Part 10 in the U2 Unplugged Series

More ugliness. That’s what I expected to see as I rode in the back of a pick-up truck into La Saline, the poorest slum of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Since traveling to the Caribbean nation on a missions trip, I’d seen, smelled, and tasted ugliness all week long; the early morning truck ride offered up more of the same: poverty; disease; and malnutrition.

My destination was a church located in the heart of La Saline. The truck soon pulled up to the makeshift shelter: scraps of sheet metal bound together, resembling an overturned sardine can for the church’s 200 worshippers. As I made my way into the building and took a seat, I was not in a spirit of worship; I was just looking forward to the ride back to a more palatable part of the city. But as the morning service got underway, and I began to look around and see what was happening around me, something radical happened. The ugliness of the slum faded away. God offered me a window into what real beauty is. The worshippers had a beauty that went far beyond anything else the world has to offer – be it a sunset in Fiji, a fashion model, or a Michelangelo masterpiece. In their worn, weathered faces, I saw how “knock-out gorgeous” a full life with Christ can be. The joyful eyes and deep smiles in that church were far more infectious than the disease found in the open sewer outside the church building. Beauty, I came to realize, is not skin deep at all; it springs from the fullness of a soul transformed by Christ.

In “All Because of You” [Lyrics] [iTunes], U2 looks at this kind of inner beauty. The song contrasts the ugliness of the world with the completeness of a life transformed by Christ.

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Excerpt from my book The Myth of Happiness

A Coke bottle drops from the sky. That’s the surprising introduction to modern society that a bushman gets as he walks through the Kalahari Desert in the 1980 screwball comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy. In the film, the bushman isn’t sure what to make of a bottle falling from a passing airplane, and so he concludes that it must be a gift from the gods. After he takes it back to his tribe, together they try to figure out what to do with it. A musical instrument. A fire starter. Perhaps a cooking utensil. But in the end, they give up. Thinking the gift is more trouble than it is worth, the bushman goes on a journey across the desert to return the bottle to the gods.

All my life, I viewed joy as something like that Coke bottle. It descended unexpectedly from the heavens and fell into my world. And like the bushman, I had been puzzled my whole life about what to make of the gift. I tried various ways to mold it into something I could understand and work with. But when my dumbed-down versions of joy let me down, the whole experience became disillusioning. In my mind, God must be crazy for making the kind of promises that he does.

I became determined to shed my pidgin understanding of joy once and for all. Over the years, I’d studied various passages in the Bible that deal with joy. I probably even led a Bible study or two on the subject. But I wanted to look again at the Scriptures in light of joy and see what I had always been missing.
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Part 9 in the U2 Unplugged Series

The Greek language may have four words that express different types of love, but Hollywood portrays love as having one meaning: romance. Any “feel good” romantic comedy – such as You’ve Got Mail, Sabrina, Only You, or Notting Hill – focuses on the saga of two unlikely people falling in love with each other. But, these films always end the moment the couple finally gets together, marries, and lives happily ever after.

In contrast, a lively, dynamic marriage is never explored in film; perhaps the underlying assumption is that now that the couple is together, the excitement is over. In fact, marriage tends to be depicted on screen only when the relationship is failing or when it serves as a back story to something more important.

The problem comes when we start to believe what we watch in the movies and hear in Top 40 love songs – that “falling in love” is what fulfills us. Then, when we don’t feel the magic or experience the romance in our everyday life, we can become disillusioned and give up on our marriage, thinking there’s something wrong with it or the person we are committed to.
Within this romance–crazed culture, U2’s “A Man and a Woman” [Lyrics] [iTunes] offers a much different take. Instead of writing Yet Another Love Song for his wife Ali, Bono writes a far deeper, more probing, and ultimately redemptive tune. The result is a musical peek into what true married love is all about.

The Engine of Marriage

“I Want to Know What Love Is” was the piercing question that the rock band Foreigner asked in their hit tune of the same name back in the mid-1980s. Their song seems to serve as an unspoken theme for a postmodern society confused about love and the expectations we should have. If the Foreigner song poses the question, U2 answers it with an exclamation point on their How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb album. For, in “A Man and a Woman”, U2 tells what true love is. The song echoes the words of C.S. Lewis contrasting romance and love:

“Being in love” is a good thing, but it is not the best thing…Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for one another even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be “in love” with someone else…It is only on this love that the engine of marriage is run; being in love was the explosion that started it.

The type of love that Bono sings and Lewis writes about has a special quality to it I call “texture”. Much like a cloth is assembled by interweaving a multitude of individual strings, textured love is bound together by a collection of strands: romance, friendship, common interests, mutual goals, physical intimacy, children, and shared ministries. In a marriage between believers, all of these strands are held together with the grace of Jesus Christ.
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Part 8 in the the U2 Unplugged series

God thirsts to be thirsted after.
— St. Augustine

The phrase “yada yada” is part of our cultural lingo. It comes from a classic Seinfeld episode in which members of the TV sitcom begin substituting the words “yada, yada, yada” to shorten up stories they didn’t want to discuss. Yet, it also seems to reflect a bad habit that we can fall into when we worship on Sunday morning. We start out singing praise music or hymns with the best of intentions, but our minds race and the words slowly morph from words of praise into phrases we mouth but don’t really consider. At that point, the choruses mean as much to us as if we were singing “yada, yada, yada”.

When we have a difficult time making the most of our worship, U2’s “Gloria” [Lyrics] [iTunes] helps us get perspective. The early U2 song, from their October album, offers us a glimpse into the nature of the God, showing us why God is due our praise as well as how we can respond to him.

Casualizing God

Have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Flick the channel to a Christian television show or listen in the pews of most churches today, you’ll undoubtedly hear those words. The idea behind this statement is that Christianity offers more than just following the rules of a distant deity. Instead, in a very real way, you can enter into a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ. The song “Wild Honey”, for example, reinforces this idea of a intimate relationship with the God of the universe.

Such a message is an incredible fact of the Christian faith. However, the downside to stressing the personal nature of our relationship with God is our tendency to casualize our relationship with God and treat him like we would a mere mortal. We can find ourselves glazing over the reality that we are speaking of the all-powerful, all-holy God and creator of the universe.
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