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Because, when everything's added up, that's about all anyone can expect to have from going to a live performance of any kind, whether it be Beethoven, Radiohead, or a Skakespeare play. You pay for your ticket, and enter a different realm outside of 'normal' time. You are either entertained and/or had your outlook on life challenged, or your thoughts provoked. Eventually the lights dim for the last time, the curtain falls, the cheering fades.

Then the house lights come up ubruptly. You stand blinking in a crowd of people who mill about you as you all collectively shuffle towards the nearest exit. What, if anything, will you take away from the performance?

Clearly you went home to ruminate on the Pope's latest encylical. That fellow in front of you woke up the next morning with a hoarse throat and a throbbing head. Both are valid reactions, though I daresay yours is the more exceptional; his the more mundane, perhaps even vulgar. In the interests of honest self-disclosure, I've been in his shoes after a show more often than yours.

Now, as to the Pope's commentary on truth, charity, love, etc, etc. This may seem flippant, but really, why should ANYONE care what the head of the Roman Catholic Church says about anything? The entire institution has long been overdue for complete, total, and final dismantling. It limped out of the Dark Ages that it, more than any other single institution, was primarily responsible for (and all the attendant misery and delusion therein) into the modern era to find itself, again, in the very vanguard of the ills in society it sets itself up to be an answer to.

What other human organization of ANY KIND would be allowed to operate unimpeded on a two thousand year history of torture, inquisition, holy wars, and now to cap it off, sexual molestation of their very own youth adherents?

It is an indefensable record of greed, lies, and mass delusion.

As to your disappointment in Bono not providing his audience with a philosophy to live by: Wake up, bwilson. That's not his job! And whenever Bono has momentarily slipped into thinking that it was, it has always had regrettable consequences, as Bono himself has said many times in interviews. (Check out the cover interview he did a couple of years back with 'Rolling Stone' magazine for proof of this).
See, the Popes have long thought it was THEIR jobs to provide us with this great truth for mankind to live by, and look where that got us.

Also, your understanding of Darwin's science is absolutely dead wrong. Survival strategies of any species can take many different forms. The mechanism of evolution merely discards those over a long period of time (long, as in biologically long) that do not favor the survival of the species.

In the case of homo sapiens, one of our very greatest strengths–evolutionarily speaking–has been our need for community and our capacity to create and pass on culture from one generation to the next. We have developed strategies and technologies not only to obliterate ourselves in the wink of an eye, but aslo (and here's where the hope lies–where it has always lied) to create communities that nurture the weak, the helpless,the infirm. We are hard-wired biologically to do so. Our young are born COMPLETELY at the mercy of our capacity to love, care, and nurture them.

The more we meditate (or pray, if you like) on this great truth, the more we are compassionate to all our fellow humans, including our enemies. This was the Christ's highest teaching, wasn't it? Let me also point out that this is also a BRILLIANT survival strategy for our species as a whole, if we can learn to live up to the angels of our higher selves.

Increasingly it would seem we are entering a time when we will either get there finally, our perish in the attempt.

Personally I'm holding out for my daughter right now. What about you?

Guess I ended a long way from a U2 concert, but Bono, The Edge, Adam, and Larry, when all things are added up, spent their working lives making music, performing it, talking a little politics, making the drunk people sing, and the thoughtful people think. And even if they are just another arena rock band a long way from their Punk DIY (”Do It Yourself”) roots, it's still not a bad way to have spent your time while visiting the 3rd Rock.

The band presented you with a snapshot of their truth last Tuesday night. That's all they can do. You've got to come up with the rest eventually all on your own.

matakuyasin–All My Relations,

drift

I am glad that Bono cares and is trying to promote good in the world – we could not ask for more in a rock star. Yet, I found myself wanting him to say more, to actually provide us with a philosophy or even a reason why we should care about the things he thinks we should care about. Without reasons – without some substance behind the good values and sentiments he is promoting – it feels like we are those onlookers watching the king who had no clothes.

The Pope speaks about this phenomenon, which is very evident at U2 concerts, in his most recent encyclical, Veritatis in Caritate:

“Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space. In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word.”

