Freedom.
I want to run, I want to hide
I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside
I wanna reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name
I wanna feel sunlight on my face
I see that dust cloud disappear without a trace
I wanna take shelter from the poison rain
Where the streets have no name
~ U2, “Where The Streets Have No Name”
the joshua tree summer series
Formed in 1976, the band U2 is the longest-running band still touring with the same members: Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen gelled in 1978 and are still going strong. Fifty years of recording and performing music that challenges war and channels their spiritual vision. Timely as ever.
It was their fifth album “The Joshua Tree” released in 1987 that defined their sound and established them as a dominant cultural force, not just as entertainers, but as advocates for good, in sharp contrast to other stars. This was also the year I graduated from college and bought their album on CD, cutting-edge technology! The songs haunted me, stirring inner desires and angsts I could not name… or trust. In fact, they felt like a threat to the easy-answer, simplistic faith of my youth. Yet the connection with U2’s music in general, and this album specifically, remained and strengthened over time.
As a summer diversion, I’d like to explore some of their enduring lyrics and reflect upon how they resonate with the soul’s universal wiring. Starting with the first song on the album, “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Before we go any further, take a moment and listen to it afresh and feel their unique combination of honesty and joy… with a touch of civil disobedience in the mix.
How do you experience this song? What stirs in you?
For me, the lyrics embody a sense of feeling constrained, maybe even imprisoned, and the yearning for freedom. There is an urgency to break free from the unjust oppressions of our world and reclaim our purpose and power. The storyteller wants to feel alive, revived, reinvigorated… and you sense that need for release even in the concert video.
Agency. The ability to know your course and actually embark on it. The capacity to actually do the good you know you’re meant to bring into your world. To be that one-of-a-kind divine spark that only you can shine with. Not for ego but for authenticity and impact.
Lead singer Bono grew up attending the Church of Ireland with his mom, and occasionally Catholic Church with his dad, but he intuited early on that the soulful angst and prophetic challenge bubbling up in his music would be stifled in traditional Christianity. Outside those religious filters, the rest of the world resonated profoundly with his penetrating vision to call out the best in us, and for Bono, Jesus remained at the crux of the hope for our world.
“Where the streets have no name…” Bono envisions a cultural context in which there is freedom to explore rather than be confined by other people’s definitions. To name the environment is to control the environment, or at least to control the narrative—an authority reserved for the architects of society in order exploit it. Or so it felt at the time. Actually, it feels a little like that now too.
finding our way home
What remains stuck or trapped in you? Where do you feel like you have to exile the truest parts of yourself in order to please and provide? What would Jesus want to say to you about that?
takeaway
Do not go gentle into that good night.