(UNDATED) Without a line on the horizon, it may feel like there is no limit to how far we can go. But it also makes the seas difficult to navigate.

That is, in many ways, where we find ourselves today. It’s as infinitely terrifying as it is exciting. Where do we go from here, and how do we find our way?

U2’s 12th studio album, “No Line on the Horizon,” gives a few great answers, if you have the ears to hear and the eyes to see.

More than 25 years ago, when I dropped the needle on a U2 album for the first time, my soul did a backflip and kept on tumbling. Earlier this week, while listening to “No Line on the Horizon,” I felt that familiar movement in my spirit over and over again.

It happened first with the sacred anthem, “Magnificent,” which tossed me into the air and sent me soaring. Listen to the words:

I was born to sing for you

I didn’t have a choice

But to lift you up

And sing whatever song you wanted me to

I give you back my voice

From the womb my first cry

It was a joyful noise …

Justified until we die

You and I will magnify

Magnificent

Some misled critics have booed Bono for that song, misinterpreting “I was born to sing for you” as a boast to his audience, rather than the prayer to his Maker that it is.

There is plenty of rock `n’ roll levity and grandeur on the new album, but it is eclipsed by the record’s heart and soul — it is perhaps the most dynamic gospel music I’ve ever heard.

With The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton, Bono began the odyssey that became “No Line on the Horizon” at an international festival of sacred music in Morocco in 2007.

“(Bono) thought that our job was to create contemporary gospel music … that we are essentially soul musicians that look for soul in what we do,” Daniel Lanois, one of several producers on the new album, told Rolling Stone magazine.

As he has for years (but not as explicitly so since 1991’s “Achtung Baby”), Bono, the band’s chief lyricist, has laced “No Line on the Horizon” with the language and images of his humble Christian faith.

The result, however, is a work of gospel music — “gospel” in its literal sense as “good news” — for people of all faiths and none. The ecstatic language and imagery Bono evokes throughout could have been penned by the Hebrew King David or Sufi Muslim poets Rumi or Hafez, as much as by a latter-day Christ-follower from Dublin.

One of the most eloquent examples is “Moment of Surrender,” which says in part:

My body’s now a begging bowl

That’s begging to get back

Begging to get back to my heart

To the rhythm of my soul

To the rhythm of my unconsciousness

To the rhythm that yearns

To be released from control

Faced with a horizon-less journey, isn’t that what so many of us want right now — to have someone else steer the ship? To lose control and surrender?

The Spirit feels like the unnamed fifth member of U2 on this album more than any other. Its presence is subtle, but powerful.

“God is love, and love is evolution’s very best day,” Bono sings in “Stand Up Comedy.” “I’ve found grace inside a sound, I found grace, it’s all that I found,” he sings on “Breathe.”

In a beautifully confessional song (with a tune based on the 16th century hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”), Bono seems to say that even when it feels like we’ve lost sight of what matters, what’s real and enduring is right there. “White as Snow,” which Bono says was written about a dying soldier’s last moments in Afghanistan, says:

Once I knew there was a love divine

Then came a time I thought it knew me not

Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not

Only the lamb as white as snow

U2 intends to release another album by year’s end, one tentatively called, “Songs of Ascent.” Bono has said it will be “a more meditative album on the theme of pilgrimage.”

I’d guess it’ll be for a place that has to be believed to be seen. My bags are packed.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and author of the new book “Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace.”)