Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

America is a song yet to be finished and far from recorded. For many Americans, America doesn’t yet exist. And yet perhaps this is an inspiration. Perhaps America is the greatest song the world has not yet heard.

Waking to news of his election, I felt more nausea than shock, but like so many others I was already coming to understand that Trump is not the problem. He’s the symptom of the problem. He’s not the virus. He’s the super-spreader. The virus is populism, and it’s deadly as the plague.

Orwell turned me on to the power of political satire and left me, years later, well in credit but with a troubling question. Am I now pig or farmer? Can you be both?

Who was it who said, ‘If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu?’

The freethinking and wildly altruistic Roger became my tutor on this new campus. I was reminded, as I’d found in my early studies under Jeff Sachs in international development, that this teen who spent less than a week enrolled in a university is a perpetual student. And I learn by doing.

Is art more important than, say, designing lifesaving pharmaceuticals? No. Even though I do believe there are days when art will save your life. While I’m sitting at home trying to make a lyric for a song feel less like a crossword puzzle, I know that at that moment there are nursing home carers or social workers or garbage collectors who are doing something more essential than what I am doing. But I confess to hoping that what I am doing may eventually become essential to them.

It was the eighteenth-century economist Richard Cantillon, born in County Kerry, who first introduced the modern idea of the “entrepreneur” and suggested it’s someone who takes risks on what they don’t know with what they do know. (Or something like that.)

“It’s about thirty-one billion dollars, and I’ve just given it to Bill and Melinda’s foundation. They know how to spend that kind of money on the stuff that you all care about. The kind of stuff Susie cared about.”

The world’s first- and second-wealthiest families combining fortunes to improve global health and fight deprivation among some of the world’s poorest families. The poetry in that moment was hard to miss, but neither did it bypass anyone involved that the world should not have to depend on such charity. Justice will always hold us to a higher standard.[*]

Because in the end, our ask is of governments. Our ask is to remake the global architecture in favor of those being locked out of the house. Our ask is for justice. And it turns out the fight for justice comes down to boring words that don’t look good on a T-shirt. Competence. Governance. Transparency. Accountability. Words that bring transformation.

Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s done Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seems to be Old bridges breaking between you and me Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall Confident that we have built our wall.

Dishonesty keeps the door of the Warehouse of Songs firmly locked, the a-little-too-successful writer now under the false impression that all his or her thoughts are worth sharing. The key is lurking deeper, down in the depths of your spirit. More prosaically…what scares the shite out of you?

The song brings you to an ecstatic end when “all the colours will bleed into one,” but the race is not done. “Yes, I’m still running.” The story of every pilgrim is the running toward and the running away from enlightenment. From the Holy Spirit. From Jehovah. Moses, terrified by the burning bush, the bluesman Robert Johnson with a hellhound on his trail.

The poetry and politics of the Christmas story hit me as if I were hearing it for the first time: the idea that some force of love and logic inside this mysterious universe might choose self-disclosure in the jeopardy of one impoverished child, born on the edge of nowhere, to teach us how we might live in service to one another is overwhelming.

I went drifting through the capitals of tin Where men can’t walk or freely talk And sons turn their fathers in. I stopped outside a church house Where the citizens like to sit. They say they want the kingdom But they don’t want God in it.

“Well,” I reply, “not exactly, but you’re not wrong. The image of the cross is something we hold tightly to. The horizontal reaching out in community, the vertical rooting our heady dreams in the solid ground.”

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.

Somewhere on his spiritual path he discovers love is bigger than anything in its way. That “no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.”

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

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.

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.

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.

At its heart is service to community above the individual. Islam. Salām or salaam. Arabic for peace. Peace through surrender. Surrender is an idea at the heart of many great faiths. “Not my will but thy will,” as Jesus prayed on the night the Roman soldiers came for him.

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.

All my life I’ve had these epiphanies, but the one that holds me now as I enter the third act of this life is not so comforting. It challenges me to overcome myself, to get beyond who I have been, to renew myself. I’m not sure I can make it. I doubt myself.

“It’s our strengths rather than our weaknesses that often hold us back.”

Can I take in the view without having to be in it? Can I not take that call, in favor of this other call, to stillness? Is this what vision over visibility looks like now?

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

I was dreaming in my dreaming Of an aspect bright and fair And my sleeping it was broken But my dream it lingered near In the form of shining valleys Where the pure air recognized And my senses newly opened I awakened to the cry That the people have the power To redeem the work of fools Upon the meek the graces shower It’s decreed the people rule The people have the power The people have the power

I believe everything we dream Can come to pass through our union We can turn the world around We can turn the earth’s revolution We have the power People have the power