Tag: Bono

Where love is — fear won’t tread

43/365

I’ve been thinking a good deal about love and fear lately.

A couple thoughts that got things flowing in my mind…

Where love is fear won’t tread

– David Barnes

Is it true that perfect love drives out all fear?

– Bono

The idea brings up a lot of questions rolling around in my head. And hopefully some answers as well.

What is it that I fear?

My greatest fear is claustrophobia, but I also fear something happening to Laurie, the babies or my family. Occasionally I can be overcome with a fear of heights.

Can these be overcome by love?

I believe so. When I have someone who loves me and assures me that they’re their by my side — my fear will dissipate and I’ll be comforted by my loved one.

What about other fears?

Fear of threat from enemies, fear of strangers, fear of the unknown, fear of immigrants and the Taliban?

How about gays, democrats and Obama?

I truly believe love can drown out those fears as well.

God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.

We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first.

If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.

1 John 4:16-21

So what’s the take home?

Should we fear anything?

Imagine if we experienced this kind of love everyday — perfect love.

Would you fear anything?

And once we’ve experienced this kind of perfect love — imagine if we shared it with the world around us.

Imagine if we loved in such a way that our spouses lived without fear… That our best friends lived without fear… That our neighbors lived without fear… And that our enemies lived without fear.

What would that do to your marriage, your neighborhood, your world?

Amazing!

We know it so well, we’ve embraced it heart and soul, this love that comes from God.

God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us.

There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear.

Justice and equality #justicefriday

From the 2006 National Prayer Breakfast:

It’s annoying but justice and equality are mates, aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain in the ass. Seriously.

I mean you think of these Jewish sheep-herders going to meet with the Pharaoh, mud on their shoes, and the Pharaoh goes, “Equal? Equal?” And they say, “Yeah, that’s what, that’s what it says here in the Book, here. We’re all made in the image of God, sir.”

Eventually the Pharaoh says, “Look, I can accept that. I mean, I can accept the Jews — but not the blacks. I mean, not the women. Not the gays. Not the Irish. No way.”

So on we go with the journey of equality.

On we go in the pursuit of justice.

What issues of equality do you struggle with?

Watch the full speech:

U2’s ‘White as Snow’

shirt-lamb-large

While some have told me they’re not digging U2’s new album, I’m loving it more and more as I listen to it.

Did a little research on the somber track “White as Snow,” of which I originally said, “The opening guitar, bass and vocals immediately remind me of Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson (U2’s worked with and written songs for both musicians in the past). Yet the melody reminds me of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” It will be interesting to see if Bono blends the songs in concert.”

Turns out, according to the Guardian, the melody is intentionally that of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”

“There are a couple of songs from the point of view of an active soldier in Afghanistan,” Bono told me back in June 2008, at the group’s Hanover Quay studio in Dublin, during a break in recording, “and one of them, White As Snow, lasts the length of time it takes him to die”….

The song’s melody is based on an old hymn, Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel, that, according to The Handbook to the Lutheran Hymnal, was composed by “an unknown author, circa 1100″…

The idea of a song based on the dying thoughts of a soldier initially came to Bono after he read William Golding’s ambitious novel, Pincher Martin, which is told from the point of view of a British sailor who appears to have survived the torpedoing of his ship. As he approaches death, his thoughts roam back over his life, and the moral choices he made or avoided.

While the dying soldier isn’t quite what I had in mind when listening to it – it does add a whole new dimension to the lyrics and the song… another reason I keep digging U2.

And here are the some of the lyrics I was originally looking for, before my pleasant sidetrack…

Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not
Only the lamb as white as snow…

Now this dry ground, it bears no fruit at all
Only poppies laugh under the crescent moon
The road refuses strangers
The land, the seeds we sow
Where might we find the lamb as white as snow

As boys we would go hunting in the woods
To sleep the night shooting out the stars
Now the wolves are every passing stranger
Every face we cannot know
If only a heart could be as white as snow
If only a heart could be as white as snow

BTW – I think I’m gonna buy the Vinyl LP next week when it’s released and maybe the Digi-Pack. What about you?

Bono on “non-believers”

Reading a great article on U2’s new album and Bono’s activism and all things in between ::

He says that a lot of people he most admires are non-believers. Bill Gates. Warren Buffett. “People who are prepared to spend their entire life’s fortune trying to make the lives of people they don’t know a lot better. These people are more Christian than the Christians. Zealotry and certainty are worrying for me. Love keeps religion from zealotry.”

SOH So without love, it becomes another kind of fixed ideology?

Bono “Yeah, that’s right! Anyway, there’s loads of pops in there about zealotry, religious and otherwise, and you’re the only person who’s picked up on this in the lyrics. I mean, ‘Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady.’ Come on?”

SOH That’s a pop at the militant atheists.

Bono “And at myself. I mean, I have a bit of it, myself. I have a bit of the helping God across the road like a little old lady.”….z

“You know, it’s like that thing that people said about U2, that most bands start off writing about girls and end up writing about God, but we started off writing about God and ended up writing about girls. But we found the God in the girls, that would be my retort.”

U2’s new album drops March 2 (3rd in the US). You can pre-order all five versions here.

10/365


10/365
Originally uploaded by Jonathan D. Blundell.

achtung yall

In 1991 (or maybe 92) I was given my first CD player/boombox for Christmas, and the first CD I purchased was U2’s One single. I wore that CD out – as well as the Achtung Baby album.

My friends and I were just getting into U2 for the first time and loving every bit of it. As soon as we saw pictures and video of Bono walking on stage during the opening bars of Zoo Station, doing his "Bono dance" (as we called it) we imitated it profusely.

We did this dance/walk/pose over and over again in pictures, videos or just walking down the street. I couldn’t tell you why, but we thought it was cool.

For some reason while trying to get a picture today Zoo Station came back in my head — hence the picture.

Otherwise a pretty uneventful day — took the Christmas lights down, took an elliptical machine to the thrift store and took our old washer to a scrap yard — apparently thrift stores don’t like em.

I also wrestled with holding on to things too tightly and making the mistake of taking those same things for granted — a mistake I probably make more than I’d like to admit.

But maybe that’s what Zoo TV was all about. Mocking the excess and challenging us to consider what really matters.

Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass

Looking forward to the bands new album, No Line on the Horizon. We’ll see where the band challenges us to go next.

mega ditto

Kevin Hendricks shares ::

Bono talks about the $700 billion bailout package:

“I am not qualified to comment on the interventions that have been put forth. I can assume these people know what they’re doing. But is is extraordinary to me that you can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion to save 25,000 child who die every day of preventable treatable diseases and hunger. That is mad. Bankruptcy is a serious business. And we all know people who have lost their jobs this week, I do anyway. But this is moral bankruptcy.”

I agree with Bono on both counts: I’m not qualified to comment on the bailout yeah or nay, but I do think it’s amazing that we can shell out a ton of money for all these bailouts but we can’t spend a much smaller sum of money to save lives.

It’s much more complicated than this, but saving lives seems more important than saving the economy.

I would add this…

“Be generous. Give to the poor. Get yourselves a bank that can’t go bankrupt, a bank in heaven far from bankrobbers, safe from embezzlers, a bank you can bank on. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.” – Jesus the Christ

Granted as someone pointed out in The Ordinary Radicals (great film by the way) if everyone just gave away their possessions just because they’re a Christian then it’s rather pointless. It has to be a heart issues and a heart matter. You have to be authentic about it. Don’t just give away your stuff because someone told you Christ said to. Give it away because you really feel its what you’re called to do.