U2 's Easter Lilly E.P: Oh, #$!!, surprising sunrises, prophetic parades, the Matrix Trainman in Limbo, coexisting in grief, stealing a Bible verse back from TBN

                                "Oh, #*#!, it's really true!"

Many mornings in the weeks and months after my wife Sonya died, the sun shining through the window would wake me up, For the first few moments finding my consciousness, I was content: becoming oriented to the opportunities of a new day.

Then, inevitably, I remembered.

                        Oh, she's dead.

Wait, really? Was it just a dream?

"Oh, #*#!, it's really true!," I actually said aloud more than once.

They joke there are two types of people:

                       those who say "Good morning, Lord!" and those who say "Good Lord, it's morning!"

On most days I was both; finding a way for both to coexist in the same space, soul and morning/mourning.

But I am getting ahead of myself..

---

Seven years later, I woke up I woke  and oriented myself to the fact that it was day.

And Good Friday, at that. A day always laden and loaded with grief over the death of Jesus, and the joy of the resurrection not far off.

The "Oh, #!@$! , it's real" morning surprises  were no longer a regular occurrence. I am not the same since she left; but I am happily remarried

I grabbed my phone, ostensibly to check the time or secure a morning devotion, but more likely to check Facebook...and found notification of a new U2 song.

"Song for Hal," it said. As I began playing it, the soundscapes escaped ; some classic and exciting new Edge "swirling epiphanies" emerged..

The vocals began. They were good, but something wasn't quite right; not quote Bono. Had I been fooled by AI?

No, it was the Edge on lead vocals..

Unlike most U2 releases of the past, I was not prepared for a new song by my favorite band. I had  usually read the lyrics and maybe even reviews/forum comments..

But this time I had no idea what the song was bout, let alone who the hal Hal was. Let alone that it was about.

                           Full immersion

 And as the morning light       Stretches out across the floor

 Can't believe it's another day And life goes on like it did before

What? Were Bono and Edge reading my memory?

My mail and my mind?

It wouldn't be the first time.

--

To switch gears to the task at hand..

--

To quote a book title that can be well-applied to personal journey/spiritual life:  the "What to Expect While You are Expecting " principle is relevant here.

 For one, we are all spiritually expecting, just ask Pastor Jack H (and my other favorite Pastor Jack H).

Two, I was not even  expecting to expect  two EPs  ("Days of Ash" and "Easter Lilly"),

 let alone one;

                let alone two great ones; 

from U2 this year  before the full-blown  album later this year.  

Two albums (three releases) in their 50th year?  And two (three?) that follow the liturgical calendar?

God is in the house. The lads are pregnant.

I consider the two surprise EPs as one whole; two sides of an album/coin/life posture. The band have spoken clearly about the first volume being more angry, political.. and lament-laden, and the sequel more personal and hope-filled .......as we are expectant of the "defiant joy" of the album to come,

To be expectant in U2 fandom is also to expect anxiety that the album this fall won't live up to these EPs. The worst fear is they partly lose the plot/baby. Me genoito,  I hope Jacknife Lee is right!

I like these two EPs  both very much ; especially the second, so I am writing about it today..

I won't write much, as I can't add much to...but can amen much to.... these great reviews that I  recommend and will reference:

• Megan Click  Easter Lily: A Journey with U2- Scars and All
• Angela Pancella  U2's Easter Lily, And when blessings overflow.
• Sherry Lawrence Unapologetically U2: Taking Easter Lily To A Higher Level
• Peter Barrett : the new Eastertide-themed album recorded by U2
• Steve Stockman:   A song by song look at U2's Easter EP... cross, resurrection and Psalms as a resistance to the world.

I am so sad that Steve Harmon's book had to go to press without a chapter on Easter Lilly!

I will only major on three songs here, as I have observations, connections and questions.

It seems unpardonable to not write about the other three songs, as they form an amazing grace sound ; the death and resurrection trilogy. Don't get me started on "Scars," which may well be in my top five U2 songs already (Not bad for a late career E.P.)

