Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

Unlike Europeans, and especially Irish people, Americans are not motivated by attempts to guilt them into action. But offer them the role of the cavalry, and they’re right there with you.

the president asked Congress to commit $15 billion to fight AIDS starting with fourteen of the hardest-hit countries. Until COVID-19, it would turn out to be the largest health intervention to fight a single disease in the history of medicine.

The scale of the response will almost meet the scale of the emergency. One hundred billion dollars. That’s a lot of lentils.

“Unos. Dos. Tres. Catorce!”

“Like slavery and apartheid,” he said, “poverty is not natural. It is man-made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.”

“If your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough.”

I once asked him if it was hard, with all his work, to find time for prayer and meditation. He shot me one of those looks. “How do you think we could do any of this work without prayer and meditation?” He taught me that prayer is not an escape from real life but a passage toward it. Like him, we do have to dine with our enemies, to make ourselves known to each other, but he knew that if we are to face difficult truths, we first need a thorough outing of how we became ourselves, both as countries and as individuals. We are wounded and scarred and divided but we need to see ourselves, in all our brokenness, before we can mend. Every one of us needs truth and reconciliation.

If you don’t have a seat at the table you’re probably on the menu.

For starters it’s not an inauguration but a coronation, and the crown is orange, not gold. King Trump begins his reign of compulsive lies with a cropped image of the Mall, its boundaries surging with people, when actually it is barely three-quarters full.

It’s No Secret That a Liar Won’t Believe Anyone Else”

I found myself returning to some words of Martin Luther King’s, about how “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I did not believe them anymore. The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice. It has to be bent, and this requires sheer force of will. It demands our sharpest focus and most concentrated effort. History does not move in a straight line; it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, all the way down the line.

Did anyone appreciate quite what a loss the departure of the Obamas would be to the world? Our family, forgetting we were Irish, took it as a personal loss.

Elevation Partners,

Participant Media

Rise Fund

Rise Climate,

don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur. When I’m feeling uppity I think of myself as an “actualist,” a term I made up…until I found it in the dictionary. An idealist who’s also a pragmatist.

Picking the Pockets of Bill and Melinda

“I have learned that success depends on knowing what works and bringing resources to the problem.”

The world’s first- and second-wealthiest families combining fortunes to improve global health and fight deprivation among some of the world’s poorest families. The poetry in that moment was hard to miss, but neither did it bypass anyone involved that the world should not have to depend on such charity.

Thanks to philanthrocapitalists like Bill and Melinda, like Warren and Susie, at ONE we never had to ask the public for money. Thanks to super-rich donors like Mike Bloomberg, George Soros, John Doerr, Mellody Hobson…or, come to think of it, the super-ficial rich like me and the band.

But if we all have our different origin stories, these people who bankroll NGOs like ONE share in the conviction that while individuals can change the world for better or worse, sustained change takes social movements. Then the rate of return is to the nth. I can’t change the world. We can.

No one in Principle Management was to make excuses, to exaggerate, or to fib on his behalf. Paul had principles to live by and style to go with them. If he’d been written in fiction, his character would not have been believable, but, fortunately for us, this magnificent man actually existed. And existed for our band.

Seamus Heaney’s poem “Scaffolding.” Seamus is there when you need him: Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s done Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seems to be Old bridges breaking between you and me Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall Confident that we have built our wall.

I was still trying to figure this out in 1987, how life was about constant refreshment, every day breaking away from the negative influences, in nature or nurture. How we might break free from the number we’re given in the DNA lotto but only if we break free every day. Life as a constant dying and being reborn, dying and being reborn. The rabbinical Bob Dylan was already there. “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

am reminded again that it’s okay if brokenness is the place we sing from, how our emptiness is always an invitation to be filled.

