Ken M. Penner

In Bono’s imaginative world, faith often begins as the quiet hum of a Dublin choir or the polite Jesus of the Sunday school wall charts. It is the Jesus who stands at the door and knocks, waiting for the believer to turn the brass handle (Revelation 3:20). But as one lives a little longer, gathering the “scar tissue” of human struggle and sitting in the harsh, fluorescent glare of hospital waiting rooms, the realization dawns that grace isn’t always polite. Sometimes history stops knocking and starts using a boot. Sometimes the doors of the heart have to be kicked open.

“Scars” is a lyric that feels written with the police report of Good Friday still warm in the hands. Bono’s work pushes back against sanitizing the cross, reminding the listener that it was a brutal state execution. The song plunges into the roar of the townhall demanding a scapegoat (Matthew 27), the cynical suits making laws out of lies, and the cold, terrifying steel of the “nails of the state.” One cannot sing about this Passion without tasting the sour vinegar on the sponge (John 19). The lyric wants the listener to feel the absolute physical wreckage of it. When the song shifts and asks, “Put your hand in my side,” it evokes Thomas in the upper room (John 20), yes, but it is also a demand to touch the very real, bleeding contours of the marginalized today. The loser. The least (Matthew 25). That is where the divine hides.

And the wildest twist of the narrative—the paradox Isaiah saw centuries before when he wrote that “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53)—is that the trauma isn’t erased on Easter morning. The wounds remain. The scars are what give true beauty; they are the proof of love’s stubborn persistence. Bono’s writing has long been drawn to the strange fact that when the resurrected Christ steps out of the blackest night into the blue dawn, his own friends don’t even recognize him. Mary thinks he’s the gardener in the dirt (John 20); the disciples on the road to Emmaus think he’s just a stranger talking too much (Luke 24). It is the terrifying and beautiful promise of “Scars”: You won’t know who I am the next time we meet. But the divine knows exactly who the believer is, bruises, scars, and all.

After Reverend Father Stanley MacDonald passed away on May 11, 2025, at the age of 92, the university community initiated plans to erect a memorial bust in his honour. But the proposed location for this permanent monument is not the university chapel or a designated sacred space. Instead, the proposed home for the bust is the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living, the epicentre of the university’s athletic, recreational, and physical wellness life. I was asked what I thought of the “secularizing” of a Catholic priest’s legacy. After all, “Father Stan” served as an ordained Catholic priest for over four decades before returning to his alma mater to serve as a Priest-in-Residence. Why the Saputo Centre? Shouldn’t his lifelong religious vocation take priority when selecting a memorial site? But the public persona by which he is better known is that of the “ultimate StFX Super Fan,” with his booming “Go X Go!” chant, his presence at varsity sporting events, and his relationships with students and athletes.

Since we’re a university, let’s investigate whether this community-driven memorial project to place a Catholic priest’s memorial inside a secular athletic facility constitutes an erasure of Father Stan’s religious vocation (a literal “secularization” of his legacy). The proposition to erect a memorial bust of the late Reverend Father Stanley MacDonald within the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living at St. Francis Xavier University serves as a classic sociological case study in the dynamics of memory, spatial geography, and secularization in modern higher education. Where I end up on this question is that this project reflects a post-secular integration of faith, presence, and community identity.

The concept of secularization has been a foundational pillar of classical sociological theory for over a century. Theoretical frameworks influenced by early twentieth-century thinker Max Weber posit that modernization, rationalization, and the rise of scientific paradigms inevitably lead to the decline of religious authority and practice. Weber’s analysis of the “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” famously explored how the secularization of Christian asceticism laid the foundation for modern capitalist structures and rationalized bureaucracies. This is the traditional, zero-sum view (referred to as the “subtraction narrative”), in which the sacred and the secular operate in direct opposition. As secular institutions (e.g., state-funded universities, scientific laboratories, and public athletic programs) grow in prominence and operational scale, religious institutions are forced to retreat to the private sphere.

Under this classical framework, placing a priest’s bust in a secular sports facility would be the final stage of institutional secularization. It would be the triumph of the secular arena over the sacred chapel, reducing a lifetime of sacramental and theological devotion to a mere cultural artifact or a secular mascot designed to boost athletic morale.

