It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.
BonoRead
There's nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that love, as depicted in the Gospels, is both demanding and divisive, highlighting its complex nature.
Bono's quote reflects the idea that the portrayal of love in the Christian Gospels is not simplistic or 'hippie-like'; instead, it conveys a deeper message of love that can require difficult choices and may not always be universally accepted. This love is powerful and transformative, yet can lead to divisions among people, as it challenges us to confront uncomfortable truths and make sacrifices for others.
In practice
This quote can be used in a sermon to illustrate the complexity of love as described in biblical texts.
It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.
Perspective is the cure for depression.
At a certain point, I just felt, you know, God is not looking for alms, God is looking for action.
It's much easier to be successful than it is to be relevant. The tricks won't keep you relevant. Tricks might keep you popular for a while, but in all honesty, I don't know how U2 will stay relevant. I know we've got a future. I know we can fill stadiums. And yet with every record, I think, 'Is this it? Are we still relevant?'
God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.
Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.
There will be no hatred or resentment among them, their hearts will be as one, and they will glorify God, morning and evening.
I donβt know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.
The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
The life so brief, the art so long in the learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly - by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation, that when I think upon it I scarce know whether I wake or sleep.
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