Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

I am terrified because for the first time ever, I reach for my faith and I can’t find it.

after forty years, I know if I can stay inside the songs, they will sing me and this night will be not work but play.

I treasure the mystery of every cosmic rhyme and took this for some comfort that I was doing the right thing.

The Dalai Lama says you can only begin a real meditation on life with a meditation on death.

we were sure our faith could survive our faith.

some arrogance is essential to the creative process. The very idea that your private thoughts or feelings are worth sharing with anyone outside your family or friends is already a kind of arrogance. Arrogance is the exit and entry point to the humiliation that art requires. Not unrelated is a dubious courage that when you find yourself out of your depth in troubled waters, you will discover how to swim. Another daft but true idea that creativity seems to depend on.

Suspension of disbelief is not just crucial for appreciation of an artwork; it’s necessary for its manufacture.

In fact one of the names of God, El Shaddai, means “the breasted one.” If the greatest creative force in the world is a woman giving birth, then of course the greatest creative force in the universe is likely to be a feminine spirit.

We confuse our self-esteem with our self-expression.

“She was a living prayer.”

He taught me that prayer is not an escape from real life but a passage toward it.

If you don’t have a seat at the table you’re probably on the menu.

I believe that genius is not a person but a process, a process in which someone determines to uncover their gift and, for a period, is able to step inside it. The “gift” is a self-explanatory state, and like a prize awarded in a DNA lotto—say, being born into beauty or into wealth—genius is no reason for arrogance.

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.

It’s more likely that church is not a place but a practice, and the practice becomes the place.

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.