Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

The Church Has Lost Its Way…

Much resonated for me in a recent post by Barry Taylor. Here’s an excerpt: 

“…Young people are leaving because they have been in attendance at church services, Sunday schools, and other church events and instead of finding a community of spiritual depth and Christ-like love that truly cares about its community, they have found too many people over-concerned with gimmickry, social status, self-interest, and self-preservation. Instead of finding a community of authentic worship of God and sacrificial love for neighbor, they have found a community of fear, anxiety, and tepid pseudo-spirituality. I believe millenials are searching for authenticity and community and that the church today has, indeed, lost its way. 

But the problem is not just that the church has refused to accommodate millennials' moral shortcomings by "relaxing its commitments to make church more acceptable" -- it's that the millennials have come looking for a community passionately following Christ in all areas of life and - far too often - we (i.e. Christians) haven't given them what they're searching for. I am not surprised that millennials are leaving church because as I survey the landscape of American Christianity today I don't see that it has much to recommend itself to the next generation -- or any generation, for that matter… 

… In order to regain the trust of future generations, the church needs to regain its own spiritual vitality, but this will not come through gimmicks, ad campaigns, moral laxity, or any of the other "desperate measures" currently being pursued to stave off the church's decline. If there is to be any hope that the church will regain the next generation, what is really needed is steadfast obedience to Christ's call to sacrificial love and a commitment to be "good news" to our communities born out in concrete acts of service and radical hospitality. We need to be less committed to the "institution" -- our buildings, bulletins, budgets, and social status -- and more committed to Christ and the pursuit of the koinonia that Christ lived, died, and rose again to create…” 

You can read his whole post here.

p.s. I now have him to thank for introducing me to US musician/singer/artist Melody Gardot, the “Accidental Musician” (Youtube clips here, here, here, and here) 

Sigh No More… You’ll find the Beauty of Love as it was Meant to Be!

An artist/theologian friend, thinking of me, gifted me a song by London-based Indie Folk Band Mumford and Sons. The song is titled: Sigh No More 

Serve God love me and mend

This is not the end

Lived unbruised we are friends

And I'm sorry

I'm sorry

 

Sigh no more, no more

One foot in sea, one on shore

My heart was never pure

And you know me

And you know me

 

And man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

 

Love it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you,

It will set you free

Be more like the man you were made to be.

 

There is a design,

An alignment to cry,

Of my heart to see,

The beauty of love as it was made to be (x4)

 

And a prayerful New Year hope: “I hope the newness of this year be filled with gentleness, kindness and grace that yields what you need in order to walk the precious path your feet tread … God walks it with you.”

 

The Multilayered “Yahweh”.

I’ve been listening to, and sitting with U2’s song Yahweh over the last few days. It’s a rich and beautiful song, poignant and evocative at so many levels. The song is off their album How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb.

Take these shoes

Click clacking down some dead end street

Take these shoes

And make them fit

Take this shirt

Polyester white trash made in nowhere

Take this shirt

And make it clean, clean

Take this soul

Stranded in some skin and bones

Take this soul

And make it sing

 

Yahweh, Yahweh

Always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh

Still I'm waiting for the dawn

 

Take these hands

Teach them what to carry

Take these hands

Don't make a fist no

Take this mouth

So quick to critisize

Take this mouth

Give it a kiss

 

Yahweh, Yahweh

Always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh

Still I'm waiting for the dawn

 

Still waiting for the dawn, the sun is coming up

The sun is coming up on the ocean

His love is like a drop in the ocean

His love is like a drop in the ocean

 

Yahweh, Yahweh

Always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, tell me now

Why the dark before the dawn?

 

Take this city

A city should be shining on a hill

Take this city

If it be your will

What no man can own, no man can take

Take this heart

Take this heart

Take this heart

And make it brave.

 

The Blanket that I Threw Over the Invisible Man

“…Writing allowed me direct access to my imagination, to inspiration and, ultimately, to God. I found that through the use of language I was writing God into existence. Language became the blanket that I threw over the invisible man, which gave him shape and form. The actualizing of God through the medium of the Love Song remains my prime motivation as an artist…”

He ends his lecture with these achingly beautiful sentiments wrapped loosely in paper of words:

"...I'm happy to be sad. For the residue cast off in this search, the songs themselves, my crooked brood of sad-eyed children, rally around, and in their way, protect me, comfort me and keep me alive. They are the companions of the soul that lead it into exile, the sate the overpowering yearning for that which is not of this world. The imagination demands an alternative world and through the writing of the Love Song one sits and dines with loss and longing, madness and melancholy, ecstasy, magic and joy with equal measure of respect and gratitude."