But I  want to start by calling attention to  two intriguing  structural observations on the EP as a whole (as an artwork); and then give a few heteroclitic and maybe unobvious comments and questions on each song.

 

1) An inclusio of sunrise language; especially  being surprised by the sunrise.  Cheesy as it might be if another band adopted it , it is clear that in the U2 dictionary, "sun" is often code/standing in for Son (Jesus). Drawing the fish in the sand,  Here the focus on sunrise/Sonrise : fitting for an EP with Easter in the title.

Here is that inclusio:

-First song "Song for Hal". 

  And as the morning light       Stretches out across the floor

 Can't believe it's another day And life goes on like it did before

-Last song: "COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?) 

Every night we hope and pray for a new day to rise
Every morning when the sun shows up, it's still a surprise

And, as often with inclusios (and chiasms) , the term often shows up in the middle (more or less) of the narrative. Thus, in the song "Easter Parade,' 

Every night we hope and pray for a new day to rise
Every morning when the sun shows up, it's still a surprise

2) An inclusio  of  the word/image "parade.'

First song "Song for Hal"

Then in "COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?)  the ;last song:

Changes, these changes
Will rain on this parade

Wherever the strange is on parade
Wherever the music is made
You'll be there

=

in "Easter Parade,' of course, the whole song is the parade.

Changes, these changes
Will rain on this parade
Changes, these changes
I am not afraid

Then in "/COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?)  

Changes, these changes
Will rain on this parade

I love how PJ PJ DeGenaro matter of factly felt this, nd took the liberty to make the inclusio explicit , amd  import the word "Easter" when the parade shows up in "Coexist". Yes!

'The changes will rain on our (Easter) parade" (link)

And, as often with inclusios (and chiasms) , the term often shows up in the middle (more or less) of the narrative. Thus, in the song "Easter Parade,' of course, the whole song is the parade.

What is "Easter Lilly" about?  The surprising and subversive sunrise and prophetic and poignant parade that springs forth from death.

Heck, maybe the original song "Easter :Parade" sung by Judy Garlad to Fred Astaire  is a bit about that, too:

On the avenue, Fifth Avenue
The photographers will snap us
And you'll find that you're in the rotogravure
Oh, I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet
And of the guy I'm taking to the Easter parade

Inclusio and chiasm are,  with or  without the   writer being fully aware of embedding these structures, reveal quite a lot about the overall meaning/message of a  work.  Don't get me started on Bible inclusio and chiasm. But I could get started up  here or here, LOL,. As Mick Jagger sang...

Alos, I note that every song (or almost every song  on "Easter Lilly" ends with an outro or coda/last section.. that changes gears. I am sure there is a term  for this in musical composition/theory.  Instead of  fadeout or repetition/reprise of a chorus, or an improv/scat/glossolalia/Bongolese ending (As in "Still Haven't Found".. a whole new thematic world opens up. 

My favorite example here is "In a Life" ...which nods to a Peter Gabriel lyric (see 40:08  in video here to learn that is (in part) about God)..
And how about the final note of "Coexist." There are different theories about what it means: a nod to the ending of the "Zooropa" album, an  exclamation point on the album. a "more to come" teaser,. A requirement to say Edge played on the song...

Let's return to "Song for Hal," which  now know is a response to death of the band's friend, Hal.

In a way it is my "Song for Sonya."

I often play on shuffle, but even more than other U2 releases, it would seem blasphemy to consider any other intended running order of the Easter Lilly tracks. As Bono mentioned (quoting Dalai Lama)  in the book accompanying "Atomic Bomb,'  "To meditate on life, start with death."

-Question for fans and followers (Edge, I know you are reading, lol): In the opening lyrics

Did you hear "Forever"?
Was it playing soft and low?
It's not a song you wanna hear
If you're not ready to go

 Is the song "Forever"  a specific actual song, or just an image? Here are some internet  guessed.. Many suggest it is just a symbol of the afterlife; but I am still haunted by the way it is mentioned as if an actual song

Gregory Daujat in his free Kindle book on Easter Lilly says the point of “Song for Hal” is that “even the dead are not alone.”

