Over the years that began with War and The Unforgettable Fire and became clarified to laser precision in The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby – U2 has wrestled with the twinned ‘angels of their better nature’ – (1) lyrically writing and rewriting the ways in which desire will only be fully consummated with our embrace by and with God, and (2) sustaining a distinctly musical signature that is the ‘U2 sound’ that draws the very best from all genres to embody their music. In short – the rock and roll search for what theologians call perichorisis – the grafting together of the mystical and the carnal – body and spirit – into an incarnational face we can be encountered by. If the early albums (War and The Unforgettable Fire) have been about kerygma – getting the word out – and the later albums have been about the musical form of that kerygmatic vision (Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Pop) then the last two were about putting it all together. Many critics and fans alike have heaped praise upon All That You Can’t Leave Behind (ATYCLB) as achieving the best U2 album since The Joshua Tree – I think they may want to rewrite those reviews in light of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (HTDAAB).

As many are aware, the central theme of HTDAAB is so basic that it is profound: as the Beatle’s succinctly put it – all you need is love. Where War and The Unforgettable Fire made direct statements of social responsibility and railed against the political and corporate machines that were crushing people right and left through a variety of systematic evils, the more mature and even better informed Bono has come to grips not only with the magnitude of the world’s woes, but has come to rest in a peace about what the silver bullet is – Give Love a Chance.

The story goes that Bono asked Christian songwriter Michael W. Smith earlier this year if he knew how one could dismantle an atomic bomb. After replying that he didn’t, Bono simply answered, “Love. With love.” And this is what U2 have given us—an 11 song intimate exposition that explores the relationship of love between man and God (“Vertigo,” “All Because Of You,” “Yahweh”), parent and child (“Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,” “Original Of The Species”), husband and wife (“City Of Blinding Lights,” “A Man And A Woman”) and those that Christ would call our neighbors (“Miracle Drug,” “Love And Peace Or Else”). From Rattle and Hum through Achtung Baby and Pop the band that is U2 have worked with different musical pallets trying to match colors with context – blues and r &b, euro pop, retro disco and electronica – all the various hues of the day. Yet trying to chase after the proverbial musical zeitgeist is akin to chasing after the wind – in many ways what HTDAAB seems to embody is a bit of the rest and repose that comes after a career forged by trying to graft the spirit and body together. Like Job in the final chapter, Bono seemed ready in his ‘desert’ phases of The Joshua Tree (mystical desert) and Pop (urban collapse) to resign and empty himself out before God – “I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (42: 5,6) and taking whatever was to come as we heard in his duet with Johnny Cash in “The Wanderer” that capped off Zooropa – “Yeah, I went with nothing, nothing but the thought of you. I went wandering.” But the years after Zooropa and Pop have been filled with a rebirth of his bent toward the Social Gospel only glimpsed at during the mid-80‘s and his now famous cry in Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” – “Thank God its them and not you.”

Over the past decade, audiences and intentional conversations with some of the greatest living activists, economists, and political leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries – Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, etc. – have forged a vision for Bono that has made overcoming debt for developing countries a mandate for his life. Taking serious the commission of Leviticus 25:10 – “Proclaim liberty throughout the lands and to all the inhabitants thereof, it shall be a jubilee for you” – Drop the Debt, End Aids Now and Jubilee 2000 campaigns galvanized a vision of responsive activism that was constructive rather than merely retaliatory. Yet after the smoke cleared, the honorary doctorates bestowed, the confrontations with US and other 1st world leaders, Bono seems to have unclenched his fists and resign himself to truthfully answering the question that has been nagging his musical search since the first song ‘I Will Follow’ on their first album Boy –

I was on the outside when you said
You needed me
I was looking at myself
I was blind, I could not see.

A boy tries hard to be a man
His mother takes him by the hand
If he stops to think, he starts to cry
Oh why?

If you walk away, walk away
I walk away, walk away
I will follow.
If you walk away, walk away
I walk away, walk away
I will follow.
I will follow.

I was on the inside
When they pulled the four walls down
I was looking through the window
I was lost, I am found.

If you walk away, walk away
I walk away, walk away
I will follow.
If you walk away, walk away
I walk away, walk away
I will follow.
I will follow.

Your eyes make a circle
I see you when I go in there
Your eyes, your eyes
Your eyes, your eyes.

If you walk away, walk away
I walk away, walk away
I will follow.
If you walk away, walk away
I walk away, walk away
I will follow.
I will follow.

What does it mean to follow – and what do we desire through it all? The answer in HTDAAB seems to be simply one word writ large – Love. In short, U2 comes full circle in this album by resting in the assurance that all in all, it all comes down to love. In ‘Miracle Drug’, the teenager in “I Will Follow” grows up and embraces the fullness of love found in God and poured out on others:

God I need your help tonight

Beneath the noise
Below the din
I hear a voice
It’s whispering
In science and in medicine
“I was a stranger
You took me in”

The songs are in your eyes
I see them when you smile
I’ve had enough of romantic love
I’d give it up, yeah, I’d give it up

In ‘All Because of You’, there is a comfort in merely being made alive and living that is made sense of as a ‘tune’ drawn from ‘confusion’ that doesn’t have to strive nor prove anything beyond praise:

I saw you in the curve of the moon
In the shadow cast across my room
You heard me in my tune
When I just heard confusion

All because of you
All because of you
All because of you
I am… I am

In ‘Love and Peace’, Bono is willing to be OK with his spiritual unease but strive to live out his life with purpose nonetheless:

I don’t know if I can take it
I’m not easy on my knees
Here’s my heart you can break it

I need some release, release, release

We need
Love and peace
Love and peace

The closing tracks of U2 albums always seem to close as a benediction and ‘song of sending’ of sorts – an overt turn to the liturgical and direct assessment of Christendom and the Christ that can be lost amidst it. Whether it is the direct Biblicism of ‘40’ from War, the mystical apophatic darkness of ‘Love is Blindness’ from Achtung Baby (‘Love is drowning in a deep well, All the secrets, and no one to tell”), or the re-framing of Pilgrims Progress for the E generation in ‘The Wanderer’ from Zooropa, or the whispering cry of the Psalmist in ‘Wake Up Deadman’ from Pop, or the resignation to the call of Grace – (“What once was hurt, What once was friction, What left a mark, No longer stings, Because Grace makes beauty, Out of ugly things, Grace makes beauty out of ugly things”) in ‘Grace’ from ATYCLB – U2 continues to draw its productions to a close with an opening to something more – more than what words and music can convey and an opening to the ‘not yet’ of the Now. This is continued in HTDAAB with the ending song ‘Yahweh’:

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don’t make a fist
Take this mouth
So quick to criticize
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I’m waiting for the dawn…

For the band that became famous in the late 80’s with the agnostic proclamation “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, Bono and the band seem to be resting in the assurance that amidst the uncertainty and pain in this life, to paraphrase from Rattle and Hum, Love has indeed come to town and for now maybe that is what we need the most. As Bono sings in ‘A Man and A Women’ from HTDAAB:

You can run from love
And if it’s really love it will find you
Catch you by the heel
But you can’t be numb for love
The only pain is to feel nothing at all
How can I hurt when I’m holding you?

In summary, it is good to see the boys from Dublin at rest with themselves and willing to embrace and be embraced by what they have been chasing all these years. Having climbed every mountain, they seem to be at rest in the valley for a spell and willing to let love rule.