I‘ve been taking in Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan’s book-length interview, Faith, Hope, and Carnage, a few pages at a time, and man does it pack a punch. I’m about half way through and much of the discussion so far deals with grief and creativity, but occasionally Cave will digress into observations about religion and God (and Jesus!). Don’t you dare call him “spiritual” though — the man identifies himself and his songs as strictly ‘religious.’ The following passage, in which he summarizes my last two books in far more poetic language than I could ever summon, stopped me in my tracks. I’ve put O’Hagan’s words in italics:
What kind of questions, in particular, would you say religion is more adept at answering [than secularism]?
[Religion] deals with the necessity for forgiveness, for example, and mercy, whereas I don’t think secularism has found the language to address these matters. The upshot of that is a kind of callousness towards humanity in general, or so it seems to me. And I think callousness comes out of a feeling of aloneness, people feeling adrift or separated from the world. In a way, they look for religion — and meaning — elsewhere. And increasingly they are finding it in tribalism and the politics of division.
The decline of organized religion may be one reason for that, but there are others, of course, social and political.
Well, whatever you think about the decline of organized religion — and I do accept that religion has a lot to answer for — it took with it a regard for the sacredness of things, for the value of humanity, in and of itself. This regard is rooted in a humility towards one’s place within the world — an understanding of our flawed nature. We are losing that understanding, as far as I can see, and it’s often being replaced by self-righteousness and hostility.
Then, a few chapters later, after O’Hagan mentions the tragic death of his younger brother, Cave drops a bomb downright Capon-esque in its cruciformity:
You either go under, or [the loss] changes you, or, worse, you become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost; they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate, and, well, other people go the other way, and grow open and expansive.
But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point — a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realized, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really — to die in a way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.
So, to return to what we talked about at the beginning of this conversation — the religious impulse … It seems, for some of us, the religious experience awaits the devastation or a trauma, not to bring you happiness or comfort, necessarily, but to bring about an expansion of the self — the possibility to expand as a human being, rather than contract. And, afterwards, we feel a compulsion, too, a need to pass the message on like missionaries of grief or something. […]
You know, I was just thinking, and I don’t know how to exactly say this, and please don’t misunderstand it, but since [my son] Arthur died I have been able to step beyond the full force of the grief and experience a kind of joy that is entirely new to me. It was as if the experience of grief enlarged my heart in some way. I have experienced periods of happiness more than I have ever felt before, even though it was the most devastating thing ever to happen to me. This is Arthur’s gift to me, one of the many. It is his munificence that’s made me a different person. [My wife] Susie, too. We’ve never felt more engaged in things. I say all this with huge caution and a million caveats, but I also say it because there are those who think there is no way back from the catastrophic event. That they will never laugh again. But there is, and they will.
[FWIW, if you are going to take the plunge on this, I highly recommend going for the audiobook.]
