I am currently listening to Paul Hewson’s memior Surrender. Yesterday I listened to the part where Paul talks about the song One. Paul’s commentary on this song is incredible. I wholeheartedly exhort you to LISTEN to this audiobook (don’t read this one… this book was very much created to be listened to), and pay careful attention when you get to Chapter 20: One (especially the last 4 minutes of the chapter)!

Here are the lyrics to One:

Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now
You got someone to blame?

You say, one love, one life
When it’s one need in the night
One love, we get to share it
Leaves you, baby, if you don’t care for it

Did I disappoint you
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without

Well, it’s too late tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
One

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus?
To the lepers in your head

Did I ask too much? More than a lot
You gave me nothing, now it’s all I got
We’re one but we’re not the same
Well, we hurt each other then we do it again

You say love is a temple, love a higher law
Love is a temple, love the higher law
You ask me to enter but then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holdin’ on to what you got
When all you got is hurt

One love, one blood
One life, you got to do what you should
One life with each other
Sisters, brothers

One life but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
One
One

Ooh-ooh-ooh
Oh-oh-ooh
Baby, make it, make it
Higher
Oh, higher (baby, yeah)
Higher
Higher

– Paul David Hewson / Adam Clayton / Larry Mullen / Dave Evans

:::

And here are a few misc. quotations from the book (just to whet your appetite)…

“You can disagree on everything but still work together on one thing… if that one thing is important enough.”

“There’s stuff you can learn from people who don’t tell you anything. Like how not to react when there is a crisis. Like how to stay still and maybe even unearth levity from the seriousness of a situation. Edge is the silence inside every noise. He’s the light inside the paint.”

“Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable.”

“I’m not sure a professional psychologist would agree, but something in me understands that until we deal with our most traumatic traumas, there’s a part of us that stays at the age at which we encountered them.”

“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.”

“I am suspicious of the idea of oneness. I don’t buy into the homogeneity of the human experience. I don’t think we’re all one. We can be one, but I don’t think we have to see things the same way for that to be so. An anarchic thought: We’re one but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, not that we’ve got to, just that we get to.”

“Climbing into the ring, the best-prepared fighter is the one who has tried to understand their opponent. Especially if it’s yourself.”

― Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story