Do you feel love?

I woke up, to use a line from Homer, "full of spirits." It would be a good day to write, to think, to journal, to email, to talk. But, there is work to do. We "modern" people are so confused. Culture is so big that it can't be stopped! Irony is the only way of pausing for a moment. We have many "goods and services" but how many opportunities for a good, long chat with a friend?

I woke up with U2's album War in my head, "New Year's Day" to narrow, and the Edge's supremely even and beautiful distortion underneath the chorus to be the thing itself. My gosh, what an album is War? Written just as they were beginning to find their musical legs, and in the very middle of Bono's (Paul's) wedding to his childhood sweetheart, Ali, War can only be described as an exercise in liberation theology. War means that holy war against violence, poverty, deception, greed and political power which can only be fought in faith, hope and love because its outcome has already been promised. War is the Kingdom of God, and in particular that portion of the church known as the Church Militant, chafing painfully against the knotty bark of this present age.

Here's how Jürgen Moltmann put it in the introduction to Theology of Hope.

"Christian eschatology speaks of Jesus Christ and his future. It recognizes the reality of the raising of Jesus and proclaims the future of the risen Lord - ‘He is our hope’ (Col. 1.27). In thus announcing his future in the world in terms of promise, they point believers in him towards the hope of his still outstanding future. In the promises, the hidden future already announces itself and exerts its influence on the present through the hope it awakens...faith can have nothing to do with fleeing the world, with resignation and with escapism...the man who thus hopes will never be able to reconcile himself with the laws and constraints of this earth, neither with the inevitability of death nor with the evil that constantly bears further evil. The raising of Christ is not merely a consolation to him in a life that is full of distress and doomed to die, but it is also God’s contradiction of suffering and death, of humiliation and offence, and of the wickedness of evil. Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but also the protest of the divine promise against suffering. If Paul calls death the ‘last enemy’(I Cor. 15.26), then the opposite is also true: that the risen Christ, and with him the resurrection hope, must be declared to be the enemy of death and of a world that puts up with death."

To make a huge leap, this is largely why calls for "evangelize one's neighbors" feel so sour to me. In correspondence with Karl Marx's observation that capitalism reduces all personal relationships to business transactions, such emphases do not seem to value and address the whole person. My neighbor does not receive me (nor I him), but merely my "product." Doing this to the gospel - which is a truth far more dense with living reality than whatever kind of thing human beings are - is like limiting one's experience of a Monet to the black & white reproductions in a 1960's Introduction to Art textbook. Evangelism keeps me safe, love makes me vulnerable. I may learn the techniques of evangelism - in a manner analogous to the way a salesperson learns and perfects their own skills - and I have done this before. When pressed, I'm a very decent salesman. But I have a long way to go when it comes to love. (And I ask, what is this Dear John letter that begins "I love you..."? How do those words go together?) Bono asks many many times (of others and of himself) through the entire corpus of U2's discography, "Where's the love?" or, "Do you feel love?"

Baby don't fight
We can talk this thing through
It's not a big problem
It's just me and you
You can call or I'll phone
The TV is still on
But the sound is turned down
And the troops on the ground
Are about to dig in

And I wonder where is the love?
Where is the love?
Where is the love?
Where is the love?
Love and peace("Love and Peace or Else" U2)