Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave might be excused for not feeling particularly joyful. In 2015, his then 15-year-old son Arthur fell to his death from a cliff on the coast of England. In 2022 a second son, Jethro, took his own life at the age of 30, after years of struggling with mental illness. Cave has been transparent about the emotional impact of the loss of his sons, both in interviews and through his music. And he has said that one can never simply move on from such tragedies. But Cave has found a way of coping with their deaths in his outstanding new album, “Wild God,” released the last week of August. Along the way, he takes his listeners on a tour of the deeper mysteries of time and eternity, life and death, sin and salvation.
Cave is known by fans as “the Preacher,” because of his religious and spiritual pilgrimage, documented through his blog, The Red Hand Files. There, he uses questions from subscribers as catalysts for insightful and sometimes profound meditations on art, religion and culture. I don’t want the reader to be misled. Cave is not an orthodox Christian believer. He eschews affiliation with any institutional church, even though he often expresses gratitude for the Anglican church of his youth, which he irregularly attends. His pilgrimage has not yet led him to rest his head in the bosom of the Church. But while neither his music nor his theological reflections are to everyone’s taste, Cave is often a helpful guide toward the truth about man and God.
The cost of love
Put another way, Cave’s new album, “Wild God,” superbly illustrates that grace is everywhere.
In “Cinnamon Horses,” for example, the narrator sings,
“I told my friends that life was sweet
I told my friends that life was very sweet
…
I told my friends that life was good
That love would endure if it could.”
But he also understands that sweetness and goodness do not come without intentional agency. Rather, they are acquired at a cost that we must be willing to pay in order to move toward redemption. Expressing a central paradox of Christian faith, the narrator sings, “‘Cause love asks for nothing / But love costs everything.”
This is not dissimilar from Pope St. John Paul II’s notion of love as disinterested reciprocal giving. “The desire for reciprocity does not cancel out the disinterested character of love,” the Pope wrote in “Love and Responsibility.” The sweetness and goodness of God’s grace (and the love among people that springs from it) are free, on the one hand. But they require us to surrender all to him on the other. Thus, the narrator of the song “Frogs” can affirm, “Oh, leaping to God, amazed of love / And amazed of pain.” Honed through the crucible of pain and loss, Cave understands that God’s mercy is severe. Grace is both free and costly.
‘Poetic order’
Having been burnished by the love of God, human relationships thus acquire a grace-filled character that they would not otherwise have. One sees the world differently after one’s vision has been sharpened by mercy. For example, in the song, “Conversion,” the singer describes a young girl who kneels penitently on “stones stacked on stones for ten centuries.” There, God “drew her into him like a flame.” “Touched by the spirit, touched by the flame,” the narrator declares, “I’ve never seen you so beautiful as that again.” Inspired by his muse, the singer concludes, “I was touched by the flame / Yeah, I never really ever hurt again.” Of course, we cannot take this literally. Surrendering in faith to the love of God does not make all hurt go away. But Cave is telling us that pain can be situated in a story of salvific grace and mercy. Suffering can be redemptive, but it requires intentionality.
In a recent blog entry, Cave addresses the question from a reader, “Are songs from God?” While some songwriters enjoy such largess, he laments that he is not one of them. “To write a song requires a reckoning,” he explains. “We exert poetic order upon the turmoil and chaos. We hew and hone and bring structure to the stricken heart; we codify our weary souls.” No one wishes to be visited with the tragedy of losing two sons. But through his new album, “Wild God,” Cave may give us the tools to “codify” our pain in such a way that we might find love even in the midst of the ruins. In the album’s brief coda, Cave confesses that this love comes from Christ, himself. “As He steps from the tomb / In His rags and His wounds / … He brings / Peace and good tidings to the land.”
Through Christ, Nick Cave offers up his own suffering. And we his listeners are the beneficiaries “Peace and good tidings He will bring,” the album concludes; “Good tidings to all things.”
