Paul and Ringo and God and Music

Paul McCartney taking the initiative to lead in prayer with U2, crying out for God's blessing? That amazing story is told by Bono in "U2 by U2", beginning backstage before Paul and U2 were to perform together for Live8:

Paul is a much more dimensional character than people realize. He came in our dressing room before the show..Then as we were on our way to the stage, he came over and stopped us, in front of everybody, and said 'Can we just pause for a second?'. He put his arms around us and made a beautiful prayer about how 'music is what we do, and we give our music to Your service, Lord. On this day, use us.'

We (U2) always spend time in prayer before we go on; we pause and ask for a blessing on the show. Some people do it in a very showy, kind of theatrical way, like they want to get Jesus to play the tambourine. But this was a real moment for
me. I thought 'What a blessing from a Beatle."
-Bono, U2 By U2, p 342

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• Video below of the song that followed that prayer..
• Later edit to this post:  See "improv theatre" worship with Pastor Paul McCartney

Abe Laboriel Jr, McCartney's drummer (and whose dad Abraham is a  respected Christian musician),

 says about playing concerts with Paul:

“We huddle behind the curtain right before we’re going to play and pray before the show“ which is something Paul said he’s never done before. He leads us in prayer and says something like, ‘God, we want you to take over. Let us have a good time and let everybody out there have a good time. Thank you for letting us be here to do this.’ Wow! What beautiful humility, handing it over that way. My dad has always said that music is all around us and it visits us. To be with someone who lives that same philosophy is beautiful.”  link

Ringo Starr talking about God being in the room? T-Bone Burnett
(longtime Bono friend, thanked in the liner notes of  U2's "Achtung Baby" for "the truth in the dark.")
tells that story in the clip below...1:17ff:

The two remaining Beatles have long been seen as the "secular ones."
But there is no secular, and as Neo once learned, there is no spoon...

Of course, there is no such thing as Christian music around here.

The closer people get to music;
  the closer they get to God....
                             as Burnett discusses above.
 It's partly because "the universe at base is music." (Len Sweet)

"A stone is frozen music."

I guess that means Jagger and Richards (here)are next..
(Update: since this post, Jagger enlisted Bono's help with a worship song)
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More on the God- haunted Beatles:
Sgt. Pepper's Bible Study....God-haunted Beatles

More on God/music:

• Cioran on music/mysticism
• Music as Metaphor for Emotion
• Praying through guitar

Music making and music hearing are ways we engage the physical world. Even in the case of electronically generated music, the body is often involved through, say, a keyboard, and patterns of vibrating air are mediated through physical speakers. The physical things we involve ourselves with in music have ultimately arisen through the free initiative of God’s love—they are part of the ordo amoris.
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