Review
Belief
Culture
Death & life
Joy
Music
Wildness
7 min read

Nick Cave’s Wild God challenges a too comfortable culture

Eavesdrop on profound discomfort and raw wonder.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A singer, wearing headphones, turns from a microphone in front of him.
Listen with Nick.
nickcave.com

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there lived an anonymous mystic who we’ve since come to know as Julian of Norwich. After coming chillingly close to death at the age of thirty, she spent the subsequent decades of her life in a small side room of St Julian of Norwich church (the inspiration behind her pseudonym), speaking to people only through windows and writing masterfully about her supernatural visions of God. 

Her anonymity, modesty, and creativity meant that she was free to write about God without the pressure of being theologically or doctrinally ‘correct’. She wasn’t too interested in making her writing academically bulletproof, nor was she too bothered with institutional rightness.  

Rather, she experienced, and she wrote. She pondered and she wrote. She suffered and she wrote. She rejoiced and she wrote.  

She was utterly captivated by God, and that meant that she was free.  

I think that Nick Cave is free, too.   

His latest album reminds me of Julian of Norwich’s work; baffling, subversive, mystical, rooted in a truth that can’t be proven. A truth he wouldn’t be interested in proving, anyway. It, too, swerves ‘rightness’. It, too, refuses to dilute the oddness of faith. It, too, is irresistibly intense. I pressed ‘play’ at around 8:03am this morning, assuming that this album would be the soundtrack to my mundane morning. But two songs in, I found myself sitting on my kitchen floor with my coffee, a notebook, and the album turned up to a volume that would have justifiably annoyed the neighbours.  

This is not a casual album. Any true Nick Cave fan would scold me for ever expecting it to be. 

The album is a ten-track-long ode to a Wild God who has met Nick in the darkest of places. Places, I’m sure, he never wanted to go. Places, I’m sure, he will never fully leave. Such a wild God is a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked. But Cave, through a combination of circumstance and intentionality, appears to have entirely shunned comfort. And so, he’s in prime position to introduce us to a God who will confound us.  

Julian of Norwich’s book and Nick Cave’s album are centuries apart – yet, somehow, it feels as though they have been made from the same materials: profound discomfort and raw wonder. 

Suddenly, you’re reminded that you’re eavesdropping on a man who has lost his son, conversing with a God who lost his too. 

This is Cave’s eighteenth album with the Bad Seeds. Together, they have created a soundscape to get lost in, a changeable climate controlled by their instruments: you get caught up in a cyclone during the title track, the cymbals crash like waves on the shore in ‘The Final Rescue Attempt’, you can hear the gentle droplets of rain fall in ‘Frogs’, the strings somehow sound like a sunset in ‘As The Waters Cover The Sea’.   

It’s music that baffles your senses. 

And then there are the stories that the songs are telling.  

The album opens mid-way through a bar, its first song – ‘Song of the Lake’ - sounds as if it was playing before you hit play. In 2015, Nick and his wife Susie lost their teenage son. In 2022, Nick lost another son. The last two albums offered up by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen – they have an address, and the address is grief. They’re laced with palpable agony. And so, beginning this album mid-way through a bar, it’s as if Nick is telling us that we’re picking up a conversation where we left off in 2019. This album wouldn’t exist if the previous two didn’t exist.  

He uses the opening song to remind us of the tragic circumstances in which he lost his teenage son, Arthur, by referencing the nursery rhyme character, Humpty Dumpty – who, of course, ‘had a great fall’. Nick quotes, ‘… and all the king's horses and all the…’ before cutting himself off with ‘… oh never mind. Never mind.’ 

What’s the meaning of this recurring ‘never mind’? Is it agony or acceptance? Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe Nick, as usual, doesn’t want to be too knowable.  

Some of his thoughts feel finished and firm, others feel unexplored and new – like we’re hearing them at the same time that Nick is. On occasion it feels as though he’s teaching us something, on other occasions, he’s the one asking the questions. It’s about him, and then it’s not about him. It is intensely personal and then it’s cosmically minded. It’s sturdy, then it’s fragile. It’s from the point of view of a deity, then it’s from the perspective of a frog in his pocket.  

It is pretty uncontainable.  

