This song is a reminder to get out and remember who the best artist in the world is.. The creator, it's a Beautiful Day.. Everyday.. thanks God!

It's so crystal clear...
It's about Jesus...
It's the life of Jesus and what kept him going.

"The heart is a bloom,
Shoots up through the stony ground."
Faith grows no matter what, even if a stony ground, it shoots up through that.

"But there's no room,
No space to rent in this town
You're out of luck
And the reason that you had to care,
The traffic is stuck
And you're not moving anywhere."
When He was born, He was born in a stable (no space to rent in this town)
They were stuck and Virgin Mary had to give birth in the stable.

"You're out of luck
And the reason that you had to care,
The traffic is stuck
And you're not moving anywhere."
Another meaning could be when He was preaching, He was out of luck as no one believed him and the reason that He had to care for the people and make them believe in God was not progressing. Thus He was stuck and not getting (moving) anywhere.

"You thought you'd found a friend
To take you out of this place
Someone you can lend a hand
In return for grace"
This refers to Him being betrayed by Judas, one of His (He thought) most faithful disciples.

"It's a beautiful day
The sky falls
And you feel like it's a beautiful day
Don't let it get away"

It's a beautiful day even though the sky (possibly the weight of His crucifix made him feel like the sky was falling down) was falling.
And you FEEL like it's a beautiful day, because actually it isn't, Jesus was crucified... but He feels like it is as he knows that the sins have been paid for.

"You're on the road
But you've got no destination
You're in the mud
In the maze of her imagination"

I think this means His ascension to Heaven, to the arms of God. He is on the road to Heaven, though he hasn't got an exact destination. He is in the 'mud' (filth like thoughts of the Jews).

"You love this town
Even if it doesn't ring true
You've been all over
And it's been all over you"

When He comes back three days later, even though many people hated him, he loves it. He has already gone over preaching before and all the townspeople have trampled over his preachings too.

"Touch me, Take me to that other place
Teach me, I know I'm not a hopeless case "

His pupils are requesting him to do the above...

"See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light, and
See the bird with the leaf in her mouth
After the flood, all the colors came out"

Jesus teaching his pupils to see the bright things in the world...

"What you don't have you don't need it now
What you don't know you can feel it somehow
What you don't have you don't need it now
Don't need it now
Was a beautiful day"

Jesus' preachings to his fellow disciples..

But, it's only my opinion

Ashman your opinion is a pretty good one. This song is one of my two favorite of all time along with Wonderwall by Oasis. Beautiful Day has helped me through some hard times and will hopefully help me through many more. I've listened to it so much that it's the only song on my CD that won't play. Anyways to me it pretty much means that with all the crap that can happen to you in this world there is so much that is good that we overlook.

I erm, had a dream I was making out with my best friend with this blasting.... yes, he's a guy. o_o;;;;

Doesn't anyone get that the lines"see the bird with the leaf in it's mouth/after the flood all the colors came out" (gospel-y music here) is clearly about Noah's Ark and God's promise to not end the world with water??

i've always wondered about these 3 lines.

See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light,

is he trying to be ironic?

This song is a really important thing for me, at the start of the year i lost my grandpa. Me and him were very close and i didnt see him for almost 3 weeks before he died. As a result of this i turned suicidal, and the first time i heard this song after his death it made me realise that life is a treasure and that i should live for another beautiful day. Big thanx to Bono for that song

Great song and while the religious overtones are no doubt apparent, I think Mattius got it right when he mentioned the book "Ulysses" and all the parallels it has with this song. Bono is someone you would have to believe is an avid reader. He ain't your typical brainless lead singer. The man is an intellect. And also, besides singing the b-side 'Spanish Eyes' on some obscure album I believe with another band name besides U2, Bono also uses 'spanish eyes' in that great song "In a Little While" in the same album. Dude, if there ever was a U2 song you could play to get your woman in the mood, that would be one. WIsh I could sing it but my voice breaks during the falsetto. Hah hah.

