and yours. What is visible often prevents our actions of change whether personal or social. As Bono’s mate, writer and activist, Jim Wallis writes, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change.” The evidence is often too visible for us to find any hope and it is in hope that we discover a vision that can change the world. Mrs Nolan, the mother of Christy in the song Miracle Drug, had vision over visibility. I guess it is what fires Bono’s hope for Africa. When the Old Testament prophets spoke of God’s people dreaming dreams and seeing visions this is what they were on about. The ability to raise your perspective above the horizontal and not just see what is there but what could be there if we had the vision to imagine something different. The book of Ecclesiastes is all about this; the meaninglessness of the horizontal without God’s vertical perspective (I might have stolen this from Charles Swindoll!). It is what Jesus was talking about when he told the disciples to forget treasure on earth and get some down payments for forever. It was what Paul was telling he Corinthians when he said that believers don’t bother too much with what is seen because all that is visible is temporary but put their trust in the unseen because what is unseen is eternal; that takes vision! With these Biblical truths at work then a world reformative vision can come into play that will bring God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven – now that is vision over visibility!

Comments

[Beth]

This is excellent stuff... will be linking it sometime over this weekend on U2 Sermons.

[Bob Flayhart]

Well done, Stocki! I wish more folk listened to U2 with their Bible close at hand...not to say of course that we can't simply enjoy the music itself!!

[Paul]

loveitloveit!

[Jonny Currie]

more great stuff from the Michael Gray of U2!

[QMonkey]

There's an interesting quote from Eno from 2007 “I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.”