A note on roaring music and transsubstantiation and Irish guys and blessings.

A single figure is outlined on a stage, spotlit. Twenty thousand people hold their breath as one. The figure is jagged, almost painfully reaching up; he could be an irregular streak of lightning. He looks in fact a little like a lone tree on a hill. Except that he’s extending a microphone up towards the heavens, as if it is the voice of silence and light, the unnamable, that he wants to bring into our midst, not his own. He is only a vessel, his silence says, ready to come to life when the moment speaks through him.

Then a guitar starts pulsing, driving behind him, a guitar that does not fly off the handle or get lost in pretty curlicues, but keeps holding something back, repeating the same simple chord the way Desmond Tutu repeats the same word, again and again, to make us feel something remarkable, the power of imminence. It’s the sense of impendingness the instrument conveys, something building, building, but not released, something crying out for release, like an extra voice within us.

The drums begin to clatter, a bass offers a backbeat, and before you know it, twenty thousand beings in Japan, Buddhist, atheistic, fun-loving beings, are shouting about elevation and the need to climb higher, are leaning in to hear about messages from the skies, advertisements for transcendence, are thinking about what they can offer the poor in Africa, the diseased in their own homes, are preparing themselves to recite the words to Psalm 40.

It’s an extraordinary thing, and one that nothing in my life has prepared me for. Seeing U2 in concert, again and again now, in Los Angeles and Copenhagen and Tokyo and New Jersey on this tour alone, I am confronted with a constant miracle: that they have turned a crowd into a congregation and, in Bono’s recurrent phrase, a song into a prayer. That they have taken all that is seen to be an example of the modern age’s distance from the divine (ours the first age, Huston Smith has said, not to have a temple at its center, but an entertainment complex — a station or a stadium), and turned it into a kind of church.

Their theme, I realize, is transsubstantiation, and one thing they’ve done is to take the very restlessness and passion and rebellion of our lives and point it heavenwards. They’ve transformed the very meaning of transformation. By elevating the words of “Elevation.”

*

Thousands of people jostle into these shows, and in cities like Boston, in broken towns around northern Europe, many, many of the people I see are the ones I would otherwise see at the pub, or reeling through the streets late at night, looking for trouble. They might be wearing the colors of their team, looking to mix it up with today’s opponent; they might be just kicking bottles down the sidewalk, looking to release something pent up. These same boys, who speak in curses and make free with their fists, are now shouting along about Satan’s temptations to Jesus on the mountaintop, about the seven towers of a city without walls, about world peace and surrender, the joy of giving up your own small sense of yourself and your own importance.

They’re singing about us all being one. They’re singing about human rights and Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the many things that is being transformed here is the very meaning of communion.

*

Too much has been said already about the biggest rock band in the world, at the top of their game for a quarter of a century now, on the cover of Time as musicians and then as activists, true liberation theologians, four young men who have stayed together through a hundred changes, dismantled their group, put it together again, challenged their own self-righteousness and advanced their own engaged gospel by playing the devil at times, quite literally speaking for the lures of the world, of power and richness and glamour, that they know they have to transform. They’ve turned rock and roll inside out just by making it an instrument for the transmission of humanity, of giving up, of foolishness and fallenness and the hypocrisy that usually comes when a mortal being takes on immortal longings.

They’ve made it almost cool to believe — at least to shout along with Bono, I believe in You — and they’ve got some of the most disenchanted and angry souls on earth to sing along, on the first song of every tour this century, about how beautiful the crowd is, and the day we’ve been given. They’ve used publicity for the causes they care about — the poor, the endangered, the oppressed — and yet kept their lives and their personalities more or less private.

And yet there’s something else to be said here. The coin of the realm today is personality (its gold bullion celebrity). The language we speak is that of acceleration, globalism, fast-moving images, over-the-top gestures. You can’t grab people nowadays unless you place a gaudy cloth on silence and make it speak in the tongues of CNN and MTV.

They make big deals with corporations. They set up huge charity concerts around the world. They collaborate with Martin Scorsese, Salman Rushdie, Wim Wenders, Steve Jobs. They beg us to call their bluff and ask, What are these three Irish boys and their English friend doing, calling a platform a podium? What value of exchange allowed them to turn a stage into an altar? Who says you can make goodness out of money?

I’ve spent many years now chronicling the life of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, trying to see how he carries his simple, universal ideas of transformation, kindness and responsibility to everyone who can gain from them, Catholic or agnostic or Moslem or Chinese. I’ve seen him feed on challenges to himself, long to be shown wrong by scientists, always affirming that even the Buddha’s words, and certainly his own, should be thrown out as soon as the evidence suggests something else. I’ve watched him take globalism, personality, the media — everything that people like me are inclined to think of as corrupt — and say that everything can be used for some good if you approach it in the right way. There is nothing good or bad — Hamlet’s wisdom — but thinking makes it so.

Then I go away from the Dalai Lama, seen most recently last November with Desmond Tutu in Hiroshima, and travel up to a huge rock arena decorated in the profanities of the day. A man is standing there, urging us to sing Hallelujiah! along with him. He’s looking up at the sky, and going down on his knees, to receive a blessing. He’s letting us know how easy it is to help others if only we turn our mind to it. He’s hanging a crucifix around a microphone.

Rock and roll was for me, as for so many of us, a way to escape the chapel we had to attend twice a day as schoolboys, and enter a realm of sedition and desire, of release and the chance to claim a unique destiny for ourselves. Whoever could have guessed that rock and roll was going to bring us into one of the most effective prayer-halls of all? The clamor, the glitter, the violence are all speaking for what lies behind them all, which Bono and his mates sometimes call grace; or sometimes they just call it home.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of Abandon, a novel about mysticism, and Sun After Dark, a set of travels into questions.