And the angel was overcome
This is a Sunday morning read about wrestling angels and courting demons, Nick Cave style ... I’m sending it out ahead of time because who opens emails on a Sunday!
It’s Sunday, so some of you may be heading to church ... some of you may be recovering from Saturday night ... if you’re like me, you’ve been up early to watch the English Premier League.
I’ve had some reflection time in recent days in response to reading Nick Cave’s book of interviews, written by his friend, journalist Sean O’Hagan. It’s called Faith, Hope and Carnage, because that’s essentially the main subject matter of the conversations ... Nick Cave’s faith, his hope following the accidental death of his teenage son a few years ago (which I talk more about here), and his latest album Carnage, which was being made while the conversations were happening.
As it’s Sunday morning, I wanted to draw your attention to some of the comments Cave makes about his faith — and more specifically about religion. And even more specifically, about the Christian religion.
Cave is asked about an occasion when O’Hagan had described his work as spiritual, and Cave had countered by saying it’s ‘religious’. The journalist says he thought Cave’s response was revealing — and I had the very same thought.
Just to deviate slightly ... there’s a great effort among church-going people these days (and not just these days, but for perhaps the past couple of decades), to wash the word ‘religion’ from their skin, as if it’s just about the worst thing they can be branded with. I know, because I’m one of them. But of course, if they are church people, then they’re religious — they’re literally following the practices of a religion. They may not want to admit that, to themselves as much as to anybody else, but that’s essentially what they’re doing.
I do find Nick Cave’s songs ‘spiritual’, but more than that, I find them deeply religious. They’re replete with scriptural allusion, baked in the grand themes of the Christian meta narrative of good versus evil, life versus death, God versus the devil, spirit versus flesh, Jesus versus ... the religious.
But even so, I’m intrigued to read Nick Cave saying that the allusions go deeper than the imagery in his songs — that in fact it’s the other way around, the imagery emerges from his own deeply held religious beliefs.
'Religion is spirituality with rigour,’ Cave says, ‘and yes, it makes demands on us. For me, it involves some wrestling with the idea of faith — that seam of doubt that runs through most credible religions. It’s that struggle with the notion of the divine that is at the heart of my creativity.’
O’Hagan then asks Cave if what he’s admitting is that when it comes to faith and beliefs, Cave is essentially a conservative.
'Yes,’ Cave answers, ‘that’s always been the case, and not just in terms of my faith. I think temperamentally I’m conservative.’
If you know Nick Cave’s music, or seen him perform (check out this extraordinary Glastonbury showing as a prime example — though be warned, it’s wonderful but utterly brutal) I’m guessing the last word you would use to describe him is conservative. To hear him say his temperament is conservative is one thing, to read that he has a conservative faith is something else. And while I’m intrigued about what that says about Nick Cave, I also read this exchange very subjectively — I would describe my own faith as conservative too, and when I read that the likes of Nick Cave share my perspective, I feel a kind of reassurance, and release, perhaps even permission; the sense that I have an ally (and a strong one at that), in both my faith and my doubts. Cave is someone who has never sacrificed anything for his art, or allowed his poetry and stories to be clipped by the expectations of others — so to hear him champion religious faith, and attest to a belief in the unseen and unprovable things, and the mystery of the divine as well as the incarnation, well, it gives me a tiny bit of courage to do the same.
'I’m not really that interested in the more esoteric ideas of spirituality,’ says Cave.
And neither am I. The ‘spirituality’ that is tossed around blithely in coffee shops by people who dabble in crystals and numbers and presence of mind has no roots, no history, no tradition, no story, and no meaning or value beyond itself. A spirituality that has no capacity to confront the human drama — which is the reality of death itself, and the turbulence that that reality creates around each of us — but merely drives a person into themselves, is not only narcissistic, it’s futile.
'I’m drawn to what many people would see as traditional Christian ideas,’ Cave continues. ‘I’m particularly fascinated with the Bible and in particular the life of Christ. It has been a powerful influence on my work one way or another from the start.’
