The Slow Work: Moonlight

A while back in this space, I wrote about a book entitled Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor.  The core idea, concept of "lunar faith" as contrasted with "solar faith," was a home run for me.  Many people, maybe even most people, either have or want a faith that is solar--it provides clarity and definition and warmth pretty much all the time.  A faith that has shadows and soft edges, one that masks almost as much as it reveals, would be counter to what they are seeking out of this whole faith project.  I get it, and I can't say I haven't looked to bathe in that solar light.  But I find myself drawn to that softer moonlight, and more to the point I get itchy when there is too much sunlight.  I need things to be a little fuzzy, whether that's because I need the mental space to imagine what is there, or because I'm not quite ready to fully confront what is there, or just because there is a beauty to that fuzziness.

But what does lunar faith actually mean?  I think the simplest answer, at least for me, is "the kind of faith U2 demonstrates in its music."

It's not a particular controversial or contestable point that U2 is the most commercially successful band that has an explicitly religious orientation to its music.  But I think not enough time is spent on the nature of U2's religious orientation.  U2 may be a religious/Christian band, but they almost entirely lack any of the triumphalist dimension seen in, for example, most Contemporary Christian Music.  I think non-Christian/non-religious audiences vibe with U2 precisely for this reason.  U2 is not selling you on spirituality or faith, but more seems to be reporting their experiences which include experiences of faith.  It is what it is, and it is often nuanced and ambiguous and even kinda lousy and sad and confusing.

I've already talked about One off of Achtung Baby (1991) on two different occasions, so I won't repeat that here.  Instead, let's go with one of my favorite U2 songs, If God Will Send His Angels, off of Pop (1997).

    

You might not think that this is a song about faith.  In fact, you might think it is an anti-faith song; from a particular solar-ized point of view, it is a song about losing faith.  But I am confident that Bono and the boys would not agree.  When I listen to this song, I think "yeah, it is like that some times," and I appreciate someone else saying so, giving permission to exist in uncertainty and confusion.  There are a lot of basically well-meaning religious people who will chastise you for asking the question "And if God will send his angels, will everything be alright?"  Yes, of course it will, they will tell you; it's God after all.  But it doesn't always feel that way.  Sometimes it feels like "God's got his phone off the hook, babe."    

For me, this is a song that gives you permission to feel those things.  It doesn't rush to paper them over, trotting out pre-packaged explanations.  It gives us space to ask "So where is the hope, and where is the faith and the love?"  Plus, and I think this is critical (and something that runs through U2's music), the song makes abundantly clear that cynicism about religious institutions is not at all the same thing as losing faith ("Jesus never let me down, Jesus used to show me the score.  Then they put Jesus in show business, now it's hard to get in the door.")  It holds that space for you to the end, leaving you in some ways with ambiguous hope--"It's the stuff of country songs; well, I guess, that's something to go on." (my favorite line in the song, by the way).

I also love the way the song is personal.  The opening of the song makes it clear:

Nobody else here baby

No-one here to blame

No-one to point the finger

It's just you and me and the rain

Nobody made you do it

No one put words in your mouth

Nobody here taking orders

When love took a train heading south

It's the blind leading the blond

It's the stuff, it's the stuff of country songs.  

So much of religious discourse is thoroughly depersonalized and abstract.  But, at the end of the day, we encounter God through each other, for good and for ill.  Anytime you add other people into the equation, you are making things uncertain and confused.  It's far easier to think about God and spirituality as relating to something up there, out there, beyond the complex and muddled world we share with each other.  But that's not how it is, and I think this song understands that (just as Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah does).  This happens through us, through each other.

Speaking of the personalism of God.

 

Much ink has been spilled of late on the gender of God, most of it very stupid.  For what it is worth, I think (and I'm convinced the tradition taken as a whole agrees) gender is a purely human phenomenon, so God is not male or female in a fixed, essential way.  As such, we human beings experience God as either or both or neither gender, and sometimes as different genders in different contexts or circumstances (and different people can experience God as different genders in the same circumstances).  All of these framings ultimately say more about us than it does about God.  Which doesn't make them wrong or useless; on the contrary, they ground us in a way that goes to that personalism discussed above.  But we have to be sure we are clear about what ultimately we are talking about.