But more recent scholars of religion and sociology in post-secular Europe and North America tend to see secularization not as the subtraction or death of religion, but as the transformation, translation, and relocation of the sacred. Sacred spaces and religious figures are repurposed to serve broader civic, psychological, or community functions without losing their transcendent resonance.

Mircea Eliade noted in his explorations of the sacred and the profane that humans can’t stop constructing sacred spaces, even in settings that are ostensibly secular. Edward Linenthal has studied exactly this: modern public monuments operating as sacred civic spaces. So when a Catholic priest is memorialized in a university sports complex, it’s a prime example of this kind of spatial and symbolic translation. The community still needs sacred focal points, but we look for them in the new version of sacred spaces: areas of collective effervescence, of which sports arenas are a classic instance.

During the early to mid-twentieth century, the institutional identity of StFX was characterized by “priest-professors.” This was the situation long before he became “Father” Stan; I mean when he was a varsity athlete. Stan MacDonald competed for both the X-Men varsity hockey and rugby teams. He was captain of the very last varsity men’s rugby team to play on the StFX campus in 1953. He understood the psychological pressures, the intense physical demands, the necessity of teamwork, and the communal bonding inherent in collegiate sports. His lived experience as an athlete provided the empathy and environmental understanding that would later define his campus ministry.

Only after his graduation from StFX in 1954, of course, did MacDonald enrol at the Holy Heart Seminary in Halifax to complete his theological formation. On May 23, 1959, he was ordained to the priesthood. For nearly forty years, Father Stan served in Cape Breton and Antigonish as Assistant Pastor and Pastor. So it is true that to suggest that Father Stan lacked a deep, formal commitment to the institutional Church would be a historical fallacy; his life was entirely defined by his ecclesial vows.

But over the twentieth century, the university shifted. The number of ordained priests as faculty members dwindled, and the university transitioned toward what we have now: a secular, lay faculty and administration. And at the age of 65, Father Stan officially retired from active parish ministry; this was in 1998. Yet his most highly publicized, culturally impactful, and institutionally defining phase of ministry was still to come: a decade later, in 2008, he returned to his alma mater, serving as Priest-in-Residence at StFX.

Father Stan’s M.O. as Priest-in-Residence was to be a visible presence across the secular spaces of the campus. He became the iconic figure loved by all, instantly recognizable by his gregarious smile, his booming voice, and his signature greeting: fist-bumps. He met students exactly where they were; there were chats outside the meal hall, conversations over coffee at The Tall and Small, and, of course, his faithful attendance at athletic events. He is the epitome of a bridge between the university’s historic Catholic identity and its modern, heavily secularized student body.

Traditional religious gatherings no longer are the primary locus where community cohesion happens, especially among Canadian university students. For the vast majority of the student body these days, the campus chapel is physically and culturally peripheral. Instead, the athletic stadium, the hockey arena, and the gymnasium take over that function as the modern forges of collective identity. It is in these highly charged physical spaces that the student body gathers to participate in shared “rituals,” chant “litanies” in unison, and experience what sociologist Émile Durkheim termed “collective effervescence,” that is, the profound sense of energy and harmony that emerges when a group of people gather for a shared, synchronized purpose.

Father Stan understood the intense sociology and psychology of these spaces. He recognized that to pastor effectively to the modern university student, he had to enter their sanctuaries. So he became a permanent fixture in the crowd for all varsity sports over a span of fifteen years, providing unwavering support for both the X-Men and X-Women teams, whether football, soccer, rugby, hockey, basketball, or cross country.

The renaming of the building to the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living points to a philosophical shift that the facility’s mandate extends beyond elite, competitive varsity exercise to encompass holistic physical and mental well-being for Xaverians. This holistic philosophy is exactly what Father Stan’s role on campus represents. He always made a habit of checking in on the mental and emotional health of the students. So placing his memorial in a building dedicated to “healthy living” is an acknowledgement that spiritual and emotional health are essential components of human wellness.

With this context in mind, let’s circle back to the question: Does the placement of a bust of a Catholic priest in a multi-million-dollar sports complex constitute a “secularization” of his legacy? By monumentalizing him primarily as a “Super Fan” in an athletic centre rather than as a priest in a chapel or a library, is the university community stripping away the specific theological and sacramental realities of his lifelong vocation?

Well, from a strict traditionalist or classical Weberian perspective, an argument can be made that placing the bust in the Saputo Centre secularizes and dilutes Father Stan’s legacy. He was, after all, fundamentally and permanently an ordained priest who served as a spiritual shepherd for nearly forty years in conventional parish settings across Nova Scotia.

