Apart from the short line in my song "Donut" about Bono's desire to bring an end to world poverty, which was based on a piece of Yahoo news that had caught my eye around the time I wrote the song, I never really did waste another thought on the vocal frontman of the 80s band U2.
Of course, I have done my obligatory U2 covers in my time, even though I was never much of a U2 fan myself. I was surprised when in the early 90s an English friend told me that U2 was supposedly a Christian band. Never noticed. After that, whenever I saw Bono on MTV with his larger than life and blacker than death sunglasses, looking a bit like a man-sized insect, I just thought, "Christian, huh!"
Oh, and I read the Rolling Stone article in which he claimed to read the Bible every day, sort of like General Patton.
To be honest, for the longest time, I didn't know what to think. Good guy, bad guy?
He definitely outed himself for me, as far as "Christian" goes, with his live performance of "Sympathy for the Devil," strutting across the stage like someone with the same type of inflated-ego problems that you'd expect Lucifer himself to have. You just can't sing that song the way he did and afterwards run to Jesus, telling Him you're His friend.
But then, we've all had our compromises.
Some Christians view Bono and U2 among the avant guarde of Christian song writing. In an Interview with Christianity Today, Bethany Dillon quoted Bono on one of his secrets of writing smash hits (I guess the secret lies in camouflaging the message to an extent that even Stalin wouldn't have considered it "politically incorrect").
I don't deny that U2 have had a few big hits in their day.
Like the one, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," in which the singer practically tells the Lord, that he believes that He bore the cross of his shame and all, but - so what? "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." In other words, "Jesus, you may be sort of cool & all, but you don't really cut the cake..."
If you haven't found what you were looking for in Jesus, then what the hell are you looking for? Or perhaps it's safer to put it this way: If you haven't found yet what you're looking for, I doubt that you've really found Jesus! Unless what you're really looking for is the same old temporal counterfeit thrills & satisfactions that everyone else is chasing...
There's an adjective for that type of Christianity in the Bible, from Jesus' own mouth: "Lukewarm." The same type of Christianity that's being observed by the majority of Christians, by the way, who basically live their lives in the feverish attempt to prove Jesus wrong when He said, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."
Well, the news about Mammon is, that his days are just about up. What you see unfolding in the economy right now is just the beginning of sorrows, and when the tale is told, and our "economy" is reduced to the value of what it's actually based on - paper - then there will only be one other alternative left, besides serving God, and if you're not going to feel too comfortable with that one, you'll wish you'll have found what you've been looking for by then.
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