Megan nails it:
The promise “You’re not alone” ,not in the “bright blue air,” not if your “voice is unheard,”sets the tone of accompaniment in grief and trouble, which runs throughout the EP. -link

Note also a possible connection binding the two EPS. The last song on the first EP declares "
"You are not alone."

Watch this..Now to he first song on the next EP (or if you consider the two as one album, the very next song!

 The repetitive “I feel alone,” conflicts with the refrain “you’re not alone” in “Song For Hal.” The personal confession of aloneness is raw — can’t see the forest despite the trees sort of thing. Here is a personal song about friendship, but he feels alone. Is it an emotional disconnect that’s being alluded to? Could it be that he feels that God hasn’t been with him? Bono did find himself   calling out to God during his brush with death and he didn’t hear Him -link

"IN A LIFE"

The second song, "In a :Life", per the Edge's comments in Propaganda, and per the clear content of the official music vireo, is about the friendship of the band over the year.

OK....but I don't hear that...at all.

I was already with Megan  on this l even  before I read her post

It is valuable to quote Megan's full comment on the song, as it radically  resonated with me. 

The song that follows feels like a cross between the underworld and purgatory. Strongly connected to Bono’s Stories of Surrender, it uses the London Underground as a kind of in between space. The repeated fare/coin imagery evokes Charon’s crossing or the purchase of indulgences. It begins with “I’ll meet you in the air… with the fare,” and the person is met “in the empty space that occupies your place.” The looping percussion and guitar during the Circle Line section accentuates the feeling of circling until one learns what they need for passage into the next life. These lessons are both relational and communal and include the futility of ignoring God’s instruction, ”You’re kicking the pricks,: an archaic form of goads, which references Acts 26, and the need to surrender. There is a driver on the train of this circle that notes how the “souls are in so much pain,” which possibly may be the wounded healer Christ presented in Scars. Only confession , both corporate (“when we make our bed out of war”) and personal (“I never achieved anything on my own”), breaks the loop. The song ends with grace: “A skipping stone I was thrown, the ocean floor is not my home.” and gratitude, “I only received from being shown.” and leads us to the encounter in the song that follows. link

Instead of Charon (a fantastic connection, and it reminds me not to miss potential lyrical connections to paintings, as in the Mephisto "Checkmate' painting (see this) 

UNOBVIOUSLY..I thought of  the Trainman  in Matrix Reloaded , who  lives in the subway/underground, 

headquartered at "Mobil Station " (Mobil is an anagram for limbo? the writers did that on purpose) , and seems doomed to keep riding the trains in a purgatorial state . He wears multiple watches (hmm . note the song lyrics 'And when we stop the clocks stopping time ) The name of the train is Loop, symbolizing a loop in time or endless cycle of limbo

And when we stop the clocks stopping time ” and jumps to the other side of the platform He is in charge of Mobil Station (Mobil is an anagram for limbo:the writers did that on purpose). The name of the train is Loop, symbolizing a loop in time or endless cycle of limbo. See  ("I am a strange christian loop")

 

.

Driver on the train is Jesus, Megan?  Yes, thank you. Again, i had somehow not seen that..

"Meet you in the air" is classically connected to the dispensational theory of the rapture I (1Thess 4:17 literally says "meeting Christ in the air" and this was I  think a doctrine of Shalom, too ) that it seemed to me certain he meant that..

Bono has even written in "Ahimsa":

" I'll meet you where the sky is torn

I’ll meet you in the air

I’ll meet you before the world was born"

Anyone with conservagelical heritage knows this excahnge:

"See you later"

"Here, there or in the air"

  14 For ⁱsince we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him ^jthose who have fallen asleep. 15 For this we declare to you ^kby a word from the Lord,⁴ that ^lwe who are alive, who are left until ^mthe coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For ⁿthe Lord himself will descend ^ofrom heaven ^pwith a cry of command, with the voice of ^qan archangel, and ^rwith the sound of the trumpet of God. And ^sthe dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be ^tcaught up together with them ^uin the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so ^vwe will always be with the Lord. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words. -1 Thess 4

or  as Bono riffs on it : "Meet you in the air..or in the underground."