Peace

This is one of u2's best songs i think it's about just having a good day or a good time. I think if your having a bad day lisitn to this song and it might make u feel better

whenever I hear this song it inspires me to join Green Peace and go afrter whaling fleets yeah!

This song is about perserving and saving the earth, and taking time to step out of our busy lives to look at the earth and what we're doing to it.

"See the world in green and blue": See the world as water/plants (Nature). This line could also refer to what the earth looks like from space, a blue planet with splotches of green. This refers to, as said above, taking time to step out of our busy lives to look at the earth and what we're doing to it.

"See China right in front of you": Again, not trying to do something, (Dig a hole to China), but seeing that you're already there.

"See the canyons broken by cloud" Yet another reference to nature. This could also be about erosion caised by rain. (Broken by clouds)

"See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out": This line is quite straight forward. We over fish, and that leads to the destruction of marine habitats via the food chain. Clearing the sea out refers to the death of marine life.

"See the bedouin fires at night": Again, straight forward. The bedouins are a tribe of nomadic people who live in the middle east. The bedouins have a rich cultural heritage.

"See the oil fields at first light": From the line about the nomads to the middle east, this line talks about the "selling out' of cultures to make profit by depleting the earth.

"See the bird with a leaf in her mouth/after the flood all the colors came out": these are perhaps the most disturbing lines in the song. These lines are obviously refering to Noah's arc. They are saying that only after destruction, wether brought upon us by ourselves our by god, as some zealots claim, is unclear, will there be hope for nature. (The leaf, the bird, the colors)

^...selling out of cultures, such as the bedouins to make profit by depleting the earth, in this case by oil mining.

the actual meaning is about a man who lost everything but couldmt be happier

well its definitely about Christ ........I do know the symbol if the bird is about the english legend of a robin .According to English legend, this bird mercifully picked a thorn from the crown of Jesus Christ as He was on His way to Calvary. As the bird carried the thorn in its beak, a drop of blood fell from the thorn to its breast, dyeing it red.
thus the name red breasted robin...its a great song and very meaningful......the sky falls.perhaps some spirits fell from the sky somewhere someplace and someone was standing right in front of it when it happened and felt the spirit of christ.

Swedes Church
Sermons

Sunday March 9, 2003 - Lent 1, Year B

There's a song by the Irish band U2
which has been running through my mind these last few days.
Because it captures some of what I'm feeling
as I listen to the TV and the conversations around me,
as I read the newspaper and the ancient words of the book of Genesis.

"See the world in green and blue," they sing.
"See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light." [U2, "Beautiful Day"]

It's a picture of the earth
as we know it so well
from satellite images — deep blue and rich green, with patches of brown where the ground is less fertile and caps of white.
And away from the sun, dark shadows mark the continents, sprinkled with pin pricks of light — yesterday afternoon I could see London and Delhi and Baghdad.

It is an incredibly beautiful picture, a picture which our ancestors could not have imagined,
and yet, as we get closer, the extent of human impact can be too clearly seen. A row of oil wells flaming in Saudi Arabia, oil slicks in the Arabian Sea, and deforestation in the Amazon.
All that beauty, and all that destruction, the essential ambiguity of life on earth — and that is just our natural world. Satellites can't begin to catalogue
the human tragedies which surround us — from poverty, disease, and war. And more is yet to come.

There is a heaviness in the air, even as Spring comes, a heaviness of waiting and uncertainty.
In just over a week
we may well be at war,
and I think none of us
knows what that may mean.
Some commentators have said
that this will be a quick war, over in a matter of days thanks to the US's superior firepower.
But others warn of a far more grim prospect — weeks lengthening into months,
as ordinary people fight not for their leaders, but for their homes and livelihoods and dignity.
And whether it is short or long
there will be deaths,
deaths on both sides, the innocent and the guilty alongside one another,
and as is the way of such things
and the poor and the struggling
will have the most to suffer.
Whether they are on our side, those who can't afford to heat their homes or drive to work
because of the spiraling oil prices, and those who have gone to war because the military is the only way they could think of to get themselves a college education,
or on the other,
those who had the misfortune to be born in that place and who have no chance to escape,
those who have been conscripted to fight a war not of their on making.