I’ve written elsewhere of the first time that I became interested in Nick Cave. I was standing in a record store reading a music magazine, something like NME, except I never particularly liked NME so it was probably one of the Australian music magazines that were big in the ’80s. Anyway, the writer contrasted Nick Cave with Bono, of U2, his point being that while Bono was a Bible-quoting believer who was flirting with demons, Cave was like something that crawled out of a crypt in order to bask in the divine light. I’ve paraphrased massively, but you get the drift.
So I’ve always had that idea in my head — that Cave, the chaotic, drug-addicted dark lord was merely using the Bible to furnish his songs with grand scriptural imagery. It seems I wasn’t alone in thinking this, because O’Hagan the journalist puts this very idea to him: ‘Back then, I assumed the Bible was simply a source of inspiration for your songs in much the same way that you were drawn to writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and the whole Southern Gothic tradition.’
'Well, a big part of the attraction of those writers was that they were also wrestling with religious ideas,’ says Cave. ‘And the Bible is an incredible source of imagery and bold, instructive human drama. Just the language itself is extraordinary. I think there was always a yearning within me for something else, something beyond myself, from which I felt excluded. Even in the most chaotic times, when I was struggling with (heroin) addiction, I always felt desirous of those who had a religious dimension to their lives. I had a kind of spiritual envy, a longing for belief in the face of the impossibility of belief that addressed a fundamental emptiness inside me. There was always a yearning.’
In terms of my own faith journey, I align more with Bono’s journey than Cave’s experience, in that I was brought up as a believer, I made a confession of faith before the age of 10, I was baptised, and so on, and only later began to court my demons. In more recent years, one of those demons has been the whole area of unbelief itself — more specifically the temptation of rationalism, in which it’s so difficult to see how the core event of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus, could have happened at all. But it’s in this fog of doubt that I encounter the likes of Nick Cave coming from the opposite direction, and it gives me a great deal of solace to hear an artist like him express the same wonder about the scriptures that I feel, in spite of, or perhaps even because of the doubt, in a way that makes me less embarrassed about it — which is how I feel, more often than not, when I come away from so-called ‘exvangelicals’, who have no fight in them at all, who aren’t wrestling with doubt so much as rationalising the histories of multiple religions away, and whose conversation is void of even respect, let alone love, for the Christian story, its traditions, or its literature. It’s in reading Nick Cave that I realise it’s not religious doubt that is the biggest challenge to my faith, but the dearth of spiritual roots in the ‘believers’ I encounter in the midst of it.
Further into the conversation, Cave is asked if he believes in redemption in the Christian sense. His answer is enlightening, and encouraging — and is a fitting way to finish these brief Sunday morning thoughts.
'Well, I think we’re all suffering ... and more often than not this suffering is a hell of our own making, it is a state of being for which we are responsible, and I have personally needed to find some kind of deliverance from that. One way I do that is to try to lead a life that has moral and religious value, and to try to look at other people, all people, as if they are valuable. I feel that when I have done something to hurt an individual, say, that the wrongdoing also affects the world at large, or even the cosmic order. I believe that what I have done is an offence to God and should be put right in some way. I also believe our positive individual actions, our small acts of kindness, reverberate through the world in ways we will never know. I guess what I am saying is — we mean something. Our actions mean something. We are of value.
'I think there is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things — the impossibility of things — and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind.’
I guess I was hoping for something a bit more than kindness, individual positive action, living in mortal life, etc. This seems like a default religious position, that most people would agree with. I guess I was hoping for something a bit more Christian - a bit more incarnation, death, and resurrection… something a bit more messy and bloody…. maybe something with a bit more substance that enfolds in the darkness and the doubt.
I read emails on a Sunday. And I am glad I did. This was a reading worth a Sunday. A religious day. Like every day. Religion without the rules that many would insist are a part of religon, is the religion that reveals the spritual and takes me to a place of knowing.