Everyone knows that Bono, lead singer for U2,
is an outspoken Christian. But do you know the story behind the band’s
faith? Bono, Larry Mullen (drums), and Edge (guitar), were all members
of a Christian community in Dublin called Shalom in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. While in high school, they had all had deep conversion
experiences of the “born again” variety. (Bob Dylan was doing the same
thing in LA at the time, by the way.) Their faith deeply informed their
early work—songs like “Gloria,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “40″ (see an amazing 1983 live performance here
with Edge on bass and Adam on guitar! Really cool to see the audience
chanting the chorus at the end.)—and has been one of the central themes
of all their subsequent records.
I’ve been reading U2 By U2,
a massive chunk of a book featuring an amazing collection of interviews
and photos of the band—essentially the four rockers telling their
story, with occasional interjections from Paul McGuinness, their
long-time manager.
What’s interesting is that four distinct stages
emerge in Bono’s (and the band’s) spiritual journey. In a series of
posts, I’d like to lay out the narrative arc, the path that these guys
have traveled. It may be a road you’ve been on too.
The story
begins with seeking, with a hole in the heart. Bono grew up feeling
confused and lost. He had a great sense of emptiness, a great longing
for more. His mother died while he was in high school, and he grew up
with his father, a strict man who had difficulty expressing emotion.
Bono sought release and acceptance, but he found neither at home.
One story illustrates this powerfully. After Bono’s grandmother died,
the family decided to sell her piano against Bono’s protests. The piano
had been a place he found peace when he felt like “my head was
exploding.” The sale of the piano deeply affected him: “That really
bothers me even now. Trying to write on the piano is difficult for me.”
Bono reflected further: “So they wouldn’t let me have a piano. … It’s so
odd, it’s the thing I can’t figure out. It was almost like my father’s
whole attitude was: don’t dream. This was his unspoken and sometimes
spoken advice. To dream is to be disappointed, that was the running
theme… But… if you were a kid like me, [selling the piano] is like
somebody taking away your oxygen tank. You can’t breathe.”
Taking away the piano was a rejection at the heart level, a rejection
and a judgment of who Bono was. So the hole in Bono’s soul was born. And
listen to how he describes the result: “I think the seed of ambition
were sown, paradoxically by this repression of the spirit. If you keep
telling somebody not to do something then that might just be what they
become driven to do. Megalomania might have started right here. I was
going to have my revenge on the world. Everyone was going to have to
listen to me! Which, of course, is psychological shorthand for ‘my
father would have to listen. When it gets down to it, there’s only ever
really one person in the audience… ”
This demonstrates a couple of recurring themes on this blog.
First,
judgment and commands (theologically known as the Law) actually produce
the opposite of what they demand. Tell a kid he can’t have a piano, and
he becomes one of the world’s most famous musicians. Tell a teenager
not to touch the liquor cabinet, and she gets drunk the next time you
leave her home alone. Tell your husband to take out the trash, and he
“forgets” to do it. (The current John and Kate Plus Eight saga
is further evidence of judgment and constant criticism driving a man to
act out in hurtful ways. I’m not excusing John Gosselin’s behavior, but
if you watch the show, it’s certainly not hard to understand from a
psychological and theological perspective.)
Second, the deepest
longing of the human heart is for acceptance and love from our Father in
heaven. Often this need is sublimated into a search for approval from
other people, but ultimately it’s about raising your eyes to heaven and
crying out, “Does Anyone up there love me?”
So the first stage in
Bono’s journey was to be made a seeker, a human who had experienced
soul-crushing judgment, creating in him a desperate hunger for
acceptance and love.
By the way—even after Bono’s conversion and musical success, the pain
was still there. In a concert in Atlanta in 1985, Bono brought his dad,
Bob Hewson (see photo on left), to the States for the first time and had
him as a guest at the show. Here is how Bono describes what happened
after the show: “…I heard footsteps behind me and I looked around and it
was my dad and his eyes were watering and I thought: ‘This is it! This
is the moment! Finally he’s going to tell me something!’ This is a
moment I’ve waited for all my life. My father was going to tell me he
loved me. And he walked up, put his hand out, a little shaky, a little
unsteady, he’d had a few drinks, looked me in the eye and he said, ‘Son…
you’re very professional.’”
Mockingbird
No comments:
Post a Comment