the gospel according to Nick Cave

Few musicians could write an opening verse like the following and get away with it:

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
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms

Into My Arms is a beautifully haunting love song and I was intrigued to discover that Nick Cave wrote it after visiting a church in Surrey. What the song highlights is the influence of faith and scripture on Cave’s writing. Simon Mayo interviewed Cave for Radio 5 Live this week and I was pleasantly surprised when he asked a question which I had submitted via Twitter: ‘Does the Bible continue to have a big influence on your writing and which parts in particular?’ The answer was interesting because Cave began by saying that he didn’t read the Bible much anymore, but then went on to talk about Mark’s Gospel at some length.

Nick Cave wrote the introduction to Marks’ Gospel for Canongate Books’ ‘Pocket Canon’ series published in 1998. This is an extract from the Introduction:

When I bought my first copy of the Bible, the King James version, it was to the Old Testament that I was drawn, with its maniacal, punitive God who dealt out to His long-suffering humanity punishments that had me drop-jawed in disbelief at the very depth of their vengefulness.

I had a burgeoning interest in voilent literature, coupled with an unnamed sense of the divinity in things and, in my early twenties, the Old Testament spoke to that part of me that railed and hissed and spat at the world. I believed in God, but I also believed that God was malign and if the Old Testament was testament to anything, it was testament to that. Evil seemed to live close to the surface of existence within it, you could smell its mad breath, see the yellow smoke curl from its many pages, hear the blood-curdling moans of despair. It was a wonderful, terrible book, and it was sacred scripture.

But you grow up. You do. You mellow out. Buds of compassion push through the cracks in the black and bitter soil. Your rage ceases to need a name. You no longer find comfort watching a whacked-out God tormenting a wretched humanity as you learn to forgive yourself and the world.

Then, one day, I met an Anglican vicar and he suggested that I give the Old Testament a rest and read Mark instead. I hadn't read the New Testament at that stage because the New Testament was about Jesus Christ and the Christ I remembered from my choirboy days was that wet, all-loving, etiolated individual that the church proselytised. I spent my pre-teen years singing in the Wangaratta Cathedral Choir and even at that age I recall thinking what a wishy-washy affair the whole thing was. The Anglican Church: it was the decaf of worship and Jesus was their Lord.

"Why Mark?", I asked. "Because it's short", he replied. I was willing to give anything a go, so I took the vicar's advice and read it and the Gospel of Mark just swept me up.

Here, I am reminded of that picture of Christ, painted by Holman Hunt, where He appears, robed and handsome, a lantern in His hand, knocking on a door: the door to our hearts, presumably. The light is dim and buttery in the engulfing darkness. Christ came to me in this way, lumen Christi, with a dim light, a sad light, but light enough. Out of all the New Testament writings - from the Gospels, through the Acts and the complex, driven letters of Paul to the chilling, sickening Revelation - it is Mark's Gospel that has truly held me.

Later in the essay Cave goes on to write:

The Gospel According to Mark has continued to inform my life as the root source of my spirituality, my religiousness. The Christ that the Church offers us, the bloodless, placid 'Saviour' - the man smiling benignly at a group of children or serenely hanging from the cross - denies Christ His potent, creative sorrow or His boiling anger that confronts us so forcibly in Mark. Thus the Church denies Christ His humanity, offering up a figure that we can perhaps 'praise' but never relate to. The essential humanness of Mark's Christ provides us with a blueprint for our own lives so that we have something we can aspire to rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy.

Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity - our ordinariness, our mediocrity - and it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to fly. In short, to be Christ-like.

Although Cave was quite ambiguous about his faith in the interview with Mayo, his song writing continues to be infused with symbols and imagery drawn from scripture. Commenting on his band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ last album Dig Lazarus Dig!!! Cave says:

Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatised, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ's miracles—raising a man from the dead—but I couldn't help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest. I've taken Lazarus and stuck him in New York City, in order to give the song, a hip, contemporary feel.