Nick Cave, musician/writer – from The Secret Life of the Love Song, a lecture delivered at the South Bank Centre, London, 1999. Available on CD or in written form (pages 2-19 of a total book of 451 pages + index).

"...society actually has a problem with sadness. They don't like sadness. They try to cure sadness, and actually I don't believe that sadness is necessarily a bad thing. i think its something thats an essential part of our character, especially an artistic character..." Nick Cave, quoted in The Moose and Nick Cave: Melancholy, Creativity and Love Songs, an essay written by Tanya Dalziel in "Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave edited by Karen Welberry & Tanya Dalziel, p. 194

And this from a review of Greg Garrett’s We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel According to U2, Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, KY, 2009; 141 pp.: 9780664232177 by Gareth Powell (formerly part (perhaps still is) of the MOOT community in London before going to Pembroke College, Cambridge - if I’m not mistaken) in the January / February 2011 issue of the journal Theology. 

“…One is also left wondering why so much attention continues to be devoted to U2 when so much could be done on other more religiously ambiguous artists such as Nick Cave, who, in a manner akin to Wordsworth’s, stands at a critical distance from Christianity, yet treats its theological questions with genuine sophistication…”

While I have an extremely high regard for U2, I agree with this reviewer’s “wondering”. As proof of the potential, albeit limited from a specifically theological perspective, I’d direct you, by way of an example of the possibilities, to this brilliant collection of essays Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave published by Ashgate in 2009. Or to this recent post (on this blog) – reflecting a more theological example. Or, for more on the themes of the religion and the bible, see this 1997 online interview by Jim Pascoe with Cave – Awash in a Bleak and Fishless Sea. 

Finally, here's three podcasts that were connected with the 23rd May to 19th July 2009 Nick Cave exhibition at the Western Australian Museum - an interview ( Mp3 - downloadable) with curator of the exhibition (Janine Barrand) about her experience of visiting Nick Cave at his home in the UK, a telephone interview with Cave (Mp3 - downloadable) himself on the exhibition, and the exhibition podcast tour with its curator. The latter two can be found here.

 

Nick Cave, the Bible and Culture

Paul writes – the musician that has accompanied me the longest in my adult life is Australian Nick Cave, firstly as one of the Birthday Party, and more latterly as a member of The Bad Seeds, and most recently as the front man for Grinderman. I was therefore fascinated (though a little daunted) by an (academic) article written by Australian Roland Boer and titled Under the Influence? The Bible, Culture and Nick Cave (circa 2006).

For Boer, Cave provides an unwitting insight into away of viewing the relationship between the Bible and culture.

Here are Boer’s introductory paragraphs.

“...How might we understand the relationship between the Bible and culture? The question is of course not new, but I want to come at it from a particular angle–the tension between seeing the Bible as the source from which its interpretations and appropriations follow, or taking it as the destination that must be attained through those subsequent appropriations. On the one hand, the Bible is the original text that influences a host of subsequent cultural products. Our task is then to interpret how it does influence those products. On the other hand, we cannot read the Bible without two or three millennia of interpretation and appropriation. It is always already read, and we can only access the text by wading through those interpretations first. If we look at the problem from the perspective of culture, cultural interpretations thereby become either the result of the Bible’s influence or the gateway through which we approach the Bible. I should point out here that by “culture” I mean in this paper the various appropriations–turned over, twisted and spat out again–of common readers, artists, poets, novelists and, of course, song writers like Nick Cave.

This, then, is the problem this essay considers for a while. And it will do so in three stages: first the essay situates this problem within the context of method. At this level I explore a certain hunch concerning biblical interpretation. Secondly the essay considers the problem in light of some recent key positions on the Bible and culture, and finally it engages with the music of Nick Cave in order to explore the methodological question of the influence of the Bible on culture...”

As my use of the word “academic” infers, the essay is technical in its thrust, and therefore not necessarily accessible to a more general reader.

I discovered the essay after doing a bit of exploration as a result of this post by Steve Taylor. You’ll note Boer has a chapter on Cave in a new book that has been recently published. I look forward to reading it. The best collection of essays I’ve read which interact with Cave are contained in Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Works of Nick Cave (pub. 2009). Also, keep an eye out for a soon to be published (US) collection of interviews Nick Cave: Sinner Saint: True Confessions (2011).