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Pro Bono

One of the things I like about the worship service at Princeton is that the musical director incorporates worship music from a host of different cultures. In my one month at PTS I've heard everything from bluegrass to gospel to Native American to West African to Spanish to Gregorian to Hillsong to traditional hymns.

Walking into the chapel for yesterday's worship, I was reminded that communion is served on Fridays. The servers were working out who would stand where to distribute communion. I settled into my seat and began looking over the bulletin to see what the music for the service would be, when suddenly I recognized a familiar four-note arpeggio pattern. The instrumentation, however, seemed different, higher pitched--perhaps a mandolin?

Then a female voice sang an ascending line that rose above the mandolin: "I can't believe the news today / I can't close my eyes and make it go away." I looked up from the bulletin so that my eyes could confirm what I thought my ears were hearing--U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday sung in chapel!

U2's version is marked by the militaristic snare beat that opens and sustains the song, which together with Bono's impassioned vocals give the song its air of defiance (it is, after all, a protest song against violence). But here it was being sung with a soft female vocal and supported solely by mandolin, which compelled the listener to concentrate on the words being sung, especially in the last verse when the mandolin dropped out, leaving the soloist to quietly proclaim:

And it's true we are immune when fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
The real battle just begun to claim the victory Jesus won

Bloody Sunday, indeed.

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