CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Tragedy can confront us with preciousness of life
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It seemed “like the audience was hungry for something, desperate for meaning, for their lives to have meaning”.
These are the words of Nick Cave talking to music journalist Seán O’Hagan in their book Faith, Hope and Carnage, in which they discuss Cave’s life and music. Best known as frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, he is an Australia-born songwriter and musician now UK-based.
His career began with chaotic, iconoclastic gigs in the 1980s, and continued through two decades of heroin addiction. In recent years Cave has mellowed, especially since the tragic death of his son Arthur in 2015 confronted him as never before with the fragility and preciousness of life. Cave is a brilliant man, conflicted yet wise, with an eloquent passion.
I was interested in his sense that gig audiences were seeking meaning. An influential Scottish Christian writer recently suggested that many of our fellow Scots have no need for the meaning Christian faith offers because these days we are taught to create our own meaning.
Nick Cave would not agree. One of the most common issues raised by folk writing to his Red Hand Files website is “a feeling of meaningless or emptiness” which, he says can’t ultimately be filled by “politics” or by “identity”.
In Cave’s own experience it seems that the emptiness, the need “to find some kind of spiritual home” which drove his heroin habit can only adequately be filled through connection with the divine.
Initially, he recognised that the act of believing itself brought spiritual and healing benefits regardless of whether or not God actually exists, and felt it would be foolish to deny himself this comfort. He chose to “be open to the divine possibility of things whether it exists or not”.
But there is more to his faith than this, especially in recent years. He speaks of “glimpses or impressions of something otherwordly”, and of “intimations of the divine”. At one point he says emphatically: “Seán, I believe.”
And he tells us in the new paperback edition of the book that he has very recently moved beyond thinking simply that religion is “good for us” to regarding it as “something purely devotional that is essentially to do with worship”.
Here is the meaningful life to which we are called, a life which in saying “yes!” to God finds freedom, fulness and peace in the fragility of life. Here is the meaning for which his audiences were “desperate”.
I love Nick Cave’s description of this journey where meaning is found and the depths of that meaning explored. “It is like we are running towards God, but that God’s love is also the wind that is pushing us on, as both the impetus and the destination.”