But a post-secular sociological perspective suggests the exact opposite. The placement of a Catholic priest’s monument in a secular sports complex isn’t the dilution or erasure of his religious vocation, as classic secularization theory would have it; rather, it is the most authentic reflection of his incarnational ministry. Father Stan deliberately chose to execute his post-retirement ministry in the secular spaces of the campus. He didn’t wait passively in the chapel for students to seek him out; he proactively went to the hockey arenas, the running trails, the dining halls, and the coffee shops. The concept of incarnation (present in multiple religions) dictates that the divine enters into the messy, physical reality of the human world. Father Stan’s ministry was nothing if not incarnational. He was indeed the “Super Fan,” using the universal language of collegiate sports to bridge generational, cultural, and ideological divides, offering guidance, joy, and spiritual steadying to thousands of students regardless of their personal religious affiliations.

Viewed this way, the Saputo Centre is the very site of his most impactful work; it’s not a profane space that degrades his memory. To place his memorial in a quiet, purely religious space—a space he frequented but which did not define his public persona over the last two decades—would be an exercise in historical revisionism. Instead, the placement of the bust in the Saputo Centre accurately acknowledges that in the modern, pluralistic university, the sacred is encountered more often in the bleachers, the locker rooms, and the shared pursuit of excellence. By placing his bust in the very arena where he championed the physical and emotional health of the student body, St. Francis Xavier University ensures that the Xaverian spirit of compassionate community is expressed through the power of presence, proving that the sacred can indeed flourish amidst the noise, sweat, and challenge of the modern secular arena.

A Response to the AI Training Debate from the Humanities

Many of my friends and colleagues in the humanities are convinced that training Large Language Models on books, music, and art constitutes theft of intellectual property. I understand the anger. I share the underlying concern: that powerful institutions are extracting value from human creativity without compensating the humans who produced it. That’s a real injustice, and anyone who dismisses it isn’t paying attention.

But I want to suggest that the injustice runs deeper than the technology, and that the solutions most commonly proposed will make things worse for the very people they’re meant to protect.

The Anxiety Is Real

Let me start with what my friends and colleagues get right. Under our current economic system, creators are squeezed from every direction. Musicians earn fractions of pennies per stream. Adjunct professors with doctoral degrees teach for near-poverty wages. Freelance writers compete in a race to the bottom. When a technology company builds a billion-dollar product using the collective output of human culture, and the humans who produced that culture receive nothing, the outrage is justified.

Where I part company with my friends is not on the diagnosis of the disease, but on the proposed cure.

The “Theft” Metaphor Doesn’t Hold

The word theft implies that something has been taken away from its owner. If I steal your bicycle, you no longer have a bicycle. But information doesn’t work this way. If an LLM processes your novel during training, you still have your novel. Every copy remains intact. No reader has been deprived of access to your work.

This isn’t a trivial distinction. It reflects a fundamental property of information that economists call non-rivalry: one person’s use of an idea, a pattern, or a digital file does not diminish anyone else’s ability to use it. Physical goods are rivalrous; for example, if I eat your bread, you go hungry. But ideas, once expressed, can be shared infinitely without loss.

What happens during AI training is not reading in a human sense. It is computational analysis of the commons, the identification of statistical patterns across millions of texts. Humanists already have a name for this kind of work: distant reading, the term Franco Moretti coined for the computational study of literature at scale. Corpus linguists, digital humanities scholars, and literary analysts routinely process vast archives of text to identify patterns no individual reader could perceive. We have never considered this a violation of authors’ rights.

There is, of course, a crucial difference. When a digital humanities scholar performs distant reading, the output is scholarship, a meta-text about the corpus. When an AI company trains an LLM, the output is a generative system that can produce new texts, potentially competing with the original authors in the marketplace. That difference matters, and I don’t want to minimize it. But it is a difference in what is done with the patterns, not in whether extracting patterns from public culture is legitimate. The proper response to harmful commercial applications is to regulate the applications, not to criminalize the act of learning from the commons itself.

Who Actually Benefits from Stronger IP?

When creators call for stricter intellectual property enforcement against AI, I understand the impulse. But let’s consider who has historically benefited most from aggressive copyright regimes.

