Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

The brains and the hands of the magician who is standing over me and can turn a really bad day into a really good one with the right strategy and execution.

Success as an outworking of dysfunction, an excuse for obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Success as a reward for really, really hard work, which may be obscuring some kind of neurosis. Success should come with a health warning—for the workaholic and for those around them.

Air is not the will to conquer whatever Everest you will encounter in your life, but it is the ability to endure the climb.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters shall not reach them. You are a hiding-place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

We begin our prayers as comrades; we end them as friends finding a different image of ourselves, as well as the audience we’re about to meet, who will change us again.

What’s on offer is our band as a chemistry set, a chemical reaction between our audience and us. That’s what makes a good band great.

I am leaving home to find home. And I am singing.

A job is a thing where you do something you don’t really like for eight hours a day for five or six days a week in return for money to help you do the stuff on the weekend you want to do all the time.

Someone has likened prayer to being on a rough sea in a small boat with no oars. All you have is a rope that, somewhere in the distance, is attached to the port. With that rope you can pull yourself closer to God. Songs are my prayers.

Once we are born, we begin to forget The very reason we came But you I’m sure I’ve met Long before the night the stars went out We’re meeting up again.

The Dalai Lama says you can only begin a real meditation on life with a meditation on death. Gothic stuff but something in it. Finiteness and infiniteness are the two poles of the human experience. Everything we do, think, feel, imagine, discuss is framed by the notion of whether our death is the end or the beginning of something else. It takes great faith to have no faith. Great strength of character to resist the ancient texts that suggest an afterlife.

Norman and I enter the emergency room at war with the universe, but Iris looks peaceful. It’s hard to figure that a large part of her has already left. I am reminded that with faith the size of a mustard seed you can move a mountain. But this mountain is my mother’s mortality, and it won’t get out of the way. We hold her hand and say goodbye.

Abandonment is probably the root of paranoia. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Geldof, John Lydon, so many rock ’n’ roll singers lost their mothers at an early age. There must be something to this. A friend tells me of a parallel abandonment in hip-hop. Abandonment by the father drives that car.

You’re no longer singing the song; the song is singing you.

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I won’t know for many years what the opera was that was going on in his head, but music was clearly his only escape. He doesn’t really notice much else.

“No man need be a mediocrity if he accepts himself as God made him” is how the poet Patrick Kavanagh put it.

Sleepwalking down the road I’m not waking from these dreams Alive or dead they’re in my head It was a warzone in my teens I’m still standing on that street Still need an enemy The worst ones I can’t see You can…you can.

I’d had faith she’d make it through and she didn’t. I told her sister she was going to make it. I comforted my aunts, saying that we were all going to make it through. But prayers aren’t always answered in the way you want. I didn’t know that then.

Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times.” I still wonder if he was singing it from my mother’s point of view: “I’ll get along, you’ll find another,”

If the door is open it isn’t theft You cannot return to where you’ve never left Blossoms falling from a tree, they cover you and cover me Symbols clashing, bibles smashing You paint the world you need to see Sometimes fear is the only place we can call home Cedarwood Road.

I got to thank him for his patience. I never got to apologize for being such a prick—until he was gone.

Who is it now? Who calls me inside? Are the leaves on the trees a cover or disguise? I walk the street rain tragicomedy I’ll walk home again to the street melody.

Guggi introduced me to the idea that God might be interested in the details of each of our lives, a concept that was going to get me through my boyhood. And my manhood. (The idea that there is a God, I now recognize, is preposterous for many people. Still more that such omnipotence, if it existed, might be interested in a teenage boy’s growing pains.)

I’d always be first up when there was an altar call, the “come to Jesus” moment. I still am. If I was in a café right now and someone said, “Stand up if you’re ready to give your life to Jesus,” I’d be the first to my feet. I took Jesus with me everywhere and I still do. I’ve never left Jesus out of the most banal or profane actions of my life.

quotation attributed to Saint Augustine when addressing the Lord—“Give me chastity and continence, but not yet”—I’d have understood it.