In 1999 Nick Cave gave a lecture on The Love Song in Vienna and the text is littered with references to God and the Bible. Reflecting on the impact of the Old Testament Cave observes:

Around the age of twenty, I stared reading the Bible and I found in the brutal prose of the Old Testament, in the feel of its words and its imagery, an endless source of inspiration. The Song of Solomon, perhaps the greatest love song ever written, had a massive impact upon me. Its openly erotic nature, the metaphoric journey taken around the lovers bodies – breasts compared to bunches of grapes and young deer, hair and teeth compared to flocks of goats and sheep, legs like pillars of marble, the navel- a round goblet, the belly- a heap of wheat – its staggering imagery rockets us into the world of pure imagination. Although the two lovers are physically separate – Solomon is excluded from the garden where his beloved sings – it is the wild, obsessive projections of one lover onto another that dissolve them into a single being, constructed from a series of rapturous love-metaphors.

The Song of Solomon is an extraordinary love song but it was the remarkable series of love song/poems known as the Psalms that truly held me. I found the Psalms, which deal directly with relationship between man and God, teeming with all the clamorous desperation, longing, exultation, erotic violence and brutality that I could hope for. The Psalms are soaked in suadade, drenched in duende and bathed in bloody-minded violence. In many ways these songs became the blue-print for much of my more sadistic love songs. Psalm 137, a particular favourite of mine and which was turned into a chart hit by the fab little band Boney M. is a perfect example of all I have been talking about.

These comments about the darker aspects of the scriptures reflected in the Psalms point to other themes which are constants in Cave’s writing alongside the spiritual; sex and violence. This darker side is perhaps best expressed through projects like Grinderman, Cave’s film script for The Proposition and his latest book, which was the focus of Simon Mayo’s interview, The Death of Bunny Munro. There are plenty of other influences on Cave’s writing, reflecting a wide range of interests and a depth of cultural appreciation, making Cave one of the most interesting and challenging contemporary musicians and writers.

Here’s a taste of Nick Cave in action performing Into My Arms back in 1999.

The Simon Mayo interview can be found here and my question comes at about 1hr 27mins 40secs.

miraculous healing

Adam Rutherford has been writing a series for The Guardian on his participation on The Alpha Course. Last week Adam wrote a critical piece entitled Alpha can't heal my scepticism which amounted to a complete rejection of the possibility of healing through prayer; in the near future I hope to blog a response to his articles about Alpha. In the meantime consider this miraculous healing event as captured on YouTube.



h/t offthepost via Twitter

Bible on the beat

I fell asleep last night with the radio on and woke to hear a news item on an Australian police force which has issued officers with their own Bible. This morning I did a quick web search and discovered the story is true. The New South Wales state police force is being issued with its own Police Bible. Christianity Today Australia has an account of the story and includes the following from the Police Commisssioner Andrew Scipione:

"I believe the Police Bible will impact on generations of Police officers to come ..... Every officer who graduates from the Academy in Goulburn is offered a Bible and I would like to think an officer who receives one of these special Police Bibles will one day sit in my seat. The Police Bibles are sure to outlive the current administration."

The Bibles were the idea of the police chaplain Rev Russell Avery who explains:

"Coming from the Air Force I saw how popular the Defence Force Bible is, and wanted our law-enforcement officers to have a similar option available to them."

The Bible includes a police prayer and articles about ethics, service and integrity as well as pictures of serving officers. Police force chaplains will issue the Bibles to officers and the initial print run is 3000.

I wonder what the most read passage of the Bible will be? What about this passage from John 7:44ff:

Some of them wanted to arrest Jesus, but no one laid hands on him. Then the temple police went back to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, 'Why did you not arrest him?' The police answered, 'Never has anyone spoken like this.'

Other suggestions?

The other good thing about waking in the middle of the night was I got to hear Andy Murray winning his latest match in the US Open.

what’s in your Bible?

Interesting article in Bible Study Magazine comparing different canons of the Bible. The comparison is presented in a helpful chart which can be seen by clicking the icon below.

My own upbringing in a family from Protestant Belfast meant that the Apocrypha was something I always viewed with suspicion and I guess that subconsciously I didn’t think that Bibles which included it were actually Bibles. Though I read the Apocrypha for academic theological study I don’t use it for devotional study and still balk if I see an Apocryphal passage as a set reading in a service. This raises the whole question of what we mean when we say ‘This is the word of the Lord’ in worship? My conviction is that the average worshipper doesn’t have a clue what they mean by this proclamation.

