U2's Most Spiritual Album

It is a relatively recent but dependable trend. Whenever U2 puts out a new album, you can bet that within a few months the Internet will be flooded with articles and essays by preachers and other interested parties about how spiritual the album is. Although some people will hearken back to The Joshua Tree album as an example of early spirituality in the music of U2, most of these discussions fixate on the recent works All That You Can't Leave Behind and How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Many of these writers act as though they are putting their readers onto something new, as though their careful ears are the first to have detected these spiritual nuances.

The fact is, though, that the most overtly spiritual album U2 has made is one of their earliest, created when they were barely out of high school. The album is called October. It is an album that, frankly, few people are aware of and even fewer listen to. The band has yet to find their musical voice and Bono is clearly struggling with figuring out how to write a song. Many of the lyrics feel scattered and unfinished. For those who came late to the U2 party, it would not meet the expectations they would have of a U2 album.

Yet for sheer spirituality, it ranks at the top. Written during a period when most of the band members were embracing Christianity with evangelical fervor, the album makes no attempt to hide or shade their devotion. In later times, they learned to present their spirituality in more nuanced and subtle ways. Here it is more raw and open. Consider, for instance, the words to With A Shout (Jerusalem):

I wanna go
To the foot of the messiah
To the foot of he who made me see
To the side of a hill
Where we were still
We were filled
With a love
We're gonna be there again
Jerusalem, Jerusalem

This theme of spiritual longing also finds expression in Tomorrow, a song about the death of Bono's mother. When Bono sings, Who healed the wounds, Who heals the scars, he goes on to answer his own question:

Open up, open up
To the Lamb of God
To the love of he who made me
The light to see you
He's coming back . . .
I believe it
Jesus coming

Praise is a major theme on this album. From the simple song Scarlet whose only lyrics are the repeated refrain "Rejoice, rejoice" to the song titled Rejoice, which sees praise as the appropriate response to God in the world.

I can't change the world
But I can change the world in me
If I rejoice . . . rejoice

The best known song off of the album is Gloria. The casual listener could be forgiven for thinking this is a song about a woman. The fact is that U2 stinks at writing traditional love songs and they know it. U2 employs "Gloria" here as the Latin term for "Glory." It is an unabashed praise song to God, as the largely Latin chorus makes clear.

Only in you I'm complete
Gloria . . . in te domine
Gloria . . . exultate
Gloria . . . Gloria
Oh Lord, loosen my lips

Bono concludes "Gloria" by singing "Oh Lord, if I had anything, anything at all, I'd give it to you." And yet he does have something to give: his music. As the subsequent career of U2 shows, culminating in the most recent albums, Bono has continued to give God that which he has to give: praise through music.