Nick Cave: St Mark’s Gospel is “the root source of my spirituality”
Nick Cave writes and sings gripping songs of evil and foreboding. Together with his brilliant band the Bad Seeds, he has recorded a long string of compelling albums. His creative ability is undeniable, even if what he has created is generally chilling, seamy, and violent.
Many of Nick Cave’s songs have obvious religious implications. He admits that his art has been informed by the language of the Bible, and the Old Testament in particular. His songs recognise—and often dwell upon—human sin, depravity, perversity, and evil.
Born and raised in Australia, he sang in an Anglican Church choir as a young boy. The experience turned him off traditional religion.
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.
Later, an Anglican vicar encouraged Cave to read St Mark’s Gospel “because it’s short”. “Willing to give anything a go”, he did and found it inspiring. In 1998, he wrote an introduction to Mark for a series of biblical publications. Here’s a snippet:
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.
Here is Nick Cave singing Blind Willie Johnson’s gospel spiritual “John the Revelator”.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPmacnYVb6A[/youtube]
Click here to see a video of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, with Kylie Minogue, singing Bob Dylan’s “Death Is Not The End”.