You can't be passé about songs of spiritual hunger like this. This feeling rests beneath so much of what every person does. And, as so many people have lamented in beautiful ways, it is very double sided. That hunger has found evocative, pitiable context in everything from the stalwart scroll declamations of Ecclesiastes to the engrossing camera-born meditation of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

So I won't just say these lyrics fall into some cliche genre. We all see the end. Our shouts all reach space.

I will point out an irony. So many 1980s pop songs were about religion and sin. Madonna, Prince, and George Michael used the conflict of morality and desire to re-claim the acceptability of certain shunned aspects of desire. And they tended to benefit as much from the risqué nature of the stance as the controversy resulting from the stance. U2 seemed to reverse the polarity and claim that the desire, even if indulged, cannot be quenched. What a bunch of choir boys. You'd think this practice would've been commercial suicide in the '80s. I've even read how a producer asked Bono to write a song about the conflicts of morality and desire, and I'd like to think that producer was hoping to get a little sensuality out of young, fair Bono. Well, not this time. ("Mysterious Ways" might have been Bono giving in.)

The song better be good!

The shimmering guitar drone, such an invention, still so unique sounding after lots of imitation.

A soaring, earnest gospel melody.

A chorus of immaculate purity.

A rhythm section creating the song's thoughtful backdrop.

The song fades out and may never arrive.