Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

Service, ambition, duty, loyalty, the desire to be the best, the desire to say yes—not such bad character traits to have cherished. I always thought of them as strengths, but lately I wonder if somewhere along the line they became a cover for something more suspicious. The demand to be at the center of the action. To make God in our own image, to help her across the road as if she were a little old lady. This perpetual longing to be filled with the extraordinary so that you begin to lose appreciation for the ordinary. If your shoulder is black and blue from trying to enter every locked room, maybe there are rooms you do not need to enter. Or maybe some doors have a key in the lock that will gently turn. This long struggle for art, for justice, for self-aggrandizement. All this ambition, all this ego. Are these goals fired by the engine of a sense of duty or of a swollen sense of self ? So often the fight is not with the world but with yourself. I was always fascinated by the story of Elijah, who is told to wait on the voice of God in a cave on a hillside. There he was, waiting for the earth to shake, and shake it did, but it did not offer up a word. Neither did the melodrama of the celestial fires or cyclone offer any clues. When it arrived, the divine communication was such a whisper that Elijah almost didn’t recognize it. In one translation it is described as “the still small voice”; in another it is translated as “the sound of silence.” Maybe Paul Simon heard it too: An...