So, about conscious convergence. In the overall scheme of things, upon examination, you could say that it was rather slow to arrive, and a number of people had picked up the ball (or, rather, had picked up on it), long before I did. In The Joshua Tree (1987) Bono mentioned his own entrance into a new realm of religious experience (Trip Through Your Wires), one he wasn’t even sure what to make of, at first, which is actually a sign of high discretion. (He wasn't sure whether to address the entity he encountered as angel or devil, he just knew he'd fallen for it, real hard.) He resolved this query with the advent of Achtung Baby (1991); by that point he’d concluded that the spiritual entity, who had appeared to him as feminine, was the Holy Spirit. This is the celebration of redemptive awareness described by Mysterious Ways.
Beyond that I cannot say that I’d developed a keen awareness of the lyrics. It wasn’t until after seeing U2's performance in November of 1992 that I realized the full implications of some of Bono's lyrics. That was a precipitous moment, and it took a while for it to percolate and be absorbed. It was sometime after, probably in December, that I actually read, for the first time, an opening couplet from The Fly and it meant something rather expansive.
Well, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was home alone at the time and so had license to full expression, which simply means I was stunned enough by the implication that I burst into tears and ended up pacing a circle in the living room several times, muttering that it wasn’t fair. That was not simply because it left me flummoxed. It does take considerable length to explain why a stoic like myself would arrive at such an emotional juncture merely on the basis of a couple of lyrics. I’m going to start with the concert, seeing as I would not have arrived at this point having not been there first, and that was really where it started.
What did I think Bono was up to? Well, the concert is a space where the music is active and the lyrics may acquire tangible expression; they are no longer restricted to the abstract, or a singular internal experience. And while I think this sort of arch-typical pattern is prevalent in performance and has been accessed by all sorts of ceremonies, etc., probably more capably, in times past, I think in U2's terms its definition is unique, and this elevates its potential. In the performance context Mysterious Ways became a focal point for the whole dynamic purveyed in concert. In doing so it was much more apparent that it wasn’t an exclusively Divine metaphor that was being described. It was easily apparent that She moves with it described a female in association with the Holy Spirit. And it’s obvious that Bono would not be offering to take the Spirit out and show Her things She’s never seen, or buy Her stuff, which is more like a date offer, and appears pretty amusing at surface value. (He added some lines when it was live.) It’s quite a leap without the context of the performance (it’s rather a leap even after you take it into account) to assert that the song acquired focus on a female medium, or anointed vessel, and alludes to a transformative experience. In terms of Christian symbols this allusion has a rather grand scale. It can be viewed as actively symbolizing the arch-typical marriage dynamic, which at the highest level represents the unification of the Church and the Lamb. I know that it is rather preposterous to assert that Bono had structured his performance to convey this type of experience to a mass audience, but I’m about to do just that.
Mysterious Ways was the point of focus precisely because of the way in which it translates from the Divine to the human. The transformative aspect is in the attempt in the lyrics to capture a specific moment; that of the total Love experience one can sense in an immersion with the Holy Spirit, occurring in the Now. It does this within the feminine context. With this single performance you can convey in a microcosm most of what was present in the rest. Bono acts as a facilitator. The dancer represents a dual medium: she can be an accessory to the Spirit as an anointed person, (seeing as the Spirit was also represented as an external using the screen), or she can be seen as a representation of the feminine Church. In representing these two aspects she becomes a very potent symbol, because it makes her an active conduit or nexus for the transformation itself. (After all, the Spirit was introduced in the NT as the medium who would act to unify the foundling, earth-bound Church with the heavenly Christ. It really is Her function.)
The reason the dancer represents both these perspectives in one body is due to the way Bono treated her as the object of the entire song. Because he bowed to an onscreen external image symbolizing homage to the Spirit, it can be taken that he approached her as an anointed conduit for the Spirit, not purely as the Spirit Herself. She represents a vector to the mutual love experience with the Divine. On the other hand, by approaching her with the open date offer, with its human associations, he is not simply proposing her as an anointed sent to elevate him, but as if he too was sent to elevate her to this plane of experience. As object to this proposal she represents the human element in the equation, or is more equivalent to the Church. In approaching her in this manner Bono assumed the arch-typical bridegroom role, which is analogous to Christ’s, but at a human level. In performing this role and initially connecting with the audience, (which was done in Real Thing), then introducing the dancer in her representation and connecting with her, and then re-affirming the connection with the audience by inviting a member onstage in the same relation as the dancer (Trying to Throw your Arms Around the World), I think it is possible to have involved this marriage dynamic. Audience unifies with the singer, and with him facilitating unifies with the dancer representing access to God in a female medium, or point of transformation. By bringing up one of the audience in the same manner as the dancer, and actually dancing with her, I think the Church representation is transferred to the audience as a whole. There is the potential to experience a sense of the spiritual unity, which on its ultimate scale will exist between God and the Church as ONE. (And the crowd goes wild.)
At least these were admittedly the terms I had to articulate my own experience. I’m not saying that this was all at the top of my head. It took a long time for me to verbalize, though I would say that this was what I could sense at the time. I’m not claiming this model for everyone else, but I do think it may be the highest interpretation, and I think Bono has a pretty good clue as to what he is conveying. It’s not too surprising, in the context of this sort of examination, that a high ratio of the people coming out of U2 concerts claim to have had a religious experience, if not precisely on these terms. They have it on their own terms. I’m saying there is a high potential, especially with it being a mass experience. It occurs in a variety of formats according to the individuals, and sometimes it has the potential to arrive a higher plateau at certain performances, than it does with others. I am not claiming that it was a unification of the Lamb and the Church, more like a simulated test run experience, there to be accessed by anyone near that frame of mind. I don’t think you can claim that God was there participating; that’s a pretty impossible question. After all this frame of perception, aside from having to previously exist as some sort of construct within the recipient’s mind (at least in order to be articulated religiously), is based entirely on what is invoked in performance. (This is why Bono once said I'm learning to lie, seeing as an objective awareness of the process automatically tends to put one on the outside of it. Acting as a participant every night, while simultaneously pushing all the buttons is really pulling a fast one.) In other words the whole experience is induced by setting and conditioning. The process reminds me of that of Grace induced by a hallucinogen, and there too I think you may enter the grand debate. It does lead to the question of whether this type of religious experience, if solely based on internal perception, is still valid. I’d have to say this has been one of the major debates in my life. When it’s left all by itself I have consistently ended up saying no. I’m mentioning this because having experienced something on this scale (I’m sure the acid had a lot to do with it), I did not jump to any conclusions about its being valid, although this was what he opened up in me. I attempted to my utmost to send it out as potential to anyone who might be capable of experiencing it, and then I reciprocated it back to him. As far as I was concerned, the only way it could be considered as possibly being a real experience was if it was somehow a mutual experience. Obviously marriage on any level is a mutual, interactive process, so unless there was some result, then obviously we are talking about a simulated religious experience. It would be a completely internalized religious experience with no relevance whatsoever, unless it had the requisite impact on the outside. So while I assessed my experience, and understood this conclusion, based on my own senses and capacities, I believed in the potential that it had existed beyond my perception. (Don’t ask me how the connection could have worked with no common sensory awareness of it, no exchange or contact. I had no idea. I say God.) The conclusion was that there had to be some sort of “result”, a tangible effect, and I had some expectation as to how that would act. Like I said, I like to think it takes a little more than the usual for me to be gulled. I got what I expected.
(Bear in mind that this was re-edited in terms of shifting all the pronoun usage from “you” to “him”, having originally been written to Bono.)