Not independent artists. Not poets or adjunct scholars. The primary beneficiaries of expanded IP law have consistently been large corporations such as Disney, major record labels, pharmaceutical companies, and academic publishers. These entities use copyright and patent law to hoard culture, extract rents from access to knowledge, and sue smaller creators who build on existing traditions.

If we establish the legal precedent that AI can only be trained on explicitly licensed data, we don’t stop AI development. We guarantee that only the wealthiest corporations (those that can afford to buy out the world’s copyright holders) will be permitted to build it. We hand the future of human knowledge to a cartel of licensors.

This is the historical pattern of enclosure: the privatization of what was once common. In early modern England, common lands that sustained peasant communities were fenced off for the profit of landowners. Today, the digital commons faces enclosure from two directions simultaneously: IP maximalists want to fence off the inputs (restricting what can be read, analyzed, or learned from); and tech monopolies want to fence off the outputs (ingesting the open web into proprietary, closed-source models and charging subscription fees to access the synthesized result). Both are forms of enclosure. Both concentrate power. And neither serves the independent creator.

Artificial Scarcity as a System of Control

To understand what’s really at stake, we need to name the economic structure that makes this debate so agonizing.

Capitalism is a system designed to allocate scarce resources through markets. When a resource is genuinely scarce (e.g., land, food, housing) markets serve a real (if often unjust) allocative function. But when a resource is infinitely replicable (e.g., a song, an algorithm, a medical formula) its natural market price trends toward zero.

This is a problem for capitalism. If the price of information is zero, no one can extract profit from it. So the system imposes artificial scarcity: paywalls, DRM, patents, licensing fees, and aggressive copyright enforcement. These mechanisms force inherently abundant resources to behave like scarce ones, so they can be bought and sold.

The result is a world in which a child in rural Nova Scotia and a child in rural Senegal may both lack access to the same textbook, not because the textbook is scarce, but because someone has decided it must be sold rather than shared.

When we demand stronger IP protections, we are (however unintentionally) reinforcing this system. We are insisting that ideas must be treated as property, that knowledge must be enclosed, that culture must be commodified. And the people who suffer most from that commodification are not tech executives. They are the poor, the marginalized, and the geographically isolated, precisely the people the humanities claim to care about.

“But Creators Need to Eat”

This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a hand-wave.

Yes. Creators need to eat. Right now, under our current system, intellectual property is one of the few tools available to individual creators trying to survive in a market that systematically undervalues their work. I am not suggesting that artists unilaterally surrender their copyrights while tech billionaires continue to accumulate wealth. Think of it as harm reduction: IP is a flawed tool,  a tool of enclosure that overwhelmingly benefits corporations, but it is currently the only shield most creators have. The point is not to ask creators to drop that shield today. The point is to locate where the problem is actually situated, so we can build the structures that make the shield unnecessary, in order to eventually set it down together.

What I am suggesting is that the problem is not the free flow of information. The problem is an economic system that conditions human survival on the ability to monetize one’s output. The solution is not to re-enclose the commons. The solution is to change the conditions under which people create, and to do so with enough urgency that “wait for a better system” does not become an excuse for inaction.

Several approaches deserve serious consideration:

Universal Basic Income. If creators’ basic material needs (e.g., housing, food, healthcare) are met unconditionally, the desperate need to monetize every creative act evaporates. Artists can create for the sake of meaning, community, and human flourishing rather than market survival. If you think this is utopian fantasy, consider Canada’s own Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s (one of the most rigorously studied guaranteed income pilots in North America) demonstrated improvements in health, education, and community participation. More recent programs from Finland to Stockton, California, have shown that guaranteed income increases creative output and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Taxing the monopolies. If AI companies are generating enormous wealth by synthesizing human culture, that wealth should be taxed and redistributed, not by locking down information, but by ensuring the public shares in the returns. A data dividend, an automation tax, or a corporate windfall tax directed into public arts funding would compensate creators without restricting the flow of knowledge.

Public funding for culture. Canada already does this better than most countries through the Canada Council for the Arts, SSHRC, and provincial arts councils. The principle is sound: treat cultural production as public infrastructure, funded collectively, available to all. We don’t need a new principle so much as a dramatic expansion of existing ones.

Open access as liberation, not theft. The Open Access movement in academic publishing demonstrates that freely available research accelerates discovery, benefits researchers in lower-income countries, and does not destroy scholarly careers, especially when paired with institutional support. Open Educational Resources have brought university-level instruction to millions who could never afford tuition. Rather than threats to human dignity, they are expansions of it.