Also:
                      now i wonder..

My question: “to wake up an unforgiving son” ..

what

Does that mean to you ?

Of course the brother of prodigal son comes to mind.

The line could mean “to wake up someone who is an unforgiving son” or “to wake up as a forgiving son”...

]

 On to:

"COEXIST: I Will Bless the Lord at All Times.

First a quick question. In the flurry of fan comments  when the song first appeared. there was  discussion about  who is the "Girl Of Guadaloop"
Of course, it is likely primarily  the Virgin of Guadalupe.

But why her, and why does she how up here?
And Pat Washington evem wondered if  Girl was thjs  other girl  here,... who Bono would obviously admire.  LOL. But her name doesn't rhyme with "book"...though neither does "Guadaloop," for that matter 

Also..

If you are reading this far, you will surely remember Bono saying as he introduces "Helter  Skelter"  in "Rattle and Hum "This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles? We're stealing it back"

This chilling song redeems or buys back some bad memories I have of the old TBN network.

Paul and Jan Crouch sometimes hosted some guests that I was interested in seeing..

But their campy  creepiness often  buggd me..let alone the scandals that ultimately came out.

Paul routinely  opened their flagship  show  with an overly enthusiastic quoting /cheerleading of this  same Scripture:

“I will bless the Lord at all times and His praise will continually be on my lips.”

And Bono's now bought/brought  it back from me.

From now on this Scripture  will  be voiced by Bono and the  U2 song, not the

TBN theme song

PTL!...to risk quoting  another controversial  televangelist show/

Finally:

One mystery : All  U2 fans know  what COEXIST means, and Bono's history with the  motto and headband/blindfold. But what does that have to do with the song's story Why is this in the title and nowhere in the lyric?

Ken Penner has as a suggested answer:

The anchor of the song is a vow seized from King David in duress, a stubborn promise to bless the Lord at all times, quoting verbatim “I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1, KJV). This is praise spoken through gritted teeth, and the COEXIST title frames that struggle with what Bono called a “powerful symbol of tolerance,” an attempt to imagine common ground when human rights feel under siege in the aftermath of 9/11. -Ken Penner

But  Brian Zahnd has an  additional (final?) answer, and

he may well be right! I haven't seen anyone suggest this. but I love the "obvious unobvious" .
 Someone ask Bono!

See 16:05 to 20:05 in Zahnd's sermon above.The take home?:

"Can the commitment to bless the Lord at all times COEXIST with the reality of a worldwhere children are killed by down strikes?"

Or to come full circle,  where wives die?

Or dead men don't wake up?
Isn't the ruthless and refreshing honesty of dozens of U2 songs  that  faith and doubt /grief an joy and coexist ? (see  "Bono audio: God at the 9" Nails Gig")

"

"Bono sings laments and yearnings as willingly as he sings resolve, peace and joy.' 

-Scott Calhoun, p.5, U2 and the Religious Impulse

Or as Walter Brueggemann, whom Bono quotes and references, has said,. the gospel and a prophet, and :prophetic imagination"  is all about  the coexistent paradox of grief and amazement?

Amazing Grief, how sweet the sound of this graced E.P.

--

"Oh #@! It's real!" ..but God is good..

all the time..

             and at all times.

I am learning to  creatively coexist in  the midst, milieux and mess of that.

Since "there's no end to grief," let's "set endless love to musical performance" so in the ruins we can know that "to know is to mourn"

photo credit

As I have said/confessed/sung/prayed  more than once, "I grieve not grieving."

                   But I finally realized that that  itself is inherently grieving, and thus a good place to start.

May He who began a good work in me be faithful to complete my encounter with grief..

Life is ruthless, indiscriminate....and ultimately loving....in supplying us the traumascape and holy ground of grief.

                   But often we need to gather..or enter into... a soundtrack and soundscape to 

                                                                sustain, sanctify and hold our grief-ground.

"Songs to Grieve By" could be a delightful name for a Spotify playlist.  I'll have to claim it.

     Of course the songs that make the cut  don't have to  all be  classically sad songs;

                                             laments, wails 

                                                                         and Pink Floyd downers.