But the song that my mind seems to have gotten snagged on is ‘Joy’, which sits about a quarter of the way through the album. Again, he begins the song by telling us how he ‘woke up this morning with the blues all around my head… I felt like someone in my family is dead,’ he speaks of his ‘pain and yearning sorrow’ – all of which hits you in the stomach, because such lines are wholly unexpected in a song entitled ‘Joy’.  

You could read a 100,000-word long thesis on the theology of joy. Or you could just listen to this song. I think it would teach you everything you need to know.  

The way Nick chooses to sign it off is to overtly tell us so. His goodbye is a direction, his epilogue is an invitation. 

Despite the references to his grief, Nick recently shared that he nearly titled the album ‘Joy’. And I get why. If you think of joy as some kind of light and fluffy thing, you might not spot it. But if you, like Nick and his band of Bad Seeds, perceive joy to be something that can hold tension, confusion, and even sorrow – you will see that it is all over this project. As Nick has already taught us, faith and hope can be found amid carnage. And Nick’s new(ish)-found faith has quite obviously turned him upside down.  

His wild God has clearly swept him off his feet.  

The remaining songs on the album - the ones that I don’t have the wordcount to do justice - they take God/death/life, and they ponder them from every angle. There is a childlike wonder to this album, a pure kind of excitement. The kind that you'd think would be irreconcilable with the realities of grief but is somehow able to sit right alongside it. Nick isn’t trying to explain the God that he has found, or the ‘conversion’ he’s experienced – he’s just celebrating it, and inviting us all to listen.  

He's simply loving God and enjoying being loved right back. It really is all very ‘Julian of Norwich-esque’. It will offend you if you try too hard to put it into a neat box.  

But then there’s the last song, which is where I’ll bring this gush-a-thon to an end. It is a hymn. Like, an actual, albeit tweaked, hymn – the last song is a rendition of ‘As the Waters Cover the Sea’.  

All of a sudden, there’s a gear change to grapple with. Nick is placing himself in a church, he’s tying himself to a particular religious tradition, he’s joining a particular community and affiliating with a particular history. It turns out the God of whom he speaks is not abstract, he’s the Christian God. You’re reminded that you’ve been eavesdropping on a man who has lost his son, conversing with a God who lost his too. The lyrics have been hinting at this all the way through the album, but the way Nick chooses to sign it off is to overtly tell us so. His goodbye is a direction, his epilogue is an invitation. He is basically saying -

If you’re intrigued by the Wild God, here is where precisely I have found him…  

And this kind of religious specificity being used to tie up an album so full of metaphor and mystery. An album I thought I had worked out, an artist I thought I had finally cracked, a message I thought I had deciphered… 

… Oh, never mind. Never mind. 

Review
Addiction
Culture
Film & TV
Monastic life
5 min read

Mother Vera: from heroin addict to heroine helping the recovering

The horse-loving orthodox sister with a liturgy for life, and a dilemma.

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A nun on a white horse, gallops across a snowy field, in black and white
Equine therapy.
She Makes Productions.

Across the arts, the recovery journeys of people with addiction and mental health issues are being re-narrated, giving voice to the navigators of their own personal transformation. In Mother Vera, the Grierson award winning documentary about a recovery community surrounding the Saint Elizabeth Monastery in Minsk, ritual and nature’s unfolding therapeutic power take centre stage. 

From Sister Act I and II, to The Sound of Music and Black Narcissus, big screen depictions of women’s monastic life tend to be overwrought. But Mother Vera is different. Shot in black and white, Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s documentary visually pays subtle homage to Black Narcissus’ bell tower scene, with a nod to Citizen Kane here and a wink to Andrei Tarkovsky there, but the overall tone is sober, in every sense of the word. 

At the heart of the film is charismatic Mother Vera, a horse-loving orthodox nun, whose story of heroin addiction and betrayal by her onetime partner is micro dosed throughout the film. Surrounding Vera are a team of world-weary men, who she organises into readers for the monastery’s liturgies, as well as directing them in caring for the community’s cows and horses. They declare themselves “snowed in” by the monastic routine of “processions and liturgies” and relentless rounds of physical labour: shovelling snow and ice, feeding and grooming the animals. But the recovery community also acknowledges the bounded routines of the monastery keep them alive, able to face down their longing for drugs and drink. The rhythm of the natural world is woven into the liturgical year as Christmas cribs are replaced with Easter celebrations, all linked by scenes of candlelight, prayers and genuflections.