You let me into a conversation A conversation only we could make You break and enter my imagination Whatever’s in there It’s yours to take

If you’re where you should be, you’ll meet whom you need to meet.

On all the journeys I’ve taken, I’ve sought a guide. Even with the compass of faith I’m looking for the right company for the ride. For some spirit guide physicalized in a person. The sacrament of friendship.

I began to understand that the world is not so scary if, around every significant corner, somebody is waiting to walk with you on the next part of the journey.

The sorts of kids who write songs or poetry or paint pictures are the sorts of kids who feel too much at times. The sorts of kids whose feelings can overpower them.

felt the pinch of wonder. I felt everything sharply, the people we met, the sensation of being in a body, of eating or drinking. 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.

We were still prayerful, and still to work out how to be “in this world if not of it.” How to be in the van but not run over by it.

Albums are travelogues. Geographically, philosophically, sexually. An artist searches for territory yet to be discovered and, better still, places on the way to somewhere else. The poet loves a crossroads.

It was Roosevelt who claimed, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but it was Churchill who lived the line. The genius of his leadership was not just his fearlessness but his faith in his fellow countrymen, faith in himself, and, when it came to World War II, faith in America.

When you hear these huge hymns, you can survive any loss. You can take any amount of blows. You can make the most difficult decisions. You can march forward in your life against all adversity. It was in Edge that I found a marching music, found those huge soul-stirring melodies of Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, and John Newton, and when I was a young man, they were exactly what I was looking for. My soul had a desperate need to be stirred.

Even while totally absorbed in all this, I had no doubt that I preferred the company of so-called unbelievers. It’s not just that some of the finest people I’ve known don’t subscribe to any particular faith tradition; it’s more that people who openly profess faith can be—how shall I put this?—such a pain in the arse.

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.

To be “in the world but not of it” was the challenge in the scriptures that would take a lifetime to figure out. As artists we were slowly uncovering paradox and the idea that we are not compelled to resolve every contradictory impulse.

I can’t change the world but I can change the world in me.

I can change the world, but I can’t change the world in me. —”Lucifer’s Hands” That’s my whole life, right there. In those two opposing views.

It’s a pumped-up person who believes they can live a life free from worldly concerns. Perhaps sometimes you have to refuse the call of religion, to stand up to it and say no. A religion that can so punish and degrade people is likely not being honest to God. Religion can be the biggest obstacle in your path.

The question wasn’t whether songs could save the world but rather could these songs save us?

Even now when I sing a slowed-down version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” all I can hear is Bob Marley’s voice, and feel his fusion of love and rage. The three-chord strand that is his gospel: love, the longing for a loving world, and protest, the rage against present injustice.

The band talked for hours about the state of our country and what Christ would make of the religion begun in his name. Not much, we thought. Christianity seemed to have become the enemy of the radical Jesus of Nazareth. Was there any evidence Jesus even wanted a church?

In the late 1970s he reminded the world that Christianity started out life as a Jewish sect, and he allowed it to be known that he had some vision of Christ that had saved his life.

But even in my spiritual life, warfare kept coming up. With a fluorescent yellow pen I’d marked a favorite Bible passage, Saint Paul’s letter to the new believers at Ephesus: “Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

these days I’m more likely to try to see something off in my own behavior than in someone else’s. 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.

Even if I’ve done it to make the case—that we now make consistently with the U.S. military—that investing in USAID is investing in peace and security in far-off places where impoverishment is an invitation to bad actors and failed states, an invitation to sociopolitical chaos.

This boy comes up to me His face red like a rose on a thornbush A young man, a young man’s blush And this boy looks a whole lot like me And the boy asks me Have you forgotten who you are? Have you forgotten where you come from? You’re Irish A long way from home But here you are, all smilin’ and makin’ out with the powerful.