Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

I was afraid deep down that I was average. I didn’t realize that my whole life would be pitted against the concept that anyone is average. “No man need be a mediocrity if he accepts himself as God made him” is how the poet Patrick Kavanagh put it.

But prayers aren’t always answered in the way you want. I didn’t know that then.

How casually our destiny arrives.

At the right time a stranger or a friend or even the physical landscape we need will find us. But not always do we discover their role.

I knew there was darkness in the world, but I was sure it would not overpower us; rather, we would let ourselves be overpowered by the beauty of our discoveries as we traveled through this world.

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.

Relationships matter, professional or fraternal. They require our attention.

Artists are the worst for blaming the exterior world for their interior failures. It’s the radio programmers, the record company, the press. It’s my gallery, my agent, my partner. It’s the artist’s dilemma: the problem isn’t out there but in here. We confuse our self-esteem with our self-expression. We confuse our life with our work when the work isn’t working out. The painter rarely blames the canvas. It’s the muse that takes the blame for disfiguration.

Sometimes a single letter is more effective than hours of face-to-face argument.

But our kids were her first port of call. I told myself that I was there for them as much as any father who was building a business. Any father away putting food on the table. And Ali told the kids. Your father is away putting food on other people’s tables. People not so fortunate. Looking back, I see the selfishness in that act. I got to fight injustice abroad, which left Ali at the kitchen table. The world of advocacy had me on loan from my wife. She had a right to expect more of me in the raising of our children but consciously decided to not exercise that right and let me go. Those years belonged to her, and she gave them away to me because she believed in the cause we were all working on, the people we were advocating for. But still. It doesn’t sit easily with me.

In relationships, I’ve observed that a partner can start out as a friend, then become a passion, then a co-parent, a mother or a father of your children, and if you’re really fortunate, the partner remains—or returns as—a friend. It’s a lower-temperature take on a romantic life, but it’s enduring. I have been so fortunate. Great friendships can survive most of the crap thrown at them. They thrive on the manure of shared disappointment and drama. It’s hard to imagine a force as great as romantic love, but friendship comes close. Someone once argued that “friendship is higher than love,” and I understood what they meant. It may not be as melodramatic or grandiose or passionate as love, but friendship is often deeper and wider. Great friendships explain why we hold on to this life so tightly because it disappears so quickly.

Maybe there are some arguments that just by being in them you have already lost.

I’m always looking for the liminal space, the outer edges of emotion. If I write a song about faith, I express it through doubt because “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” If I write a song about a “beautiful day,” it’s also about the longing for a lost friend. Over the years there have been times when I’ve been mesmerized by a figure in my imagination that I mistook for someone real. A crush that could have crushed my partner’s feelings. At such a moment, while you may not be in control of who or what is beguiling or besotting you, you are in control of what you do about those feelings. The choices you make. Romantic love can enlarge a person or shrink them. Sometimes the most convincing act of love is to just let someone be who they are. Without you. As a songwriter I am attracted to any territory or subject that’s just out-of-bounds, a someone or something new who might take my imagination by surprise.

Somewhere at the heart of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”—an Edge song title—is John Bunyan’s idea of the pilgrim’s progress. Or in my case, the lack of it. If I mostly find religiosity annoying, right up at the top of the annoying is the pigheaded certainty of the devout without the doubt. Not just no room for doubt in the God they follow, but no doubt in their ability to decipher the holy tracts. No doubt their version of events is the right one.

I am in awe of the poetic power of the scriptures, how you can’t approach the subject of God without metaphor. All the way from Adam and Eve these fantastical stories help us make a way through our metaphysical lives. If science is how we navigate the physical universe, then religious texts offer to navigate the more than physical, the existence we can’t even prove exists. Stories that are instruments of inquiry into an invisible world we strain to see, a world we glimpse through art and family and friendship. Stories of a love that has no beginning and no end.

We begin by looking out for our children, and in time, if we are so blessed, we find they are looking out for us.

To be physically present in any relationship is not everything. Emotional proximity is.

What have I found here at the far end of experience? Gratitude.

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.”