On our diocesan Course in Christian Studies we encourage everyone to use a modern translation of the Bible. The one we recommend is the NRSV with Apocrypha because one of the issues we explore is the formation of the canon and why some books are seen as part of scripture and others not.

The question of what we regard as scripture, which parts we would include and what we would rather wasn’t there is as old as the writings themselves. A few years ago I received a letter from a vicar, circulated to all the clergy in our Episcopal area, calling for the removal of large sections of the Bible and urging that other ‘sacred writings’ be included. Nothing new there, good old Marcion was up to something similar in the second century.

Recently the Ship of Fools ran a forum to find the ten worst passages in the Bible and announced the results at the Greenbelt Festival. The list can be found here. What is fascinating about this list is the questions it raises about those who suggested the verses. How do they read scripture and in what way are they interpreting these verses (hermeneutics)? There is a helpful critique of the list offered by Peter Ould.

So, what’s in your Bible? More importantly, what difference does reading it make to your life?

H/T @SteveFouch on Twitter.

ducking and diving

Two Premiership teams have had run-ins with the football authorities this week. First in the dock was Arsenal and their young Croatian striker Eduardo. Last week, in a Champions League qualifying match against Celtic, Eduardo took a dive and won a penalty which he then converted. The goal all but secured the tie for Arsenal and the football world was almost united in condemnation for what was seen as blatant cheating. I was furious at the time while following the match on TV and, if my Twitter mates are anything to go by, many Arsenal fans were embarrassed by the incident. Diving has been the bane of football for some time and players have become more and more adept at what is often referred to as simulation. Though the referee thought Eduardo was brought down by the Celtic goalkeeper, EUFA charged the player with deceiving the referee and on the basis of video evidence he was found guilty this week and suspended for two matches.

Although many commentators are delighted that EUFA has decided to take a tougher stand against cheating there is an uneasiness in the game about the decision. Can the officials be sure that Eduardo deliberately dived to win a penalty unfairly? Will EUFA show some consistency and punish other players throughout the season, or have they made an example of a young player in the early stages of the competition?

I have a complaint about UEFA’s decision. Last season Manchester United played Arsenal in the semi-final of the Champions League. During the second tie with the match already secured Man Utd’s Darren Fletcher was deemed to have fouled an Arsenal player in the penalty box. A penalty was awarded and Fletcher was sent off. TV replays clearly showed the player had won the ball fairly and that a penalty should not have been given. Even though there was a clear case for rescinding the red card UEFA claimed they were powerless to overrule the referee's decision and could not take into account the video evidence.

So there we have it; UEFA using video evidence to retrospectively punish a player for cheating but refusing to use the same evidence to overturn an unjust decision which ruled a player out of one of the most important matches of his career. Why was video evidence allowed in one instance and not in the other? How are the interests of the game served by refusing to acknowledge when officials have made a mistake? UEFA needs to pursue a consistent line in its use of video technology, not just to punish cheating, but to overturn injustices.

The second case involves Chelsea who today were found guilty by FIFA, the world governing football body, of illegally inducing the young French player Kakuta to sign for the club in 2007. Kakuta had been playing for the French club Lens when Chelski came knocking at his door. Lens were furious at the poaching of a young talent they had nurtured for several years and took the case to FIFA whose Dispute Resolutions Panel has today delivered its judgement. As punishment Chelski have been banned from engaging in player transfers until 2011; they and the player have been fined E780,000 and ordered to pay compensation of E130,000 to Lens. There has been a growing unease within the game about the large wealthy clubs hoovering up all the young talent from around the world, at the expense of smaller clubs who have developed the players and this case seems to indicate FIFAs determination to stamp out illegal approaches. This case focuses on Chelski inducing a young player to break a contract.