These modern debates over access and enclosure are, in fact, echoes of much older moral questions.

A Voice from the Tradition

I write as a scholar of biblical literature, and I would be remiss not to note that the traditions I study have something to say about enclosure and abundance.

The Torah’s vision of jubilee (Leviticus 25) imagines a periodic restoration of economic relations, a systematic undoing of accumulated inequality. Land returns to its original holders. Debts are cancelled. The logic is that the earth ultimately belongs to God, not to any human proprietor: כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ  “the land is mine” (Lev 25:23).

The prophetic tradition consistently frames the hoarding of resources as an offense against divine justice. Amos denounces those who “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:7). Isaiah warns against the monopolizers who “join house to house” and “add field to field, until there is no more room” (Isa 5:8), an ancient critique of enclosure that resonates uncomfortably with the modern enclosure of the digital commons.

The wisdom tradition, meanwhile, presents knowledge itself as a public good. Proverbs personifies Wisdom as calling out “in the street” and “at the busiest corner” (Prov 1:20–21) — not behind a paywall or inside a licensing agreement. The assumption is that wisdom, by its nature, seeks to be shared.

These are not proof-texts for a particular economic policy. But they do suggest that the instinct to enclose knowledge, i.e., to restrict access for the sake of private accumulation, stands in tension with some of the deepest currents of the Western moral tradition.

The Harder Question

I want to be honest about what I’m not claiming.

I’m not claiming that AI companies are benevolent. Maybe some are; I don’t know. I do know that the concentration of AI development in a handful of corporations is a genuine threat to democratic life, and it requires aggressive antitrust action, regulation, and public investment in open alternatives.

I’m not claiming that the transition to a post-scarcity information economy will be painless. It won’t. Real people are losing real income right now, and “wait for UBI” is not an adequate response to someone who can’t make rent this month.

And I’m not claiming that all forms of artificial scarcity are illegitimate. For example, privacy is a form of artificial scarcity applied to personal data, and it’s essential. Verifiable credentials require controlled access to maintain trust. The infrastructure that transmits digital goods (I’m talking about servers, cables, electricity) is genuinely scarce and requires management.

What I am claiming is this: when we respond to the disruption of AI by demanding that information be locked down more tightly, we are fighting the wrong battle. We are using the master’s tools to shore up the master’s house. The enclosure of knowledge has never served the vulnerable, and it will not start doing so now.

Conclusion

Information wants to be free. Stewart Brand famously added that information also wants to be expensive, which is true because the human labour required to create it is costly. Both halves of that tension are real, and I am not pretending otherwise. The question is not whether we can make information free; we can’t eliminate the cost of creation. The question is whether we will build economic structures that bear that cost collectively, allowing human beings to thrive in a world of informational abundance, or whether we will cling to artificial scarcity and condemn creators to an endless, losing war against the nature of digital goods.

Our goal should not be to put chains on information. It should be to free the humans who create it.

“Moment of Surrender” arrived almost fully formed from the evocative atmosphere of Fez, Morocco, the air thick with ancient calls to prayer that inevitably colored the music (Eno). It’s a song about hitting the mat, that point of utter exhaustion where the fight just drains out of you – the fight against yourself, addiction, the void. As Stokes observed, it employs “the language of surrender, of letting go,” essential for recovery but also deeply spiritual (Stokes, 2009, U2: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song, p. 164).  That word, ‘surrender,’ it carries weight. Sounds like loss, doesn’t it? But Bono explained that sometimes “The only victory was surrender” (Surrender). This isn’t merely about earthly struggles, though the shadow of addiction (“every black hole / At the altar of the dark star”) gives it a raw edge. It taps into a deeper, spiritual current, that act of letting go, the “submission to God, or a higher power” (Bono, Surrender) found across faiths – a necessary yielding reflected in the biblical call to “Submit yourselves, then, to God” (James 4:7).