Going under the water in this mythic river that means more to me than I can figure out. The symbol of baptism is about submerging into your death in order to emerge into new life, a powerful poetry, and I’m a fortunate man to have a family of foolish pilgrims who will follow me into this symbolism. I get that this moment sounds more than foolish. Preposterous.

And Johnny Cash, too, as I thought about it. And that’s the line I want to walk. The wanderlust in the wanderer. The spirit that still hasn’t found what it’s looking for, a life and a gospel song about doubt as much as certainty, about the journey, more than the destination. That’s how this band goes on. Just when you reach the promised land, you discover you haven’t.

The best thing in life, he discovers, is to enjoy your work. To do what you love. The promised land will always be somewhere else. I think I can grasp this. I don’t know if I can reach it.

How being so comfortable in your skin is the most attractive thing an audience can observe of a performer.

There’s a phrase we’ve used touring these songs of innocence and experience: “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.” What have I found here at the far end of experience? Gratitude.

but now I’m speaking to my brothers, these fellow travelers who had no idea when we first met what kind of road we’d be taking. Thank you for giving me a great life. Thank you for letting me be in your band. Thank you for letting me harass you and hector you, push you and pull you. Inspire and disappoint you. Tears are streaking down my clown face. They are not tears of joy. I find myself apologizing for using a little too much force in the pursuit of liftoff. In the gathering of their best selves, I might not have always been at my best, but if this is the end, so be it. At the peak of our accomplishment I wonder if we have run out of road, run out of reasons to share the road together.

For a lot of people, certainly a lot of performers, there is a degree of bullshit required just to get out of bed in the morning and get dressed. Facing the day is hard enough without having to face yourself.

a family is the place where you are free from self-consciousness, where you can be yourself in all your different colors and moods. Family is where you can be fearless. Maybe, at its best, it’s a place where “perfect love drives out all fear.”

Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, Doesn’t have a swelled head, Doesn’t force itself on others, Isn’t always “me first,” Doesn’t fly off the handle, Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, Doesn’t revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end. —St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13, The Message

I’ve never quite found a church I could call home, and I tell the kids to be wary of religion, that what the human spirit longs for may not be corralled by any sect or denomination, contained by a building. It’s more likely a daily discipline, a daily surrender and rebirth. It’s more likely that church is not a place but a practice, and the practice becomes the place. There is no promised land. Only the promised journey, the pilgrimage. We search through the noise for signal, and we learn to ask better questions of ourselves and each other.

The mystics tell us God is present in the present, what Dr. King described as “the fierce urgency of now.” God is present in the love between us. In a crowd. In a band. In a marriage. In the way we meet the world. God is present in love expressed as action.

The moment of surrender is the moment you choose to lose control of your life, the split second of powerlessness where you trust that some kind of “higher power” better be in charge, because you certainly aren’t.

Slowly, reluctantly, I am learning to let go. Because if you do, then that may be the very moment when you discover that your spiritual potential lies not in what you have, but in what you have not. That the trouble or torment, the weights you cannot carry, that these may carry you. Your afflictions and addictions are some kind of gift. They brought you to the empty place that you are compelled to fill. You almost want to thank them.

All my life I’ve had these epiphanies, but the one that holds me now as I enter the third act of this life is not so comforting. It challenges me to overcome myself, to get beyond who I have been, to renew myself. I’m not sure I can make it. I doubt myself. Carl Jung observed that the very things that made you successful in the first half of your life not only no longer work for you in the second half; they positively work against you. The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr put it to me like this: “It’s our strengths rather than our weaknesses that often hold us back.”

This perpetual longing to be filled with the extraordinary so that you begin to lose appreciation for the ordinary.

Rumi. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

So many of the characters I wish to inhabit come together in Patti Smith: the poet, the seer, the spitting-venom punk rocker, the revelry and reverie, the animal-like physicality, the howling voice, the prayerful hush, the reverence for the sacrament of music. Above all the pilgrim. Leaving home to find home. How far am I from home?

new editor, Reagan Arthur,