This is not the first time Chelski have been accused of sharp practice over player transfers. In 2005 John Obi Mikel was sold to Man Utd by his then club Lyn Oslo but Chelsea intervened and encouraged the player to sign a contract with them. FIFA were called in to help resolve the dispute and rather than leave the matter in their hands an agreement was made whereby Chelsea paid Man Utd £12 million for the player and Lyn Oslo £4 million.

Now the issue in Chelski’s case is not a simple matter of a club trying to encourage a player to seek a transfer, which is known as ‘tapping up’ in the game. Such activity is banned although it is recognised that most clubs engage in the practice at one time or another. Chelski have been found guilty of encouraging a player to break his contract with a team in order to sign for them.

It is no surprise that both Chelski and Arsenal have indicated their intention to make the most vigorous appeals against the UEFA and FIFA’s rulings. However, the cases do highlight some serious issues that the game must address if it is not to be brought further into disrepute. It goes without saying that I take no pleasure in seeing two of Man Utd’s greatest rivals facing the wrath of the football authorities!

drop down dead drunk

Yesterday’s accounts of the OECD report Doing Better For Children make disturbing but perhaps not surprising reading for anyone concerned about children and young people’s welfare in the UK. Take for example this quote from the report:

"Underage drinking and teenage pregnancy rates [in the UK] are high. Drunkenness is the highest in the OECD. The UK also reports the fourth highest teenage pregnancy rate after Mexico, Turkey and the United States."

Drunkenness is the highest in the OECD. Two personal experiences from last week might help explain the context for these figures. Last Monday I was in Iceland buying some food and at the checkout noticed a display for 75cl bottles of Vodka: Price £5.50p. A little while later I looked at the front page of the local newspaper to discover that Duke’s, a Chelmsford town centre night club, was offering punters ‘£15 all you can drink’ nights – pay up front and drink the night away.

What these examples highlight are two factors that must have an impact on consumption of alcohol in this country; availability and cost. Lou Manzi the boss of Duke’s justified his pricing and availability policy in the following terms:

“None of us would seriously offer half-priced, discounted or all-in offers if we did not have to. It’s a matter of commercial survival like any other retail business.”

But the drinks industry is not just like any other retail business; it trades in a substance that can bring enjoyment but can also cause great harm, that is why the industry is regulated and there are laws governing the sale and consumption of alcohol. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against alcohol and enjoy a pint or a bottle of wine. I also recognise that there have been times in my life when I have drunk too much and I have seen the damage that alcohol has caused in broken relationships, violence, chronic disease and loss of life. In every parish I have served as a minister I can think of people whose lives were severely damaged if not ruined by drink. I married into a family of doctors and am all too familiar with the impact of alcohol abuse on the resources of the NHS.

Back in the 1970s I had a Saturday job in a Tesco store (in the days before it was seen as part of the evil empire). The drinks section consisted of a small part of one aisle with a few shelves stocked with a small selection of bottles of wine and cans of beer and larger. Today the drinks section in the average superstore takes up both sides of a whole aisle plus various other displays throughout the store. Those same stores have perpetual offers to encourage high volumes of sales, the classic being the 5% discount for 6 or more bottles of wine purchased. A few weeks ago I was shopping in a store and needed to spend over £50 to get a significant discount on petrol. I was a bit under the amount so added another bottle of wine to the shopping only to see the price drop below £50 once the wine discount was added so I added another bottle!

Two other factors to mention. In a bar with a colleague over lunch I observed three businessmen buy a bottle of wine which was then emptied into three large wine glasses. Not only were the glasses large, 250ml each, but the alcoholic content of the wine was high at 14%. I say high but actually 14% is fairly standard these days for a New World red, whereas not long ago 12.5% would have been the average. The same is true of the strength of beer and larger.

Four factors which provide the context for the OECD report: price, availability, volume and content. Yet, the saddest aspect about alcohol consumption in the UK is that so many people, including young people and children, seem to be drinking simply to get drunk and these factors serve that purpose. Why and what response can we make?

Right, I’m off to put the wine I bought on holiday in my cellar!

My post on teenage pregnancy and abortion can be found here.

Nicke Baines has posted a related blog to the OECD report here.