The narrative captures a soul teetering on the edge, maybe Bono himself, maybe a composite figure, finding himself lost, worshipping at the wrong altars. Then, in the most mundane of settings – an ATM machine – comes a lightning strike of clarity. Seeing his reflection, but really seeing, experiencing what Bono calls “vision over visibility” (Bono, Surrender), piercing the veil of the ordinary to glimpse a profound truth beneath. For Bono, the journey to this point mirrors the grueling path of the “stations of the cross” (Bono, Surrender), evoking Christ’s own agonizing walk towards crucifixion, where soldiers “put the cross on him and made him carry it” (Luke 23:26). It’s a pilgrimage through personal suffering. Yet, crucially, there’s anticipation mixed with the pain, as the character is “Counting down ‘til the Pentecost” (Bono, Surrender). He’s waiting for that transformative inrush of the Spirit, reminiscent of the disciples when “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4), hoping for that divine spark, that spiritual reboot.

The physical posture described – “folded to my knees” – embodies this surrender. It’s the universal sign of prayer, of humility, perhaps the moment before a confession or a plea, where one acknowledges a power greater than oneself, a posture anticipating the day when “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:10 NIV). The body becomes a “begging bowl,” an image of utter dependency and emptiness, like the beggar Lazarus “longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table” (Luke 16:21), yearning for grace, for spiritual sustenance, to reconnect with the soul’s true rhythm. And the central question isn’t an assertion of Bono’s own belief, but a vulnerable query directed outward: “It’s not if I believe in love / But if love believes in me / Oh, believe in me.” It turns the tables, asking if Grace itself, if the Divine, still holds faith in the broken human spirit, a raw prayer echoing from the precipice.

References

Matthew 5:3 / Luke 16:20-21 (related to “Begging bowl”): Evokes imagery of dependency, humility, and being “poor in spirit,” such as the story of Lazarus the beggar.

Luke 22:42 / James 4:7 (related to “Moment of surrender / Submission”): Reflects the spiritual act of yielding to God’s will, seen in Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane (“not my will, but yours be done”) and the instruction to “Submit yourselves, then, to God.”

Luke 23:26 (related to “Stations of the Cross”): Refers to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s suffering journey to crucifixion, including carrying the cross.

Acts 2:2-4 (related to “Pentecost”): Directly names the event where the Apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit, signifying spiritual awakening or empowerment.

Philippians 2:10 (related to “Folded to my knees”): Represents a posture of prayer, humility, and submission, aligning with the concept that “every knee should bow.”

U2 > Discography > Lyrics > I Will Follow

Bono’s “I Will Follow” begins with teenage anguish and ends up sounding like something out of the Psalms. The song’s mysterious lyric—“Your eyes make a circle / I see you when I go in there”—has puzzled fans, but it has spiritual weight. Bono’s mother, Iris, whose name literally refers to a part of the eye, died suddenly when he was just fourteen. That trauma cracked his world open. In the song, her gaze becomes symbol. A circle: eternal, maternal, divine. “It’s a song about unconditional love,” Bono once said, “which is what a mother has for her child. If you walk away, I will follow. No matter what you do, you cannot separate yourself from my love. Which echoes the scriptures: ‘nor from the love of God’” (U2 by U2, 2006)​. He was thinking of Romans 8:38–39: “Neither death, nor life… nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.”

That line—“Your eyes make a circle”—holds a whole theology in its silence. It calls back to Psalm 17:8, “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings,” and forward to Isaiah 66:13, where God speaks as a mother: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.” The divine gaze and the mother’s watchfulness merge. Bono once explained, “I felt a real resentment, because I had never got a chance to feel that unconditional love a mother has for a child… That house was no longer a home—it was just a house. That’s what ‘I Will Follow’ is about” (Rolling Stone, 1987, qtd. in McGee)​.

Psalm 139 hides behind the lyric too: “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb… Your eyes saw my unformed body” (Psalm 139:13, 16 NIV). It’s not hard to hear Bono’s lyric as a return to that womb—a memory not just of comfort, but of being seen. And seen wholly. “There’s a chill in it,” he said. “I’m singing from a mother’s point of view” (U2 by U2, 2006)​. The maternal and the divine blur, as they do later in “Mysterious Ways,” where the feminine becomes a vehicle for grace. In “I Will Follow” Bono was finding, in his mother’s absence, a love that doesn’t end. A circle that never breaks.

References

Psalm 17:8 – “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.”

Psalm 139:13 – “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

Psalm 139:16 – “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”

Isaiah 66:13 – “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.”

Luke 15:8–9 – The parable of the lost coin, reflecting themes of searching and being found.

Romans 8:38–39 – “Neither death, nor life… nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.”