Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

A civilized country can’t suddenly sacrifice hardworking communities because the wages for that hard work are cheaper somewhere else. These transitions have to be managed. We know competition is often the driving force of innovation, but we don’t want to be a part of its Darwinian unfairness. Survival of the fittest is a long way from Jesus saying that the last shall be first. Capitalism may have taken more people out of extreme poverty than any other ism, but it has also destroyed too many lives. Capitalism is not immoral but amoral. It is a brute, a wild beast that requires our instruction to heel and serve. Capitalism needs reimagining. A reboot.

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.

the world should not have to depend on such charity. Justice will always hold us to a higher standard.[*]

Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim when he says, “The power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.”

It’s hard to listen while you preach

The male ego is made more, not less, brittle by success.

“Nostalgia,” said Edge, “it’s a thing of the past.”

Noel Gallagher

Noel since the first Oasis album, Definitely Maybe,

He is the greatest tunesmith out of the U.K. since Paul McCartney.

“How did we become grown-ups?” I think it was me who asked Larry, as the sun begins to come up. “I’m sorry?” He readies the question mark to place over both of our heads. “On what grounds are you making such an accusation?”

“The free U2 album is overpriced.”

Friendship can run out of gas. Romantic love always will. Romantic love, an epic subject, wears itself out unless it moves toward the real and away from the fantasy.

I view friendship as a kind of sacrament

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

Families and our secrets. Is there a family without any?

“Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.”

Why am I always talking about the scriptures? Because they sustained me in the most difficult years in the band and they remain a plumb line to gauge how crooked the wall of my ego has become. To getting the measure of myself. This is where I find the inspiration to carry on. The exhortation that makes this struggle with the self workable. The wisdom that makes it doable. I return to a spiritual master like the apostle Paul, way back in the first century of the modern era. I go to someone who overcame himself.

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.

Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable. In the slums and cardboard boxes where the poor have to play house. In the doorways as we step over the divine on our way to work. In the silence of a mother who has unknowingly infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war, in the bare hands digging for air. God is with the terrorized. At sea with the desperate, clinging onto drowning dreams. God is with the refugee. I hear his only son was one. God is with the poor and the vulnerable, and God is with us if we are with them.

Singing erupts from somewhere we don’t understand and communicates with a part of us we can’t otherwise reach. Though it unlocks emotion, it seems to break into feelings deeper than the obvious. In my notebook I jot down, “Some people sing for a living / some people sing to survive / I sing cause I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

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.

Rescuers so often think they are doing the saving when really we are the ones who need to be saved.

What kind of addiction is this? To climb the mountain that is your own ego.

When you’ve won the argument you now understand you never needed to have. The argument with your life that’s no longer necessary.