Great little passage from the comedian’s far from (merely) comic new book Recovery:
These are secular times. I just went to see a priest with my girlfriend to discuss getting married in his church and God wasn’t mentioned, as if doing so might cause embarrassment and I feel some of the same tension when writing. It’s not like the atheists have all the best tunes, though some people who I really admire are devout atheists, but it is the time we live in, the mechanical dome that umbrellas us from the eternal that causes me consternation. The unwillingness to open our hearts to the mystery. Even a sentence like ‘open our hearts to mystery’ makes me feel a bit queasy with its sincerity but nothing has given me a stronger sense of the great unknowable than listening to scientists, some spiritual, others not, confessing to the limitations of understanding being through material analysis.
I (like the saints and sages and prophets on my earlier list of heavyweights [Augustine, Shakespeare, MLK, Ghandi, etc] that this time I’m too shy to repeat in case it seems that I’m trying to edge myself onto the inventory of greats, which I am) feel there is some other power at work here. I feel too that in my journey to freedom from active addiction, undertaken basically for selfish reasons, I have inadvertently been connected to this power. I also believe that anyone can do it. That is what is at the heart of this book, that addiction, however severe or mild, is a sincere attempt to address a real problem, the lack of fulfillment to which the material world cannot cater. Therefore the solution to this problem is a spiritual connection. This is not my idea. (pg 231)
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3 responses to “Some Other Power At Work in Russell Brand’s Life (Inadvertently)”
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Hell yeah! Thanks David. I always enjoy your insights. I totally went on a youtube binge the other night with all the Russell brand interviews from Colbert (insane!) to Mahr to the View. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I love seeing how God reveals Himself in seemingly unconventional (to the church) ways!