Church Mouse has commented on the OECD report here.

wormwood – g.p. taylor

For several years now Harry Potter audio books have been a real godsend to the Ritchie household on our summer holidays. The long drives to various parts of France have been transformed into an enjoyable experience as we listen to the honeyed tones of Stephen Fry reading J.K.Rawling’s tomes. However, even these soundtracks of the summer have begun to wear a bit thin both literally and metaphorically. The kids know each book off by heart and have become expert critics of the films as they compare text to screen and spot the omissions, alterations and inconsistencies.

In a bid to break the Potter habit I headed off to the library in search of new material and came away with Wormwood, G.P. Taylor’s follow up to the excellent Shadowmancer. As we set off to Devon last week I inserted the first disc and waited to see how it would go down with the budding literary critics of the Ritchie clan. The first thing to say is that the book is brilliantly read by Cornelius Garrett who uses a wide range of voices to realise the various characters in the narrative. The plot lends itself to dramatic reading with a fast paced plot full of darkness and mystery. Taylor’s descriptions of London are graphically realised and you can almost smell and taste the disgusting underbelly of eighteenth century life in the capital.

The plot of Wormwood centres around two characters, Dr Sabian Blake and his servant girl Agetta. Blake is a scientist and astronomer with a fascination for the Kabbalah who comes into possession of a precious book called the Nemorensis. During his observations of the night sky Blake discovers a comet called Wormwood hurtling towards the Earth, threatening to bring destruction to London and he studies the Nemorensis in an attempt to understand the unfolding catastrophe. The book is sought by other sinister characters including the beautiful and mysterious Yerzinia and her accomplices. Agetta is a fourteen year old, reminiscent of Pullman’s Lyra, who longs to escape service to Blake and her life of toil and drudgery. Hearing about the Nemorensis and encouraged by Yerzinia, Agetta steals the book from her master and sets out to deliver it into the hands of a bookseller introduced to her by Yerzinia.

As the race to retrieve the Nemorensis develops two other extraordinary figures are introduced amongst the collection of grotesques emerging from the backstreets of the metropolis. Tegatus is a fallen angel, imprisoned by Agetta’s father and facing a future on public display as a freak. Agetta frees Tegatus and together they seek to prevent the Nemorensis falling into Yerzinia’s hands. At the same time Blake discovers that he has a guardian angel Abram (Raphael) following him and Abram explains his mission to retrieve the Nemorensis while also exposing the foolishness and danger of Blake’s fascination with the Kabbalah.

Taylor is a skilled descriptive writer, though at times he lingers too long on the blood and gore; there are only so many descriptions of sores, scabs, lice and disfigurements one can take. Some of the accounts of the panic and mayhem following the emergence of the comet are truly horrific, including packs of wild dogs tearing apart children and the infirm, in a style characteristic of the classic gothic novel, and this tone is sustained throughout the text. The chapter headings are chiefly in Latin, there are unfamiliar phrases and scriptural allusions likely to be ignored by many and there are occasions when it is difficult to follow the narrative which continually demands careful listening. With the book it would be easier to reread key passages and conversations.

The book is not without controversy. Taylor is regarded as a children’s writer and yet the material is challenging. I’ve already mentioned the graphic and gruesome descriptions and there are occult references and allusions. Others have been disturbed by the ambiguity regarding good and evil in the story; this is much more subtle than Harry Potter where the characters are more clearly on the side of right and wrong. Taylor is prepared to explore the spectrum and uncertainty, leaving it to his audience to reflect and draw their own conclusions. The subtlety provides much material for reflection and discussion about the nature of what is good and what corrupts. One of the issues explored skilfully by the author is the contrast between a rationalist scientific reductionism represented by Blake and a spiritual openness to questions including whether we have a soul.

I did wonder whether Wormwood was suitable listening for our young son but he has seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy and listened to the excellent BBC dramatisation, so blood, guts, evil and demons are nothing new. Perhaps the main difference is LOTR is more clearly fantastical whereas Wormwood is rooted in a world more realistic even if of a different time. There were times when both our kids found it difficult to follow the intricacies of the story and it will be worth waiting a couple of years before we give it another go.

Wormwood is more Pullman than Potter and harder work than both but was still an entertaining way to pass a few hours in the car.