Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

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. This

“It’s all you’ve got,” said the postman’s son. “That’s it. Your thoughts, they decide who you are.”

I’ve slowly come to see that if we want to understand the forces we’re up against, then it helps to befriend the idea in opposition to the one you’re pursuing. Before you do battle with it. The devil you know. Climbing into the ring, the best-prepared fighter is the one who has tried to understand their opponent. Especially if it’s yourself.

I used to say that the Irish are like Brazilians except for three damning differences: we hardly ever qualify for the World Cup; we avoid our own nakedness; and you might not always recognize our dancing…as dancing.

Nelson Mandela aroused so much emotion in so many, and yet few knew he was a man who could not cry. Mandela was born into royalty, his great-grandfather a tribal king, but as part of the daily grind of imprisonment he’d been forced to work in a limestone quarry. He could not have known the corrosive glare effect the limestone would have. It cost him his tear glands and Nelson Mandela could not cry. This moves me still.

“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.”

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.

Ali says, “Don’t look up to me or down on me; look across for me. I’m here.”

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.

In the ancient-wisdom literature known as the book of Ecclesiastes, written several hundred years BC, there is a wanderer I borrowed from, a sojourner who discovers that sex, drugs, money, fame…are apparently not the promised land. Instead, says the writer—maybe Solomon—these are the vanities of vanities. 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. 37 Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way The door is open to go through If I could I would come too But the path is made by you As you’re walking, start singing and stop talking.

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 This zealot scholar who ended up a traveling tent maker, paying his passage with manual labor. Who faced jail and death for his beliefs and learned that love is not sentimental but tough, that it’s about speaking hard truths to power or hard truths to yourself.

But if my faith is a crutch, I want to throw it away. I’d rather fall over. I remain more suspicious of religion than most people who’d never darken the door of a church. 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.

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. I sang the statement “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” as a question when I was twenty-seven. But in trying to make peace with my own uncertainty, I grew to be certain in one regard. That whatever our instincts or ideas about the great mysterious He or She or They, whatever the differences of the great faith traditions, they find common ground in one place: among the poor and vulnerable is where the signal is strongest.

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.

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.”