Faith, hope and FOMO

Missing out on seeing her favourite band's first live gig provides Mica Gray a lesson in doubt and faith.

Mica Gray

Mica Gray is a wellbeing practitioner working in adult mental health. She is training to be a counselling psychologist.

A singer stands beside musical instrument behind pink frosted glass on the front of a stage.

SAULT's first gig.

The morning found me sat upright at my work desk between two tasks. One half of me was talking to my colleague and the other was debating the ticket prices on my computer screen. My favourite music group SAULT had just announced their first ever live show and I was one of the lucky ones who had managed to fight through the ticket queue to get to the point of purchase. The group had put out nine studio albums in the past four years and had never given a single interview nor put out a piece of promotional material that would reveal their identities. I was excited like so many others to finally get a glimpse behind the veil.

The only problem was that the ticket price was high. Yes, it was my favourite band, but they had never done a live show before. How could I be sure it would be worth the expense? Across social media others were expressing similar doubts. SAULT had never played a live show before. The venue they’d chosen was an abandoned IKEA - hardly the Roundhouse or the Royal Albert Hall. There would be no alcohol at the venue, how were gig goers supposed to have fun? Given that the band's lyrics often focus on spiritual themes, and that high ticket price, was this another case of a religious group trying to financially exploit their followers. While SAULT have not professed to be a Christian band, a lot of their lyrics focus on spiritual themes and reference God as Lord. The show itself was called ‘Acts of Faith’ after all. By the time I had deliberated and decided that I would take the chance and get the tickets they were gone. The show had sold out.

Three days later, footage from the show began to circulate online. Videos revealed elaborate stage designs, dance sequences, choir performances, a full orchestra, exhibitions, fashion shows and so much more. Testimonies flooded the timeline with “it was the show of the year” being a common refrain. Many of the doubters came back to say how wrong they were, how the show was worth so much more than the price. How the artists behind SAULT were seasoned professionals and this was anything but an amateur performance. How the venue was perfect, and any other place would not have worked. How the lack of alcohol didn’t matter because there was such a ‘heavenly’ atmosphere.

Scrolling through all the content I realized how perfect the title ‘Acts of Faith’ was for this show. Were there was no assurance that the cost of the show would be worth it, it would have been an act of faith to trust the artists and buy those tickets anyway. It would have been an act of faith to trust their choice of venue, of making it an alcohol-free event. I imagine it would’ve been an act of faith for the artists themselves too - an act of faith to step out and produce such an elaborate show for the first ever live event. An act of faith to pour all their effort into it without any experience to say that it would work out the way it did.

Those SAULT fans who saw the doubts and uncertainties and still decided to act in faith were able to witness something magical.

As I watched this all unfold, I couldn’t help but think of how much courage it takes to step out in faith in these ways. As a trainee psychologist, my studies tell me that faith is a subset of hope. One which is associated with positive mental health and wellbeing, resilience, coping with anxiety and healthy relationships. Faith tends to have an additive impact on our lives.

Doubt on the other hand, is a protective mechanism that helps us to minimize risk so that we can preserve ourselves, others or our resources. Doubt often works by integrating our past experiences into our present. For instance, those who shared their doubt about the quality of SAULT’s first live show did so for good reason. Many first artist shows are underwhelming for fans. Spiritual leaders and groups have exploited followers in the past. An old IKEA hasn’t historically been the best venue for esteemed musicians. On that evidence, attending the show seemed like it would have just been a loss. However, what actually happened was quite the opposite. Those SAULT fans who saw the doubts and uncertainties and still decided to act in faith were able to witness something magical. It reminded me of John, one of the followers of Jesus, who wrote: ‘blessed are they who have believed but not seen’. Sometimes, we want to see the evidence of our faith so that we can believe we have good grounds on which to make a decision, and that is wise. But sometimes, faith asks us to go beyond our wisdom, to go beyond our lived experiences and to be open to something new that we haven’t seen yet.

Of course, not all acts of faith work out the way that SAULT’s first show did. Sometimes we step out in faith and rather than having our hopes realized, we are met with disappointment. We are met with our fears coming true and met with risks that become real losses. Though those moments can be deeply painful, we can at least be glad that we had the courage and ability to hope at all. Those moments remind us that sometimes the act of faith is the end in itself, they remind us that it is not about the reward of faith, but about keeping the flame of hope alive underneath it.

Though I won’t be able to look back years from now and say I was at SAULT’s first show as I would’ve liked to - thanks to the password I couldn’t recall, I can look back and say that morning where I was sat at my desk between the faith and doubt taught me a valuable lesson: faith is not the absence of doubt, but the ability to see beyond it - to choose beyond it. In 2024, I think that’s a lesson worth holding on to.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.