Even though life is often best "tuned to minor chords"..

                    Some  of the songs selected should be uptempo and upbeat, 

and shamelessly embedded with unrepentant joy..

"California" by U2 is an intriguing choice.

The rocker is hardly a dirge; though a quick read at some of the lyrics might cause you to guess that it is.

This section has haunted  (stalked) me for months

I've seen for myself, there's no end to grief/That's how I know

 And why I need to know/That there is no end to love

All I know/And all I need to know is                          There is no end to love

                              

U2 has faced an unimaginable string of losses in recent months:the 

Bono's harrowing accident,

   the death of the band's chaplain, the indefatigable  "north star" Jack Heaslip,

         the death of Larry's father the week of the tour kick-off..

and yesterday , this:

Pastor Rick Warren:

U2's road manager for 33 years, the amazing Dennis Sheehan died suddenly last night here in LA. Dennis was a calm and kind Christian man. The team is heartbroken so Adam, Larry, Edge, and Bono asked me to share some scripture, words of comfort, and pray with them right before they walked on stage tonight. After sharing the ‪#‎ChooseJoy‬story from my son's death, I asked "So how do you go out and do a concert when your heart is hurting?" Bono said "We choose joy!" Right. Pray for Pam who lost the love of her life.  link

That  version of  "choose joy" is not some "name-it, claim it" happy-clappy motto (Denial is not just a river in Egypt),  but  a hardwon  naked trust in the endless love that is know only through the crucible of endless grief.

That doesn't preclude anger..even yelling at life, grief, the grieved...and God.

"I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Comfort me, COMFORT ME, COMFORT ME!!!" -Bono at end of "Wolves." #RIPDennis #U2ieTour

— Tim Neufeld (@timneufeld) May 28, 2015

Last night, at the end of "Raised by Wolves," itself a stunning public griefsong, Bono snippeted Psalm 23 in the outro (as usual), this time followed by "Comfort me.  COMFORT ME, COMFORT ME!"  (see video below).  Psalm 22 and 23 are two sides of the same whole and holistic grieflove lamentjoyprayer (see"The Lord Be With You...Even When He’s Not!")

Even St Paul unapologetically confessed, "I had no peace of mind."

                 And as another singer has added/midrashed "Peace of heart is better than piece of mind."

Peace of heart...finding love limitless in the midst of limanality and limitless grief is the only ways and means of knowing anything.  Not to mention are only lens for  knowing as we are known. ( By the way, we can know the Unknown Calle)r.

Note the last line  of that excerpt of "California"-- "there is no end to love" ---is itself a clear nod to Paul's 1 Corinthian's 13 insistence that "love never ends."

But do check well  the line before that, which has baffled me: "There's no end to grief.  That's how I know there is no end to love."

This  apparent nonsequitur and profound truth   is also thoroughly  Pauline.  NT Wright has detected in Scripture, notably in Paul, an "epistemology of love."

He even suggests that it must inevitably worked out in art; specifically music...even more specifically "musical performance":

....Is this then a reinforcement, from a musical point of view, for Dorothy L. Sayers’ thesis in The Mind of the Maker, to which I referred earlier?  Is there then indeed a Trinitarian pattern to the work of the artist or writer which, reflected back, provides some kind of evidence of who God may be?  I am not sure that this thesis can be sustained by itself, or that a natural theology built up by that means without help from elsewhere would arrive at anything approximating to the God and Father of Jesus, the giver of the Spirit.  But when the creative and aesthetic project meets the scriptural revelation — mediated, of course, through the thinking of the household of faith — then the two can perhaps at least be complementary.  I have explored elsewhere what I have called ‘an epistemology of love’, in which the sterile opposition between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reductions of ‘knowing’ are transcended.   I think, and hope, that what Paul Spicer and I discovered in our work on the Oratorio was something like that: a love for the subject-matter, a love worked out in art and scholarship, through which we both learned and grew and grasped afresh some of the central matters of Christian faith. And if this is true it may be a pointer to something else - something which the whole Theology Through the Arts project is all about: the non-reducible, and not merely decorative, function of imagination within historical work (as Collingwood insisted) and also theological endeavour, as well as in musical composition and performance.