Early on in the film, Vera slips a puffa jacket over her black habit and gallops across the snow on a white horse. Without giving away too many spoilers, Vera’s desire for a life beyond the borders of the monastery grows as her story develops. Visits to her family show adolescent nephews and godsons growing into strapping maturity in her absence. Her mother relates the time Vera overdosed, 20 years ago, and doctors told her “to prepare for every outcome.” Vera reflects on how her charisma influenced “fresh faced girls” to become heroin users. For Vera, heroin went from being a portal of insight and revelation, to “showing its true face” which was diabolic. In monastery community meetings men praise how Mother Vera helped them to “reconstruct”. 

Vera initially joined the monastery for a year, to wait out her partner’s prison sentence. Twenty years on, she has reached a new phase of her own reconstruction. Immersing herself in a river, her parting words are: “Let’s move on. Let’s continue. Amen.” 

The community at Saint Elizabeth Monastery echoes the residents of W-3, the psychiatric ward in the American teaching hospital described in Bette Howland’s memoir W-3 first published in 1974, and republished four years ago. The author is admitted to hospital following an overdose, while she struggles to raise two children alone, on a part time librarian’s wage, while also trying to write. “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it had dawned on me these obstacles were my life. I was always rolling these stones from my grave.” 

Howland positions the institutionalised rhythms of the hospital as the supreme life force, and ultimately more curative than talking therapy or medication. “For the sick in their beds were invisible. They were there only by implication. They must have existed, if only for the sake of this other life, full of importance – the bustling arms, starched coats; the carts, mops, ringings, beepings; the brisk comings and goings of white stockinged nurses.” The invisible, timeless guiding spirit of the hospital “as mysterious as a submarine”, would prevail regardless of what the medical staff or patients did, or resisted doing. Realising they were not the ones calling the shots, was the first step for Howland and her fellow patients to returning to life outside the hospital. 

Accepting community and kinship, rather than superiority or aloofness, with others in recovery is also a key feature of Saint Elizabeth Monastery and W-3. “Nothing was original on W-3, that was its truth and beauty,” writes Howland. And continually telling and re-telling her story to fresh batches of medical students, under a psychiatrist’s supervision, eventually allowed it to be transcended. “It is not strictly accurate to say that these interviews were of no use to us. Because you would have to tell your story yet once more, all over again. And each retelling, each repetition, hastened the time when you would get tired of it, bored with it, done with it – let go of it, drop it forever – could float away and be free.”  

In Mother Vera members of the lay community argue about accepting a new member, who may have been raped in prison, and is labelled a “downcast”. But the argument against allowing prison hierarchies to overshadow their new community wins the day, with the new member being integrated, and objectors accepting “you are no better than him.” 

Contemporary approaches to mental health and wellbeing also pivot on an acceptance of shared humanity and imperfect day to day life with its relentless demands, as well as acknowledgement of a power outside human control. In the Netflix documentary Stutz, actor Jonah Hill charts his sessions with Hollywood psychotherapist Phil Stutz. Stutz counsels his clients there is no escape from pain, uncertainty and hard work. To try to avoid these conditions, whether through fantasy or substance or addiction, is to live in the Realm of Illusion. Progress and satisfaction can only be achieved by embracing the here and now, and doing the next necessary thing for life to continue. Stutz calls these actions the String of Pearls, urging his clients to be the one to put the next pearl on the string. The outcome of the action is immaterial, it is the self -belief fostered by taking real world positive action in support of self-flourishing, that is critical. 

Stutz believes in a force for good he calls Higher Forces, and a malign force thwarting human growth he calls Part X. For Mother Vera her latter days at the monastery when she felt she could be of more service in the outside world were “tricking God”.   

From a Minsk monastery to a Hollywood therapist’s office, to a 1970s hospital, an acknowledgement of the divine, together with an embrace of each other and demands of daily life, emerge as key tenets of recovery’s long road. 

 

Mother Vera is released in the UK from 29 August.

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