There is a hopelessness about it all, behind the rhetoric of our leaders and the pride in our fellow citizens,
a hopelessness and a helplessness
because there is so little we can do,
as we sit in our living rooms
and watch the world head into war.

How has it come to this? Not just the situation with Ira,
but the situation of our world. Weapons of mass destruction
spoken of
as casually as toy guns.
Mothers filling their shopping carts with plastic and duct tape
alongside diapers and bandaids and apple sauce,
as if they think it would really make any difference.
Shoppers arrested in shopping malls for wearing T-shirts with peace slogans.
And underneath it all, the fear that somehow war in Iraq will escalate, or that North Korea will take an opportunity while attention is elsewhere, and whether by government decision or terrorist action, we will all be caught up in conflict of unimaginable proportions.
Some of us are too young to remember the 1950s campaign, "duck and cover,"
but even as we laugh at the innocence and futility of it, there was at least a sense that there was something you could do
in the face of the atom bomb.
I remember the threats of the 1970s, a time when many of us who were children at the time
expected to die, sooner or later, as a result of nuclear attack. Children's fantasy fiction told stories of a return to savagery among those who might survive; we were set writing assignments on Armageddon — the notion that the world might be destroyed.
Today the fears are not so much around nuclear attack, but around the fr more ordinary things that we have seen and we fear
could so easily be turned into weapons of war.
Airplanes, postal systems, drinking water,
dirty bombs, smallpox...
The list is endless.
There is only so much we can do;
mostly, we are helpless,
and so we wait.

And it seems to me
that a big part of theat helplessness, that fear,
is that the world as we know it is under threat. Threat of breakdown.
The breakdown of buildings,
the breakdown of infrastructure,
the breakdown of society as we know it.

And it is all too easy to imagine
that God
has abandoned us. Abandoned us not so much as individuals — we can still pray, and worship, and experience God at work among us — but abandoned us
on the earthly scale.
Sometimes,
as we looks at what is going on around us, it seems as if God has abandoned the human race, left us to our own devices, to the consequences of our own flawed decision making.
Sometimes it seems
as if there is no future for us at all.

But the image of the world
of U2's song
is not so hopeless
after all.

"See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light
And see the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out" [U2, "Beautiful Day"]

In the middle of hopelessness, in the middle
of our ambiguous and fractured world
there is a story,
a story
of another time
when the world was bent of destroying itself. A story from the very foundations of our faith. The story of Noah.

You may remember the story. The world has got itself into so much of a mess,
that God decides
to begin again. To destroy everything
except a family
and some animals — enough to repopulate the land.

It's a difficult story. We don't like to think of a God
who would go and destroy everything
just because the human race had made a mess of it all.
We don't like to think of is, because we know that we are constantly messing up, and the last thing we want
is to be put in the hands of a God who just might decide to abandon us
and begin all over again.
It's a difficult story, because it belongs to a way of looking at the world
which is very different from ours.

But if we try to step into the shoes, just for a moment, of the people who first told the story, then it is very different indeed.
They had no satellite views of the earth, no pictures from far off of a beautiful green and blue globe.
All they had
was what they could see,
and what they could see
was frightening.

Things happened
without warning. Storms and fires and eruptions, famine and plenty, all came
without any real reason.
One moment you were safe
and the next
dead.
And there were consequences
to everything.
Justice was simple. You hurt someone; they hurt you back, eye for eye, limb for limb, life for life. Your child made a mistake, or your wife, or your servant, and you punished them. Your very survival depended on it.
And if that was your world, the actions of God in this story
seemed perfectly reasonable. To put an end to evil,
and begin again.

