Bono’s Christmas Story
I posted this 2 years ago, but I really like it so I’m posting it again. This is an excerpt from the book Bono. In Conversation. This brings into context the true poetry behind Christmas; God coming to his creation as a human.
————————————————————————————
I remember coming back from a very long tour. I hadn’t been at home. Got home for Christmas, very excited of being in Dublin. Dublin at Christmas is cold, but it’s lit up, it’s like Carnival in the cold. On Christmas Eve, I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I went to this place, sat. I was given a really bad seat, behind one of the huge pillars. I couldn’t see anything. I was sitting there, having come back from Tokyo, or something like that. I went for the singing, because I love choral singing. Community arts, a specialty! But I was falling asleep, being up for a few days, traveling, because it was a bit boring, the service, and I just started nodding off, I couldn’t see a thing. Then I started to try and keep myself awake studying what was on the page. It dawned on me for the first time, really. It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw … a child … I just thought “Wow!” Just the poetry… Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this: love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me, it makes sense. It’s pure logic. Essence has to manifest itself. It’s inevitable. Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh.
————————————————————————————–
Merry Christmas!
Tags: Bono, Christian, Christma
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
December 26, 2007 at 10:34 am
Are we alternating? I posted it last year.