I always try to avoid hearing a U2 album until the moment of its official release! It was no different with NLOTH and I held my self discipline better than I do when I give up chocolate for health reasons or something at lent for religious reasons! I did hear Breathe, though. I didn’t break the rules, it was recording of a TV appearance, in France, I think, that my good pal from Vancouver Mike Todd had put on his lovely blog - http://www.miketodd.typepad.com/.
I clicked the mouse in the morning just as the girls left for school and Breathe woke me up like a spiritual epiphany; it was a doorposts shaking Old Testament type jolt into the day. This was U2 as U2 only harder and then Bono’s soul grabbing urgency pulling you in to eyeball you with something he thinks you need to know. And it is not all clear what. Is “16th of June” Bloomsday from James Joyce’s Ulysses? Or is it South African Youth Day that marks the scarred memory of the 1976 Student Uprisings in Soweto, Guguletu and elsewhere? Or could it be a significant date in Bono’s own spiritual journey because when he moves from the great lyrical intrigue of travelling salesman, talking cockatoo, Asian viruses, Ju Ju men and hits the heart of the song we are again into a treasure trove of basic Christian theology.
The dying and rebirth of the chorus are again, as is strewn throughout the album, basic Christian beliefs. Dying and being reborn is the concept of baptism, dying to the old self and being born anew. St. Paul would write, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5 v 17) and “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4 v 22- 24) It was Jesus chatting late one night/early one morning with a Pharisee called Nicodemus who coined the phrase “Born again.” (John 3) It would be a label that U2 would try to avoid in America, after one of their early visits there, because they were surprised at what that term meant and how their own faith was being caricatured and stereotyped. Yet, Bono has strong belief in rebirth and it is a thread running right through NLOTH, “Reboot yourself” in Unknown Caller and ”the heart setting sail” in FEZ-Being Born to name but two. For the anoraks who followed the development of the album on the @U2.com website another song was prominent in the guessing of the albums tracklisting; Mercy, an out take from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. Mercy finishes with the lines – “I am alive, baby/ I'm born again and again/And again, and again and again and again/Again.”
The other concept that is a recurring theme not only in Bono’s lyric writing but also in his interviews is the idea of grace. He told Q way back at the time of All That You Can’t Leave Behind, an album with a song called Grace on it that he trusted in grace because if he had to trust in karma he would be coming back as a frog. The song Grace is likely to have been based on a very influential Christian book at the turn of the Millennium; Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace which Bono actually sent to Noel Gallagher from Oasis after a discussion about God and faith. In the wonderfully explicit book Bono In Conversation With Michka Assayas, Bono speaks a lot about grace and the idea of interruptions of grace in the lives of individuals and history.
This section in the Assayas book probably gives an excellent and succinct Bono theology that will help unpack the ideas of songs like Breathe...
“It’s clear to me that Karma is at the heart of the Universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “As you reap, so you will sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Grace interrupts, if you like the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid things.”
Assayas tried to call him out on the stupid things but sadly Bono declines to spell it out before going on to the basis of this grace being found in Christ’s cross.
“But I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb... The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not rerap the obvious death. That’s the point. It should keep us humble... It’s not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven.”
To find a Biblical source for Bono’s ideas here, go to Ephesians chapter 2. To find it in Breathe go to where he finds grace... and that is all that he has found!
This rebirth is all very well but it has to be lived. Breathe pours it out onto the street with energy and urgency. There is a sense that this rebirth, this grace, this love that you can’t defeat is not for his own self-indulgence but needs taken to the public square with arms out in welcome that the grace he has found becomes the grace that he lives by; a serving grace as much a saving grace. This idea of going out into the street might well be from the Old Testament Book of Proverbs - “Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out, in the gateways of the city she makes her speech.” (Proverbs 1 v 20). The idea is repeated again some chapters later.
Breathe is going to be a major new input into the U2 live act. It is going to come over with a blistering power. It is the kind of song that demands commitment and when you add its potent punch to the cumulative adrenaline of a live audience of tens of thousands it is going to fuel some serious commitment to whatever campaigns U2 will build their tour around. Be ready to be moved!
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