Nelson Mandela.

“I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

I thought of this Nelson Mandela quote a couple of days ago when New Zealand politician John Banks was once again trying to tell all who’d listen that anyone who knows him knows he’s an honest person who’s spent a lifetime of doing good. The lack of humility from a polarising, deeply eccentric politician (who is now before the courts) in little old New Zealand couldn’t be further apart from the humility and grace of Mandela.

To farewell perhaps the 20th century’s most recognisable force for positive change, here is the brand new U2 song Ordinary Love which features in the just released biopic Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom.

Rolling Stone magazine had this to say about Ordinary Love, a song U2 themselves call a “complicated love song” for Mandela:

U2’s return starts like funky church–synth-choir hosanna and the gentle hammering of electric piano and rolls with steady, compelling restraint. Bono fires a few bolts of falsetto in the chorus, and the Edge’s terse guitar break suggests the ring of a wounded church bell. But Ordinary Love is about the seeds of dreams, and U2 play it perfectly: down-to-earth, while looking up.

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” – Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013.