Of Faith, Hope and Carnage
Some of you will have heard me speak of Nick Cave and heard me quoting him.
I devoured his book ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’ on Retreat last year in pretty much a single gulp, which is a really big deal for me.
I decided to find out a bit more about Nick and of course, much of what follows is a direct filch from the magic of the internet. Faith, Hope and Carnage pretty much describe his life and this homily comes with a health warning. It is not pretty or glamorous or sexy. His life is a cocktail of Faith, hope and carnage mixed through with 20 years of heroin. So here goes.
Nick was born in Warracknabeal (which is a marvellous place to spend your infancy) in 1957 and then moved to Wangaratta where he was a choir boy in the Anglican cathedral there. So far… so good. What could possibly go wrong?
At 13 he was expelled from Wangaratta High School and sent off to Caulfield Grammar. After his secondary schooling, he studied painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology but dropped out the following year to pursue music. It was around this time that he began to use heroin and continued to do so for the next 20 years.
Nick was 19 when his father was killed in a car collision and his mother told him of his father's death while she was bailing him out of St. Kilda police station where he was being held on a charge of burglary.
It took him a while to find English model Suite Back and they married in 1999. That’s me putting a large dollop of chocolate sauce on history and protecting a few people.
Nick is a father to four children and outlives two of his boys. One had taken LSD and then fallen off a cliff, and the other to suicide. So it is with the greatest level of authenticity and integrity that he can offer us these words.
“Grief is something that you get practiced at”
“Hope is optimism with a broken heart”
“Grief and joy can coexist in the same moment.”
What started me on this quest to learn more about Nick’s life was just one of his many songs.
The song is called ‘Into My Arms’ and I hope that the words will appear in the pew sheet. My interpretation of it is that it is pretty much a love ballad for his wife but you will discover that The Master also makes an appearance.
“And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love And guide you into my arms”
The verses of the song begin with “I don’t believe in …” and then later say “But,… if I did…
So we get
I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did, I would kneel down and ask him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Will not to touch a hair on your head
Leave you as you are
If he felt he had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms
And in a one swift verse, we caught up in that lovely endearing, delicious slush between believing and disbelieving, bobbing around with faith, doubt, despair and hope. Wanting to believe whilst barely existing in a very inky black cavern.
Now if we are brutally honest and tell the truth, as we are meant to do, is that not also true of each and every one of us in here and everyone out there? Doesn’t every life have darkness and light? Don’t we all live a life of faith, hope and carnage?
But we should let Nick have the last word here.
He once clarified his view on Christianity as "non-political and fully personal and emotional" and described his religious beliefs as "bound up in the liturgy and the ritual and the poetry that swirls around the restless, tortured figure of Jesus, as presented within the sacred domain of the church itself.”
“My religiousness is softly spoken, both sorrowful and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true. It is worship and prayer. It is resilient yet doubting, and forever wrestles with the forces of rationality."
Cave's religious doubts were once a source of discomfort to him, but he eventually concluded:
“Although I've never been an atheist, there are periods when I struggled with the whole thing. As someone who uses words, you need to be able to justify your belief with language, I'd have arguments and the atheist always won because he'd go back to logic. Belief in God is illogical, it's absurd. There's no debate. I feel it intuitively, it comes from the heart, a magical place. But I still fluctuate from day to day. Sometimes I feel very close to the notion of God, other times I don't. I used to see that as a failure. Now I see it as a strength, especially compared to the more fanatical notions of what God is. I think doubt is an essential part of belief.”