There is a tension in 21st-century life that may come close to defining how millions of us now live. Whenever we want to commune with other people, we need only reach for an object the size of a Twix and there they all are: scores of acquaintances and a veritable galaxy of complete strangers, offering insights and opinions on a huge range of subjects. But our online lives too often revolve around a mixture of anger, silliness and superficiality.
Where do we go and who can we find to meaningfully share our thoughts about life’s inescapable fundamentals: love, loss, death, fear, bereavement, regret? To properly do so might require real-world company, which can be an equally big ask. Think about all this, and you will sooner or later collide with something that predates the internet: the long and steady secularisation of life in the west and the vast social holes it has left. Once, for all their in-built hypocrisies – and worse – churches at least offered somewhere to ritualistically consider all of life’s most elemental aspects. Now, beyond communities with high levels of Christian observance, they are largely either empty or woefully underattended.
Which brings me to the singer-songwriter Nick Cave, who has just released a new album, Wild God. In November, he will be playing to huge audiences in a run of British arenas: a relatively new experience for him and his collaborators, which reflects deep changes in his life and his music. In 2015, he suffered the loss of his 15-year-old son Arthur; seven years later, another son, Jethro, died. And in the midst of an unimaginable level of grief, Cave has not only poured his thoughts and feelings into his art, but repeatedly spoken about the profound personal changes caused by outwardly senseless bereavement, as well as reflecting deeply on other people’s experiences. As a result, his audience has ballooned: as he turns 67, he is probably at the all-time pinnacle of his success.
Wild God is a fantastically moving, life-affirming record. But there is even more to Cave’s bond with his public than music and lyrics. Since 2018, he has overseen the Red Hand Files website, where he answers inquiries on a huge range of subjects. As he puts it, the original idea has grown into “a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency”, which entails reading “100 letters a day”. Because he is a kaleidoscopic, complex figure, some of his replies highlight views that are not to some people’s tastes, as evidenced by his hostility to cultural boycotts of Israel, or his antipathy to so-called cancel culture. Last year, he explained why he attended the coronation of King Charles (“I’m just drawn to that kind of thing – the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring”). Most of what he posts combines his curious, questioning instincts with a deep humanity: recent editions have covered loneliness, parenthood and suicide. When he plays live, all of this is in the air: it seems to give everything even more meaning.
The same is true of Faith, Hope and Carnage, the bestseller published in 2022 and made up of dialogues with the Observer writer Sean O’Hagan. It looks ahead to Cave’s tentative return to the Anglicanism he was brought up with, and – among many other subjects – is full of insights about what happens when life fills up with grief and hurt. One of his key beliefs is that when we experience loss, we become more human: these things are universal, and therein lies the key to surviving them. “This will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self,” he says. “It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation.”
He goes on: “But in time they put themselves together piece by piece … and the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person.” The book is full of passages like that. I don’t think I have ever read anything like it, which is a tribute to Cave and O’Hagan’s achievement – but also an illustration of what is missing from most of our culture.
Some of us seem to be belatedly trying to fill the gap. I see that impulse in people’s renewed yearning for nature, the ritualistic pleasures of summer festivals, and the popularity of meditation and mindfulness. It is telling that the militant atheism that peaked 20 years ago with the publication of such books as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great now seems passé.
No one should ignore darker developments that run alongside all this – not least the culture warriors whose interest in a Christian revival is part of their loathing of Islam. But there is a very different story about other people’s quiet quests for meaning and transcendence, and the enduring presence in our culture of essentially Christian thinking. The historian Tom Holland – who, like Cave, has returned to the Christianity he was brought up with – says that in the way millions of us interpret world events there is something unspoken: the fact that “at the heart of western culture is the image of someone being tortured to death by the greatest empire on the face of the Earth”. Many modern rituals and gatherings, he says, look like a “tepid echo” of old church festivities. And he likes Cave’s characterisation of God as wild: “Unless you feel a sense of awe and incomprehension, what’s the point? It can’t be a God who’s just nice.”
I am a devout agnostic. But as I get older, there are experiences and aspects of living that often open the way to a sense of the ineffable and mystical, and the need for something that may help me make sense of an increasingly chaotic world, and life’s ruptures and crises that seem to arrive with alarming regularity.
Most Sundays, I go walking with my two kids, which is a reliable emotional pick-me-up. More often than not, we stray into one of the village churches that tend to pepper our routes. It happened again last week, when we spent 15 silent minutes in a disused chapel near the Somerset village of Holcombe, and I thought about an entry in the Red Hand Files that Cave posted in response to a fan’s bafflement that he has found at least some solace in Christianity.
“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,” he wrote. “At times, this is as bewildering to me as it may be to you.” Here, I think, lies the faint outline of a journey that more people may sooner or later take, and something I can just about imagine: slowly increasing numbers of people being pulled away from their screens, towards something much more human and nourishing. Those pews, in other words, may not stay vacant for ever.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
