'One Of Us' - dad listens to daughter.

I was surprised one morning to find that my twelve-year-old daughter wanted me to listen to her radio station. Normally my reaction to the program being aired ranges from making a face to ordering it shut off. But, bubbling with enthusiasm, Caitlin insisted she had found the perfect song for the eighth-grade religious education class I teach.

Sure enough, a woman was singing, "Yeah, yeah, God is great, yeah, yeah, God is good." The singer wondered what it would be like to see the face of God, and if seeing God's face would make her believe in heaven, in Jesus, the saints, and the prophets. And what, she asked, if God were one of us, a stranger encountered on the bus? How would we react?

Like many other people, I reacted to Joan Osborne's rendition of "One of Us" by buying her new album, "Relish." For this was truly a rare event: Someone was singing about God on the crassest of drive-time formats. Clearly, the sentiments expressed by the song were also something the public wanted. The song carried Osborne, a previous unknown, to five Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and Best New Artist. (She didn't win.)

In useful ways, "One of Us" raised the basic issues I wanted my students, who were preparing for Confirmation, to think about. What would it be like to encounter God? And how would I be changed by that encounter? I was concerned about a theological point, the qualifying "what if" in the key line, "what if God was one of us." For Jesus Christ is God with us. With that proviso, I played the song for my class and found that the combination of its lyrics and polished sound helped open up discussions about the nature of God.

In the meantime, I tried to learn more about Osborne. Her CD made it clear that she was no Christian rocker. Another song, "Let's Just Get Naked," established that much. A solicitation for donations to Rock for Choice and other pro-choice groups on the CD made it unlikely that she would sing at a the next papal Mass in Central Park. Another important bit of information on the album jacket was that Osborne did not write "One of Us." It was penned by Eric Bazilian, a member of the Hooters. After listening to the album, I decided that Osborne exhibits what Andrew Greeley has described as "the Catholic imagination." Greeley cites Bruce Springsteen as a prime example of how images and even an outlook absorbed during a Catholic upbringing can stay with an artist later in life. Osborne, it turned out, is a lapsed Catholic and her music is sprinkled with references to saints and sinners. One song she co-wrote, "Saint Teresa," speaks of a streetwalker who is "higher than the moon." The connection with Saint Teresa was more than a bit strained to say the least.

The enormous popularity of "One of Us," it seems to me, reveals that Americans, if given the opportunity, will flock to buy music that awakens or perhaps satisfies their spiritual hunger. As Entertainment Weekly put it, the song "filled a God-sized hole in the Top Ten."

Unfortunately, the spiritual aspect of contemporary pop music often is overlooked by music critics. A group called Crash Test Dummies deliberates on the existence of God and the afterlife in a number of songs. The Irish rock band U-2's work expresses a strong spiritual dimension. Van Morrison's album "Hymns to the Silence" is, as the title indicates, filled with hymns. Enya ponders the angels. Billy Joel, once castigated for singing that "Catholic girls start much too late," has become a spiritual seeker in middle age in his "River of Dreams" album. Sting's new album has a song with the chorus, "Let your soul guide you." Pop music is not only about "losing my religion." It is, arguably, also about seeking it.

Within the church, too, there's been a retreat from an engagement with what is good in popular culture. In the years immediately after the Second Vatican Council, folk Mass groups in many parishes and schools borrowed contemporary music or lyrics for worship, a practice that has since faded (okay, maybe for the better in many cases). But there is still some good popular music to be found, and it should be pointed out. This was done in a grand way at Pope John Paul 11's Mass in Baltimore, when he entered to the unlikely sound of the group Boyz II Men.

So I was disappointed to read one morning in the New York Post that the song "One of Us" was being described as anti-Catholic. And sure enough, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights had issued a release quoting its president, William Donohue, as saying that Osborne's songs "dance awfully close to the line of Catholic baiting." Now, I do not oppose Donohue's concern about anti-Catholic prejudice in the news and entertainment media. He has had a number of hits. But this looked to me like a miss.

Donohue especially objected to one line in the song's chorus, which asked what it would be like if God became one of us, "just a slob like one of us." Was Osborne calling God a slob?

This was a tortured reading of a song that simply asked how we would react to God if God was just an average person encountered in our everyday lives. It was not exactly a new idea: "Lord, when was it we saw you hungry and gave you food?"

I called Donohue and told him that I thought the song was pretty good. (In fact, I later discovered, a youth commission in my home diocese of Brooklyn used it for a program with teen-agers.) He explained that the Catholic League was taking "kind of a prophylactic approach. Here is a new rising star who is dancing close to the edge....We don't feel it would be a good move on our part to say nothing." Osborne's work "is not the worst thing I've seen," he said. But, he continued, "Cultures aren't changed as a result of one incident. Cultures are changed as a result of patterns."

The cultural pattern, I believe, is that longing for spirituality is so strong in our society that it is finding its way even into the very secular world of the pop charts. "One of Us" is not a religious song. Like the recent songs by Billy Joel and Crash Test Dummies, it is about alienation from God. In "One of Us," the God-among-us is a lonely stranger on a bus, with "nobody calling on the phone, 'cept for the pope, maybe, in Rome." In other words, only organized religion has tried to keep in touch with God.

But I can't find anything in this particular song that dances close to Catholic-baiting. And Osborne, who has said in a letter to fans that "the church's attitudes toward women and gays make the pope look far more ridiculous than any pop song could," did not write the song, which speaks of the pope only with respect. Bazilian, who was raised Jewish and attended Quaker schools, penned it, and he's at a loss to explain where it came from. "I just take credit for being the scribe," he said in an interview in the Washington Post. "I thought, `This song knows what it's saying even though I don't."

Bazilian has written a song about longing, pop music's overarching theme. Without quite realizing it, he tapped into America's longing for God.