Untamed and joyful

God according to Nick Cave

“God cannot be domesticated because God is wild. He is wild by nature because nothing greater than Him can be conceived. He cannot be contained”, Father Antonio Spadaro wrote in his book, Una trama divina (A Divine Plot). This “Wild God”, of whom Father Spadaro speaks, is the same “Wild God” referred to in the title of Nick Cave & Bad Seeds’ latest album. Cave, a rock singer-songwriter (to whom Jesuit Father Spadaro dedicated a lengthy essay about 20 years ago in La Civiltà Cattolica), appears to debate more strenuously than ever, two opposing realities: doubt and faith. Yet, it is precisely in this wild God that Cave places his trust, singing of Him as a being of great virtue and courage, who moves amid the flames of anarchy and the winds of tyranny, constantly journeying to reach us.

The Acts of the Apostles speak of the descent of the Holy Spirit as a powerful and unpredictable wind, strong and free, that cannot be stopped. It bursts in, renewing our minds and hearts (cf. Acts 2:1-11). This same wind finds Nick Cave, stunned in a dark forest, and speaks to him in his suffering, enveloping him with peace. He sings of it in Joy: “Over by the window, the voice came low and hollow / Spoke into my pain, into my yearning sorrow / Spoke into my pain / Who was it? I cried / What wild ghost has come in agitation? Who is it? I cried”.

Pain engages with happiness. The song’s protagonist pleads for mercy, on his knees: “I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees / I called all around me, said: Have mercy on me, please!”. And he continues: “We’ve all had too much sorrow / now is the time for joy”. While trendy musical genres cry out angry words, Cave speaks of a God who is provident and blessing. When Bob Dylan listened to these lyrics, he was so moved that he wrote the following on X: “Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy’. I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right”.

For some years now, Nick Cave has been answering his fans’ questions on his religious beliefs and his spirituality, on his blog, “The Red Hand Files”. Asked about Bob Dylan’s post on X, Nick Cave replied: “I hadn’t known Bob was at the concert and his tweet was a lovely pulse of joy that penetrated my exhausted, zombied state […] I did indeed feel it was a time for joy rather than sorrow. There had been such an excess of despair and desperation around the election, and one couldn’t help but ask when it was that politics became everything. […] The world had grown thoroughly disenchanted, and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent — that holy place where joy resides. I felt proud to have been touring with The Bad Seeds and offering, in the form of a rock ‘n’ roll show, an antidote to this despair, one that transported people to a place beyond the dreadful drama of the political moment”.

To fans who do not appreciate his closeness to the Lord, he talks about artists who have disappointed him because they sought their own truth, not the Truth. Included in his list of disappointments are Neil Young, Nina Simone, Jim Morrison, Morrisey, Brian Eno, Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith. At the top of the list is Bob Dylan. Dylan’s reaction to the song, Joy, shows how two people seeking God can follow their own paths. They mirror themselves after a God who is the source of life and salvation, no longer satisfied by the simple idea reconciled by the divine. His “yeah, that’s about right” about Cave’s song, sounds like an act of faith. Dylan heard a truth among the crowd in the concert in Paris, just like the characters in the Gospel did when they met Jesus in the midst of crowds. Dylan’s yes brings to mind the “Amen” in the Book of Revelation (1:8-7). It is like the act of faith of the blind man healed in the Gospel according to John (9:38), and the “yes” of Saint Paul the Apostle (2 Corinthians 1:20). Like Dylan, Cave is not afraid to face the sacred and to mix it with the profane. Indeed, his inner battle with the Incarnation takes place precisely on the crossroads of these dimensions. Faith, which emerged after the loss of his two sons, is the means by which he faces death without ever rejecting it, using it as an instrument needed for redemption.

His relationship with rock legend Elvis Presley was fundamental for his journey of conversion. Cave has often mentioned his debt to Elvis, especially for the king of rock’s spiritual approach in gospel records like, How Great Thou Art and He Touched Me, which are echoed in Wild God. Cave’s album is the result of a religious experience that pervades him and is traceable in his songs. Without faith in the Risen One, the Australian singer-songwriter would have slipped into murky and deep waters. He confesses this in the song Frogs: “Oh Lord, oh Lord / The children in the heavens / Jumping for joy / Jumping for love / And opening the sky above / So, take that gun out of your hand / Cause all will be well say the bells / It’s Sunday morning and I’m holding your hand”. Here pain is not the end of everything, but a beginning, a rebirth. The song is filled with hope, and death seems to be a passage to something eternal to be found, a movement explained with the image of frogs and children leaping for joy:

“The frogs are jumping in the gutters / Leaping to God, amazed of love / And amazed of pain”. A leap that is also in the track, Joy: “I jumped up like a rabbit….”

The Australian musician explained his “wild” relationship with God in his book, Faith, Hope and Carnage. A restlessness shown for a long time through violence and desperation. In fact, there is a Nick Cave before, and a Nick Cave after, “Wild God”. Obsessed with Christ, he sang of guilt and damnation as permanent states of the soul, a hell from which it is impossible to emerge to see the stars again. From the time of his album, Ghosteen, he seems to emerge from the underworld. The doubt that remains is the essence itself of his devotion and of a fertile creativity that links him to the Bible, seen as the Word of Life, not as a book from which to draw inspiration to write lyrics in the style of William Faulkner. An example of the “old Nick Cave” is the album Murder Ballads.

Song of Joy is filled with evil that drives away Joy, the name of an alluring woman taken as a bride: She “became Joy in name only / Within her breast there launched an unnamed sorrow / And a dark and grim force set sail”. All things proceed towards their end, and yet, in the new song Joy, eternity wins. In the dark, Tender Prey, and especially in The Mercy Seat, Cave wants to ascend into Heaven because God is merciful and loves everyone, especially sinners. The seed sown into the soil bears good fruit. As it dies, the grain of wheat forces Nick Cave not to wallow, but rather to insist in trying to identify with the Crucified and Risen Christ. Obedience to the suffering in Wild God, already accepted in iconic songs such as The Ship Song and Into My Arms, becomes joy and surrender to the Truth, thanks to the stories of Flannery O’Connor. Nick Cave said something unusual for a rock n’roll star: “Our lives are complicated… we live our experiences and find our truths in different places. To my considerable surprise, I have found some of my truths in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird, and thoroughly human institution of the Church”.

Nick Cave surrenders to a larger truth, but not in a predictable way. The divine intervenes in his music without ever allowing itself to be grasped or defined.

Wild God is an album that invites us to recognize a more profound meaning, a testament of spirituality that is constantly involved in a struggle, always on a journey, that sacrifices freedom for a greater good. As Cave says in Cinnamon Horses, “Cause love asks for nothing / But love costs everything”.

Nick Cave’s faith is wild, just like the God he sings about, who continues to challenge us, illuminate us and save us.

Massimo Granieri