But the surprise for you comes
in the last bit of the story.
Noah, and his family, and all the animals
day after day
cooped up in the ark, day after day
as the rain pours down.
Until finally it stops, and they begin to see the tops of mountains,
and they send out a bird,
and it returns with a branch in its beak, a leaf in its mouth.
And they know
that the cycle of life
has begun again.

But that is not the end of the story.
Because God speaks, God speaks, not words of condemnation this time
but words of hope, of promise, of grace.
And God gives a sign, a splash of color
across the sky.

Never again
will this happen.
Never again
will the earth be destroyed.
Never again.

The rainbow
is a sign.

"See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light
And see the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out" [U2, "Beautiful Day"]

In the middle of our helplessness
we wait for a sign from God,
in the middle of our hopelessness
we wonder what sort of future we will have.

But the sign has come,
a promise
that never again
will the earth be destroyed.
A leaf in the mouth of a bird,
a splash of color in the sky.
Life will continue, even in the most difficult places.

There is a robustness
to our world,
a robustness
rooted in the very heart of God.

And no matter what happens in the days ahead,
God's promise still stands,
and we can have faith
in a future of peace
peace which comes not from military force
but from the very heart of God.

This song basically means, that whatever is happening, its still a beautiful day and it shouldnt be wasted "dont let it get away".
By far one of the most uplifting songs I have ever heard.

Yeah, I agree with most of you and I think you've got it right. And this song was like a new start for the band for the new milennium, and was kind of the soundtrack of the best time of my life (2000) and so I will always remember it because of that, it was so beautiful that it even made (and still makes) me weep...specially because of that feeling that not everything is screwed and you might actually *someday* get yourself together and move on to a beautiful day...
I adore the line "I know I'm not a hopeless case"...cause I know how it feels like when people look down on you and don't believe in your strenght...but you somehow feel that you are more than what they say of you and you wish and hope to prove them wrong...

this song is amazing.
it can make the crapiest day feel new.
i always listen to it when everything sucks and it always cheers me up.
it has great lines and even though everyone has said it, it does have a bible refrence.
which only makes it better for me i guess.
i love U2

On July 29, 2004, John Kerry accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. After his acceptance speech, as the balloons and confetti fell in the Fleet Center in Boston, this song was played.

I really love this song. At least once a week me and my 4 years old son go dancing on this song. And I feel like the most happiest person in the world.
I've seen them on stage during the late 80's and the early 90's. U2 is the greatest band on earth! If they continue touring, I certainly will try to see them again on stage.

The whole album "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is a return to the traditional U2 sound of the pre-Achtung Baby era. Beautiful Day is not supposed to be an ultra-complicated song. It's optimistic. It's the opening of a new era. And Bono screams, "it's a beautiful day!" Perfect.

This is the perfect song for getting your spirits up, no matter what happened! I love playing it in the car and singing along very loudly! (And watching the faces of people passing by!)
The other day I was in the car with my father, who still needs to get used to me being a U2 fan. I have made a U2 tape for in the car and my father always has to put up with it, but bravely never says anything about it. (I have the sweetest father!) I keep playing this tape, hoping that one day he starts liking them aswell.
It seems to help because when Beautiful day began, my father actually said that he liked this song most! He looked like he was shocked that he just said that to me, admitting that U2's music is not all bad and loud!

u2 is probably the worst band ever
their music is so boring i dont even care what its about

THEY SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This has definetly got to be my favorite song by u2...i am not a huge fan of them because of how Bono always bitches about 3rd world countries but this song was truly awesome

Maybe I'm just looking at it too superficially, but couldn't one interpret it as a song about getting out and travelling the world?

That's how I've always thought about it, anyway. I mean, okay, there's definitely some spiritual connotations and such, but the entire bridge where he mentions seeing all the different things always came across as a "Get up, out and see what the world has to offer." kinda message.

So I guess that goes with the story about the guy at his computer.