I realize that I have thus arrived, as a non-specialist, at more or less what Aquinas says in his famous formulation: ‘As grace does not destroy but perfects nature, it is right that natural reason should serve faith just as the natural loving tendency of the will serves charity.’  There is of course a dangerous circularity about reaching that conclusion about method precisely by engaging in what, I hope, might be an instance of it happening in practice.  But I think I have said enough to show that this is a fruitful area for further enquiry and experiment, especially if — though this would be a matter for specialists to enlighten me further — what Aquinas meant by ‘natural reason’ is a large enough category to embrace aesthetic and artistic integrity, the composer’s and conductor’s sense of ‘what works’.  Certainly in this case the composer’s — and conductor’s — aesthetic and artistic integrity ‘served faith’ in a way that makes the ordinary jobbing theologian and preacher jealous.  If all theology, all sermons, had to be set to music, our teaching and preaching would not only be more mellifluous; it might also approximate more closely to God’s truth, the truth revealed in and as the Word made flesh, crucified and risen. 

 NT Wright, link

Is this how the band got through the concert last night?

Is this how they get through every night?

I too have felt (well, maybe not; which is itself the problem) the deaths of a series of loved ones:

a cousin who was like a brother, dear friends from church...

and I have grieved not grieving.

And even though I have been weaning myself from the evangelical idol of certainty  in recent years (and that is a grieving indeed)..

   in recent weeks, thanks to U2's "California," and their healthy navigation of their own grieving, I have been learning and leaning into all that I need to know.

Steven Garber writes of Walker Percy (whom I am pretty sure is a U2 influence):

One of his best stories is Love in the Ruins. It is the first of two novels featuring the character Tom More, a fictional descendent of Sir Thomas More, “the man for all seasons” who, in the 16th century, was the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor of England – and who refused to go along with Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce, so lost his head and his life. Percy’s More is a bad Catholic, a wandering husband who drinks too much, and a brilliant doctor. Written with a finger to the wind to the social turmoil of the 1960s, Percy wrote of Southern life embodied in the institutional frailties of the Love Clinic, a place where physicians and patients are thrown together in their hopes, longing to belong to someone somewhere.

Literally and metaphorically staggering his way through the story, More develops a machine that promises to save the day for the Love Clinic; he calls it “the qualitative/quantitative ontological lapsometer.” For anyone with ears to hear, attentive to the Enlightenment Project of the last few hundred years, Percy here captured the fundamental flaws of the modern world, fictional as they were in imagination and conception. When More is asked about the nature of a lapsometer, he replies – innocent as a dove, wise as a serpent – “It measures lapses – in the human soul.”

The dreams and debates of modernity, cascading as they are into postmodernity, are always at the heart of the human condition. It cannot be otherwise, as we are never more and never less than sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So we take our place as folks who long to love and to be loved. Percy understood that with an unusual eye: historically, philosophically, psychologically, politically, and, yes, theologically, seeing the complexity for Everyman and Everywoman. We want love, yet we also know how hard it is to love and to be loved.

There’s the rub. To know and to love; to love and to know. Can both happen at the same time? Can we do both? Can we have both?

Most of the time it seems impossible. For reasons beyond the scope of this short essay, I would argue that human beings more often than not choose cynicism or stoicism as alternative accounts of life and of love. Rather than an epistemology of love, a way of knowing that is manifest in loving, we choose to protect our hearts, “knowing” with the poet Byron that “he who knows the most mourns the deepest.” To know is to despair. To know is to flounder. To know is to mourn.  link

Related:

• "Know Kidding" = "Know Love" ?
• Wright: Epistemology of Love

• Crowder goes slumming /Psalming: Gilligan's Island, R-rated T-shirts, automated urinals, St. Airport...and sunsets and sushi
• Pepsi, Sex, Elevation...& Mission Trips That Are Actually Missional
• Soundtracking Grief and Missing Jesus
• an impossibly bad ending that's good news
• No Sanctified Church without Grieving our Grief