Later in the encyclical the Pope says this: “A Christianity of charity without truth would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance. In other words, there would no longer be any real place for God in the world. Without truth, charity is confined to a narrow field devoid of relations. It is excluded from the plans and processes of promoting human development of universal range, in dialogue between knowledge and praxis.”

I spent a lot of time on Tuesday night thinking about the man about 2 rows ahead of me who was obviously drunk, and who spent the entire show pointing into the sky and yelling the lyrics to every song at the top of his lungs. Like me, I imagine that he probably had no idea what most of the songs were actually about (if they are about anything in particular), but somehow the songs meant a lot to him. He did nothing to hurt anyone that evening, he obviously had a good time, and he heard about Burma and Iran and other social issues, at least in passing. All told, the concert was clearly a positive event for him, despite his inebriation. But what I found troubling was this sense I had that the U2 concert and its diffuse social commentary is about as close to Christ's message of salvation as that man will get this week. Our society, while steeped in Christian sentiment, seems unable to offer us anything more than good sentiments – unable to offer us the Truth that would make sense of those sentiments.

I realize that I should not expect U2 to provide a philosophical explanation for their political activism in the context of a concert, but I worry that our entire society is milking this Christian cow without feeding it. Good sentiments, without the truth of Christ, are “helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance” precisely because the sentiments are not rooted in anything subtantive and can be washed away, ignored, or replaced with other sentiments at anytime. While I think much of U2's social commentary is worthy of support, I think we should also be careful to explain to our children that caring for Burma and Iran is not the same thing as knowing Christ, who is the logos of God and the savior of the world. If we don't do that more often, I fear that all we will have left are Christian values unmoored to Christ, which is exactly how I felt at the end of the U2 concert on Tuesday.

My favorite lyric is from Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For: “I believe in the Kingdom Come, when all the colors will bleed into one.”

What do people think about this line from Stand Up Comedy: “Stop helping Gold across the road like a little old lady”?

That quote said it all for me.

Background: I'm a 40-something, and was really into the whole Punk/New Wave sound of the late 70s early 80s when I was a teenager. It's hard to believe now, but back then U2 was a hard driving rock band that eschewed stage spectacle for putting on a great live show. Saw them 3rd row in 85 for the 'Unforgettable Fire.” Bono did 'Amazing Grace' acapella that night, too. Was one the best shows I've seen in my life. Saw them again 2 years later for the J-Tree tour, and EVERYTHING was different. They had a film crew in tow for '(P)Rattle and (Ho) Hum' and a huge light show. I wondered during the show whether they were performing for us or the cameras.

Haven't seen them since, or liked anything (except for the song “One” ) they've put after JT.

I am a GREAT admirer of Bono's humanitarian work since. I think he's a great man and a great singer. It's just I think U2 is a lame arena rock band, like any other. It's about the spectacle, not about the music. It's SO FAR form the punk ethos and milieu U2 came out of. And they were once SO ON FIRE.

So it goes. It's only Rock and Roll.

Will have 'October' in my CD player this month, as I have now for years, when my wife and I take my daughter apple picking…

At a recent conference I heard Margaret Wheatley speak of how change is found to be exponential not incremental. A great reason for hope! Her example was Maathai Wangari, the Nobel Prize winning “tree woman” who was the catalyst for the eventual planting of over 30 million trees to date (from the initial 7… 5 of which which 5 died, I believe).

I guess it's why I admire Bono, I believe he's been a catalyst for an extensive amount of consciousness raising, activism and resource sharing. When he spent a month in an African Refugee Camp a woman tried to give him her hungry child. He swore he'd work to eliminate that kind of grinding poverty and the sources of it, like the crushing debt of developing nations. It seems he's used his very public persona and his concerts to get out an important message and information to millions. He may not put ALL of his money where his mouth but it seems he puts a lot!

My all-time favorite was being in Dublin for Popmart. Although U2 has had better tours (Zoo TV, Elevation, the current one), there's nothing like seeing them in their hometown – the energy level was twice as high as when I saw the same concert in Chicago earlier that year.

My dream has always been for my 74 year old mother, a native of Co. Galway, Ireland, who has never been to a rock concert before, to share the powerful experience of a U2 show.

So it was quite memorable for both my 11 year old son, my wife, and my mother to go to this magnificient performance.