Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

The Dalai Lama says you can only begin a real meditation on life with a meditation on death. Gothic stuff but something in it. Finiteness and infiniteness are the two poles of the human experience. Everything we do, think, feel, imagine, discuss is framed by the notion of whether our death is the end or the beginning of something else. It takes great faith to have no faith. Great strength of character to resist the ancient texts that suggest an afterlife. At age fourteen, none of this was abstract.

“No man need be a mediocrity if he accepts himself as God made him” is how the poet Patrick Kavanagh put it.

I hold to that line attributed to Francis of Assisi, who told his followers, “Go into the world to preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words.” We need less to be told how to live our lives and more to see people living inspirational lives. I’m also deeply conscious that I can’t live up to the badge I’ve pinned to my lapel. I’m a follower of Christ who can’t keep up. I can’t keep up with the ideas that have me on the pilgrimage in the first place.

’70s. Something curious was happening in Dublin. Depending on what you believed, you might say it was “revival,” a movement of the Holy Spirit.

Charismatic Renewal, “charisma” being the Greek word for “gift,” a movement that emphasized the New Testament’s “gifts of the Spirit,”

Chris worried that our generation would not hear about the radical gospel of Jesus, that they would confuse Christianity with churchiness.

Agreed. I just didn't know or thought of Bono being so religious in a good way.

It was clear that Chris saw our potential as missionaries being taken over by the mission of our music. I thought I noticed Lillian smile to herself when I tried to convince her preacher man that our group could serve God better if we served the gifts we’d been given, that surely heaven would be happy if our band was a success and we’d have the means to help others a little more here on earth.

Our lesson not learned, that night we were staying in Belfast’s Europa, which had a reputation as the most bombed hotel in Europe—thirty-three times.

I drove by Europa on a bus tour to the Game of Thrones Exhibition.

Hume also set up the credit union in Derry, which helped Catholics into housing in Northern Ireland, a defiant act, as up until 1969 only property owners could vote in local elections.

Wow.

That would be awkward, so both men agreed to walk on, one from the left and one from the right, and in a moment that signified why John Hume and David Trimble would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, they shook hands for about three seconds.

(In the Name of Love)”

As a band made up of two and a half Protestants and one and a half Catholics, we didn’t naturally lean on traditional “Irishness,” because none of us had any clear sense of what that was. Perhaps that was a good thing because if we were informing our musical wanderlust by looking in the rearview mirror, Ireland probably needed to do a little less of that.

when the war was over, and in my lifetime secretly firebombing Cambodia to not win the Vietnam War.

And they too will reply, “Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?” Then the King will answer, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.”

Cúchulainn who could smack a ball with a hurling stick and then

carrying