A good friend recently called us to get some tips for a project his daughter was doing. She was going to grow some sunflowers and knew Honey had grown some amazing sunflowers last year, so she wanted some advice. Our advice was basically throw them on the ground and they will sprout unless the birds eat them first, in which case you may want to cover them with something for a few days. Not everything is so simple in a garden, but a huge part of the process is just putting a seed in the dirt and letting nature take it from there. That being said, not all seeds are good seeds. There are plenty of bare spots in our garden where what we believed to be good seeds proved to be bad seeds. Six inches away, in the same dirt, getting the same water and sunshine one seed sprouts and flourishes, while another simple decays into the earth. One seed produces a rapidly growing, healthy plant, and the other produces a puny little sprout that never seems to grow. I told Honey this morning when we return from vacation, if those okra plants haven't grown, I'm going to remove them and plant something else. It’s happened to us with okra, cucumbers, sunflowers, peas, and pretty much every variety of seed we’ve planted. While we appreciate the good seeds far more, especially come harvest time, even the bad seeds can have value. For one, they keep you humble and grateful. Don’t assume all your plans will work out as you planned them, don’t even assume they will work out at all. Don’t think this is going to be easy, just because the plant is doing most of the hard work. I read a story once that said some seeds will produce thirty-fold, some sixty, and some a hundred. It seems that lately I’ve been learning a lot of good things from bad seeds, both in the garden, and elsewhere.
I can’t honestly say when I first encountered the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but it was almost certainly during my moody, emotional teen goth era. I may not be able to pin down when I first heard Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but he re-entered my life in a big way in the midst of my deep theology era. Had you told me at 17 that this angsty, post-punk, goth rocker would speak to my heart again thirty years later through a borderline gospel album titled “Wild God”, I wouldn’t have possessed the bandwidth to even comprehend such a statement. Some of you may be thinking you’ve never heard Nick Cave’s music, but you’d almost certainly be wrong. Have you ever seen the movie Batman Forever? Dumb and Dumber? The X Files? Scream? About Time? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Shrek 2? If you’ve seen any of those movies, you’ve heard at least one Nick Cave song. He also helped to score several movies: The Road, Hell or High Water, and The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
I’ll give you a disclaimer now, should you be so inclined to check out some Nick Cave music…it is an acquired taste; much like Bob Dylan, you don’t listen for the music as much as the message. Don’t wade into these waters expecting poppy melodies and catchy hooks, but if you can keep your head above water long enough, you will realize you aren’t treading water, you’re being baptized, as his motifs have long been imagery and concepts from the Old and New Testaments. Listening to his music is akin to joining Jacob as he wrestles the angel of the Lord on the banks of the Jabbok River. If you hold on and don’t let go, eventually you will be blessed, but it will likely leave you wounded and limping.
C.S. Lewis once said, "Well, that feeling you got while gardening, that was an echo of a tune we haven't yet heard. So enjoy it and let it point you towards this thing." Oddly enough, what brought Nick Cave back into my life wasn’t his music, but his writing. Before we get to his writing, let me tell you a little bit of his story.
Nick Cave’s life has been filled with its share of tragedy, suffering, loss, and heartbreak. When he was a rebellious teenager being held in jail, he learned of his father’s death in a car crash. In 2015, his fifteen year old son Arthur died as the result of falling off a cliff. Seven years later, in 2022, his thirty-one year old son Jethro died after serving a prison stint and a lifelong battle with mental illness. He would later say, “I try to write from the point of view that something can happen to your life that is absolutely shattering that can also be redemptive and beautiful.” This quote reminded me of a statement from Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who also suffered profoundly; “I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.” His suffering, and the way in which he has been reborn through his suffering, a death and resurrection if you will, is a path I have walked many times myself. For those who have traversed this landscape, meeting a fellow traveller is akin to meeting yourself from a different time; some in the past, some in the future.
