~ After Listening to an interview with Nick Cave
and while reading his book Faith, Hope, and Carnage.
Does it get better?
Does it get better?
Does it get better?
Does it get better?
Does it get better?
Does it get better?
⊕
Does it ever get better?
Does it ever get better?
Does it ever get better?
Does it ever get better?
Does it ever get better?
Does it ever get better?
⊕
Does it ever get any better?
Does it ever get any better?
Does it ever get any better?
Does it ever get any better?
Does it ever get any better?
Does it ever get any better?
⊕
Will it ever get better?
Will it ever get better?
Will it ever get better?
Will it ever get better?
Will it ever get better?
Will it ever get better?
⊕
Yes.
It will.
~ © Daniel J. Miller, November 2023.
I find this album—the collaboration of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis—one of the most hauntingly beautiful records I’ve listened to in years. It’s a brave, vulnerable, and hopeful album. Nick Cave and his wife Suzie lost their 15-year-old son, Arthur, in 2015 when he died from injuries suffered from a fall from a cliff. Like Cave’s previous 2016 album Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen (2019) uncharacteristically makes extensive use of a synthesizer and looping. I’m not a big fan of electronic music, but Ellis and Cave use it effectively along with percussion and choral voices to create a mournful score that is spacious and lingering. The marriage of the music and Cave’s lyrics in Ghosteen make for a heart-wrenching lament that captures the pathos of love and loss and death and sorrow and faith.
The older I get the more suspicious I am of purported beauty that has not held hands with pain, that has not sat at the bedside of suffering. I’m perhaps less tolerant still of theologies that glamorize suffering or, even worse, that turn away and fail to see all the ways and means and places where Christ is being crucified today in our world of human-made woe. The only reverent, tolerable, and respectable theology holds the blessed tension between grief and praise, lamentation and celebration, the sorrowful and joyful mysteries of life where paradoxically hope gestates and grows and becomes an act of resistance “where a terrible beauty is born.”
~ Dan
ARTWORK: (Top) Oswaldo Guayasamin, 1919 – 1999
♣ GOODPEOPLE ♣ HOW ABOUT YOU? ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SPIRITUAL DIRECTION ONLINE? Would you benefit from having a trustworthy companion to listen with you to your yearnings, hopes, struggles, burning questions? Someone who will pay attention with you to your quiet desire to cultivate a life of spiritual depth and meaning as well as to the One from whom all wonder, joy, and blessings flow? I am offering spiritual direction online. If you, or someone you know, are interested in beginning or returning to spiritual guidance CLICK HERE where you will find both practical information and explanations of spiritual direction. I’d be honored to hear and hold your unfolding story.