Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This publication is free for now, but please consider clicking on the button at the bottom to become a paid subscriber to enjoy this along with Monday’s “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
I like the sound of my own voice / I didn’t give anyone else a choice
an intellectual tortoise / racing with a bullet train —U2, “All Because of You”
That lyric proves that Paul David Hewson a/k/a “Bono”—lyricist and lead singer of U2—is capable of self-awareness. At least he has recently given people a choice, confining his voice to the written page—557 of them, all told. I voluntarily read his new memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, and it is clear that Bono still loves the sound of his own voice.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a fan. I wouldn’t have read it otherwise. I remain a fan. I think he’s an extraordinary person in an extraordinary band with an extraordinary story. But portions of this book are just exasperating. I’m not going to write a full review of Surrender, but I’ll give you a brief summation. The first half of the book is very enjoyable, walking through the early years, the sudden loss of his mother, conflict with his father, the formation of the band, meeting and marrying Ali, getting a record contract, the songs and the tours.
The second half of the book is tedious and self-indulgent—I know, I know: shocking from a megalomaniac pop star, right? A nauseating and rather sycophantic rehearsal of every A-List celebrity and world leader Bono has had the honor of knowing, and many of the stories seem to have little point besides the name-dropping. He tries his best to counteract the self-assured smugness of his lifetime of activism by claiming a sort of lifetime “imposter” syndrome—that all that time he really was very humbly feeling out of his depth. It has the ring of feigned humility.
He accomplished a great deal besides a stellar list of platinum albums and sold-out tours—$450 Million of debt cancelation for the world’s poorest countries. The massive—and massively successful—rescue of the African continent from its AIDS epidemic. But for all his “these are bipartisan issues,” he doesn’t really believe it. All of the conservatives who lent a hand in these efforts are portrayed as doing something against interest—somehow committing treason against their political principles. As if they are naturally expected to not give a rip about the poor and vulnerable, but in an act of great courage they “did the right thing in the end.” So condescending.
Even now, after undergoing an evolution of his own and recognizing the need for democracy, transparency, rule of law, and free markets for the alleviation of poverty, he cannot allow himself the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, economic conservatism is the worldview that really cares about poverty—wealth creation being, as it is, the only possible solution to being poor. Honestly, the book leaves the impression that he won’t allow himself that conclusion because he is utterly enthralled by what C.S. Lewis calls “The Inner Ring.” He simply loves being buddies with Barack and Michelle, Bill and Melinda, and the rest of that overrated company.
But none of that is the most exasperating part.
Bono still hasn’t found what he’s looking for, and he’s running out of excuses. Sure, that legendary song was originally meant as a cry about living in the “not yet,” the period of seeing “through a glass darkly.” What makes that song so great is that it is rooted in a solid foundation:
You broke the bonds / you loosed the chains / carried the cross of my shame/ of my shame —you know I believe it / but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
That sense of longing can be perfectly appropriate, giving voice to the virtue of hope. The recognition that we haven’t yet arrived at the far shore. But if that “not yet” should ever get untethered from the definitive “now”—if hope and faith are severed—James tells us what happens: “But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind” (1:6). And 62-year-old Bono is—well, I’ll use his own lyric: “blown by every breeze” (“In A Little While”).
How is it that a man can know the Scriptures as he does—and he does—occasionally be uncertain about God’s preferred pronouns? How can this man know the face of God in the person and work of Jesus Christ (which, I gather, he still claims) and yet still occasionally speak of God as some kind of abstract force to which you can apply any name? How can someone so full of uncertainty and doubt be so certain that God doesn’t care who you’re sleeping with?
But it was really pages 528-531 that I find tragic. In the midst of trial and tribulation, he writes:
A good strategy for me is to continually go back to the source. To drop my bucket in the well in hope of a refill. 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. The exhortation that makes this struggle with the self workable. The wisdom that makes it doable.
I return to a spiritual master like the apostle Paul, way back in the first century of the modern era. I go to someone who overcame himself.
He continues, “I have so much to learn from this ancient writer,” and then quotes Paul’s “love” discourse in 1 Corinthians 13. Unassailably sublime—even though Eugene Peterson’s version is a faint shadow of the real thing. And then, while still talking about the Apostle Paul, Bono starts singing very off-key. Imagine, if you will, the Apostle Paul reading this:
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. We search through the noise for signal, and we learn to ask better questions of ourselves and each other.
I call the signal ‘God’ and search my life for clues that betray the location of the eternal presence. For starters we look to who is standing beside us or down the road, the ones whose roof we share or the ones around the corner who have no roof. The mystics tell us God is present in the present, what Dr. King described as ‘the fierce urgency of now.’
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.
This, my friends, is pablum—self-indulgent drivel. There is no Jesus here. There is no Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no cross here. No salvation here. No atonement. No forgiveness. No gospel or announcement of any kind. This is gauzy, fortune-cookie religion. And it is something the Apostle Paul—the guy Bono has “so much to learn from”—would deem profoundly pagan (see his reaction as he walked around Athens in Acts 17, and his response, telling the Athenians to stop groping around in the dark, but to behold and (ahem) surrender to the resurrected man, Christ Jesus).
Look: I expect a guy who gets inspiration from a mystic like Richard Rohr to talk like this every now and then. What I cannot abide is a guy talking like this while pretending in that very moment to be learning from the Apostle Paul.
So, Bono, on the off-chance you’re reading, please let me help you out: you claim that the scriptures are a plumb line to gauge how crooked the wall of your ego has become. You are deceiving yourself. The scriptures are not shaping or critiquing your ego; it is manifestly the other way around. You call your book Surrender but I don’t see a whole lot of that when it comes to the very-much-not-mysterious gospel proclamation of the Bible. No genuine student and disciple of the Apostle Paul could speak of God in these pathetic and insipid terms. A mysterious “signal” we have to hunt around for?
Paul’s religion was a visceral and bloody one culminating in the crucifixion of the Son of God (Jesus—do you remember that name, which you’ve swapped out for the “great mysterious He or She or They”?)—a real flesh-and-blood religion, not this ethereal talk about the “location” of the “eternal present.” His was the kind of religion that inspires the kind of music and lyrics you used to write.
The Apostle, as you say, was a man who got over himself. It would be fitting—doubly so, since you share his name—if you would do likewise.
You prayed it yourself once, in a song: “I know I’m not a hopeless case.” The line before that?
Teach me, Lord.
He is teaching, but there are indications that you are not listening.
Thank you for reading this week’s Square Inch Newsletter, and please feel free to share it. Have a wonderful weekend.
I commend you for reading it! It can be a scary thing to look deeper into the lives and thoughts of our 'heroes". You have to be willing to have your affections/opinions changed, and it looks like you have your eyes wide open. I hope Bono reads this.
There is an irony in the notion of a man who spent his career giving generously of his own income... the admirable definition of voluntarism / Christian charity, while simultaneously advocating for market intervention and welfarism... the opposite of that. A double mindedness of sorts.
I love how God captures this activity despite its flawed motives (as some of Paul's opponents preached the gospel out of envy). May Bono get to the real source, so he can enjoy the peace of a pure motive. I shudder to think of how many "good" things I do out of skeezy motives.