All of which is a prelude to saying that I definitely relate to the presentation offered by Mysterious Ways from Achtung Baby, which is God as feminine-resonating mystery.  Indeed, Mysterious Ways might as well be the anthem for lunar faith.  The first line sets us up right from the jump--"Johnny take a walk with your sister the moon, let her pale light in, to fill up your room."  This "moon sister" is something of a trickster, but also clearly also Sophia, the Wisdom figure from many traditions including post-exilic Judaism.  And Wisdom and mystery are not oppositional, but in part of a coordinated experience.  Yes, we get some direct spiritual wisdom ("to touch is to heal, to hurt is to steal"), but we get the strong sense that most of what we are being told we won't actually understand all that well, or at all.  This is not a song about answers, about communicating direct concrete information--she "talk[s] about the things you can't explain."    

It's at places like this that my universalism is probably at its height.  Lots of different religious traditions talk about very similar Wisdom figures, and my supposition is that they are all talking about the same underlying reality.  Again, I think that different people experience the same reality differently, so I assume some people will experience Wisdom in a masculine register, or in an non-binary way, or in various other ways.  So, the fact that this song has a sort of deliberate vagueness about our, well, mysterious woman is speaking to the ambiguous, lunar parts of the spiritual experience.  We are left with more questions at the end of the song than answers.  Sometimes that's how it is.   

Mysterious Ways also confronts us with the erotic dimension to spirituality.  Without question, this is a very sexy song, and that sexiness may cause some to reject that the song is about spirituality at all, reframing it as an ode to some impossible woman who lives just outside our grasp.  I think that approach represents a false binary; I think the song is both about tangible women and about God as mysterious feminine.  If you react to the line "[i]f you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel; on your knees, boy!" as a statement about the necessity of faith, or something that's kind of a turn-on, or even better both at the same time, I think you have the proper orientation to this song.

Again, if the way we experience God is by and through others, then anything we might say about God is going to have to also resonate in the human dimension, and visa versa.  Which means that a component of the way we approach God is through the erotic.  The mystic tradition in Christianity has had this component for its entire history, but we tend to be afraid of it, mostly because we are afraid and uncomfortable (in general, but especially in Christianity) with eroticism generally.  This line can certainly go too far, making everything we might talk about with regard to spirituality really about sex (for those who engage in certain sorts of Christian discourse on Twitter, we can think about the notorious "Sex Lutheran" here).  But I think it is also a mistake to try to hermetically seal off sexuality from our grappling with spirituality.  

Maybe one of my hottest takes is that the genre of "Jesus is my boyfriend" songs in Contemporary Christian Music from female artists is Basically Fine, and probably overall healthy in light of the otherwise complete lack of any sort of outlet for such expression in the Evangelical world (again, especially for women).  Likewise, the total refusal of many to accept that at least one dimension of the Song of Songs is a description of two probably-not-married people getting it on is silly and counterproductive--the horny reading doesn't invalidate or limit the reading of the text as a metaphor for God's love for God's people.

The point is that Mysterious Ways supports both the physical and spiritual readings of the song, and doesn't play them off each other, but has them in parallel at the same time.  It is an expression of an embodied spirituality, an antidote to the efforts to get you to wall off parts of yourself, especially the complicated parts that we don't necessarily want to engage with.  Sex and spirituality are both messy alone, and are particularly messy together, but that's real life and real life is necessarily messy.  Don't be afraid of it, Mysterious Ways is telling us.

There are other U2 songs I could point to as expressions of lunar faith--Moment of Surrender from No Line on the Horizon (2009) comes to mind--but I think I will stop here.  As I was putting this together, one thought that I've had is that I have been listening to U2 for basically the entire time I have been engaging with faith in something like an adult way.  Until now, I haven't really given much thought to if and to what extent U2 has shaped the way I look at spirituality.  But, considering it now, I think the impact has been pretty profound, if subtle.  Again, because U2 doesn't bludgeon you with very didactic messages, it is easy to miss the influences.  And yet, at least for me, they are definitely there.