U2 devotional #9:"Levitate": Lifted east and Up

(for story behind the picture, click here)


I don't know how you read the chorus of U2's "Levitate"...a delightful and unfinished track

(so unfinished that you can still hear, at 1:41-1:47 below, Bono calling out to Edge: "More guitar!" etc.) ...

...but I can't not read it as a dialogue/prayer/Abrahamic midrash/tug of war:

• Narrator: "Spirit, come on down!"
• Holy Spirit: "No, I'm not coming down!"

All that to say, the Spirit suggests for all our well-meaning, and sometimes frantic praying for/begging for him to "come down"

(especially in the Pentecostalish circles Bono and the boys were discipled in)..

..he offers a better deal (and a literally "higher love"):

we get to "come on up" to his realm instead.

Shades of Revelation 4:1 ("the Spirit said to me, 'Come on up.'");

traces of Ephesians 2:6 ("we are already seated with Christ in the heavenly realms"),

and obvious connection to the rabbinic elevation prayer offered in the U2 song "Elevation."

(as well as the "levitating with he" line of U2 cover of Patty Smyth's "Dancing Barefoot."

How about the "Higher Love...lift us higher" Bono has been known to pray on behalf of gathered congregations?

Thus the "Levitation" song title,

and the vulnerable, expectant prayer- response of "Lift me up" Bono sings/prays in the bridge (4:00-4:07).

For those squeakies that complain, "Levitation?! But that's an eastern religion!!"..

I understand the concern, but..

I really love Francis Fragipane's line whenever people complain,

"But Francis, what you are describing sounds like an Eastern religion!!":

"Well, Christianity IS an Eastern religion."

As Bono has often asked/prophesied in concert, "Going up?"..

"In the end I got something better. There are very few things, I would imagine, that can rival the high of heroin for people looking for a way out of a low life. And it was my faith that brought me higher. It is a higher love"

-Bono