In many interviews he has stated the death of his two sons made him realize that art was not everything, and that responsibility to his wife and family now drive him, especially his infant grandson. Hearing those words was like having a conversation with myself. For me it wasn’t art, but vocational ministry. For twenty-five years preaching, and the things affiliated with this lifestyle, consumed all of our time, energy, and attention. Though I don’t regret it — there were more blessings than I can recall — I also don’t miss it. A series of sufferings in our own lives reoriented my center of gravity, not away from God, but away from ministry. I found myself no longer having the emotional, psychological, physical, or spiritual capital to “be all things to all men” and my family. It became apparent to me that I could do one or the other well, but not both. Rather than follow the dead end road of many of my former faith heroes who put church before family and lost their family, I decided to walk the way of Noah and prepare a sanctuary for my family.
When I returned to my faith at age 20, I knew I had to “go all in” if I was going to make it. I couldn’t just start going to church, I had to sort of live there in a sense, so that I could find sanctuary from the demons that were tearing apart my life. As I’ve aged, and my faith has matured and grown deep roots, I no longer have to live my faith “full speed” with no breaks, and always busy. During this season, I’ve found encouragement in his music and writings as examples of how you can still very much remained rooted in faith, without it being your career. Cave is an avid reader of the Christian Bible, and he regularly attends a 900-year old Anglican church in London where he enjoys the traditional solemn liturgy "with no guitars. Thank God." In his recorded lectures on music and songwriting, Cave said that any true love song is a song for God, and ascribed the mellowing of his music to a shift in focus from the Old Testament to the New. Reading this I thought of the words by Peter Mayer that give language to what fills my heart, “Everything is holy now.” Cave once wrote, “My religiousness is softly spoken, both sorrowful and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true. It is worship and prayer. It is resilient yet doubting, and forever wrestles with the forces of rationality."
Speaking of his writing; his music will be a bridge too far for many people, but I am convinced his writings, specifically his blog “The Red Hand Files”, are inviting to anyone. In The Red Hand Files, Cave fields questions from anyone about anything, and he answers as many of them as he is able, in letter form with unapologetic candor, often infusing tremendous vulnerability and compassion. It was through one of these Red Hand Files questions that I encountered a quote that has reoriented my understanding of biblical hope. The quote is actually taken from his book “Faith, Hope, and Carnage”, though I encountered it through the blog. (At 4:30 PM today my vacation begins and I plan to read the book during my down time.) In issue #308, January 2025, Bailey from Seattle asked the question: 2025 is coming. The world seems to be in such a catastrophic state. Where is the hope? What is hope? In his reply, Nick suggested:
It is understandable to feel alarmed by the current state of things, to feel fearful and depressed. We are presented with a constant communiqué of despair, that we exist in the worst of times, indeed, the end of times. Many feel impotent in this dreadful imminence – words like ‘Happy New Year’ ring hollow, like a hangover from a bygone better time. We become what we consume, living embodiments of a catastrophe foretold. We turn in on ourselves, trapped within the dark pathology of our time….I wrote in Faith, Hope and Carnage, ‘Hope is optimism with a broken heart’. This means that hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still. We understand that our demoralization becomes the most serious impediment to bettering the world. In its active form, hope is a supreme gesture of love, a radical and audacious duty, whereas despair is a stagnant rejection of life itself. Hope becomes the energy of change….Over Christmas your question went around in my mind, Bailey. I write this on New Year’s Day, and Christmas has come and gone. Ours was a large, noisy family affair that revolved around my infant grandson, Roman. Magisterial in his highchair, I watched him being fed by his doting parents – this bright, new child – and your question seemed to melt into the vision of that little boy, his face covered in avocado, a radiant affirmation of that small word – hope. On that Christmas day, I saw the vitality of hope in action.
Closing in on fifty, I’m beginning to realize Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds that were sown in my life at fifteen, didn’t fail to produce fruit, they just needed a little more time to grow.
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