INTERFERENCE IS SOMETIMES A VERY GOOD THING …

Interference.com is, for my money, the best U2 fan site around (they have everything and usually have something new and different, too … love that). Much to my delight and surprise this morning, a Google alert showed up in my Gmail inbox letting me that someone at Interference was talking about me.

Happily, it was Jake Olsen, who wrote a lovely review/story about The God Factor. You can read the whole kit-and-caboodle here, but below is a wee bit of what Mr. Olsen had to say:

Falsani and Bono alike recognize the almost compulsive obsession with which people (myself included) pore over U2’s lyrics in an attempt to gauge the band’s spiritual health or brand it with one religious label or another. Bono answers the question with a word that sums up Christianity for every sect—grace. “That’s it! Christ’s attempt to bring you out of your religiosity to an impossible standard you cannot reach without grace. Grace is the reason I discovered my gift. It’s the reason I have children. It’s the reason I found my voice in different areas. Grace is the reason I’m here,” he said.

With these words, Falsani wraps her piece about Bono and grabs the reader for a full 31 more interviews. Author Anne Rice talks openly of her prodigal return to Catholicism; publisher Hugh Hefner expounds on humanism; filmmaker Harold Ramis compares “Groundhog Day” to the Buddhist tenet of reincarnation; Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel describes his journey of doubt and back to belief after surviving the Holocaust. While it may be that no other personality receives as many pages as Bono, it is clear that each is treated with equal respect, whether they are athlete, politician or radio shock jock, Muslim, atheist or Buddhist. As with Bono, Falsani gently coaxes sincere, deeply held beliefs from each subject, even if that belief is an admission of uncertainty or indecision.

If “The God Factor” is an accurate cross-section of American spirituality, many of us are beginning to admit uncertainty, indecision and doubt in the supernatural—especially after the attacks of 9/11. That day asked many painful questions that still defy answers. Falsani and her subjects may not have the answer, but she does suggest a balm for the pain. On the Saturday after the attacks, Falsani recounts when grace walked into a Chicago nightclub to banish the gloom:

“I came to sing to you tonight because someone wants us to suffer,” [jazz musician Kurt] Elling told the hushed crowd. “Someone wants us to fail—as a nation, a culture, as a people. We fold? They win. We stay home in fear or depression? They win. Culture must continue. Joy must come out. Life is stronger than death …”

“We are not encircled by darkness. We’re surrounded by a circle of light whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere. We have beheld this glory; it is full of grace.”

Yep. There you have it.

Grace.

There was hardly a dry eye in the house, and the pall blew away.