Is your nativity missing a dragon?

This Christmas, we might be closer than ever to the story’s origins. Terror. Surveillance. Poverty. Genocide. Perhaps it is time to add a dragon to tame creche scenes.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

The head of a giant paper dragon glows orange and red against a night sky.

Oliver Needham on Unsplash.

Advent is not Christmas. The wisdom of the church is this: humans need time to take stock of the grim reality of life, as the nights get even longer. We can’t skip forward with shopping bags and fairy lights to Christmas. These weeks of Advent prepare us. For the unexpected. For the necessity of grace.

Advent is the time the church reflects on its hierarchical structures, its imperialist tendencies, its obsession with power. And repents. It repents because it is about to celebrate that God’s greatest power move was to become powerless. Yes, the church forgets this annually. Sometimes centennially. But inbuilt within the church year is a season that forces it – and ourselves – to come face to face with our hypocrisy.

Advent begins in the darkest time of the year.

Advent is also an enforced time of waiting for the miracle of the unexpected, often in times of grave crisis. We, like the church, can be perpetrators, but we can also be victims. Another aspect of Advent is a vigilant time of waiting alongside the oppressed, in hope, for what we cannot see. For some people it involves fasting, a sign of repentance. For others, it is an advent wreath with daily readings and meditation. Still for others, it is a time to challenge rather than give in to our consumerist global empire.

Advent invites us to remember that God doesn’t come how or when we want. God cannot be manipulated. God can only be received, and most often by those who least expect him. Those on the margins. Those pregnant by accident. Those under tyrannical rule. Advent grows in the church a reverence for the downtrodden and the abused, if we are paying attention. Advent teaches that God comes to those who think they least deserve him.

What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely?

The first Christian account of the birth of Jesus is not, surprisingly, in the gospels – the four biographies of Jesus’ life, composed within living memory of him. We are accustomed to this first century record of sheep and shepherds, stars and stables. But there is a poetic nativity story that is composed prior to all these histories of Jesus, hidden in the middle of the Apocalypse – the book of Revelation. Written just a couple decades after Jesus’ death, this story is of a woman on the run, being pursued by a dragon. At long last, she is cornered. “The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born”. This child facing the dragon, against all odds, is the child Jesus.

This is the grim situation of people all over the world this Advent, far closer to the original nativity story than our chocolate calendars communicate. And perhaps this is a better text for this year’s Advent, as the world watches the fate of women and children in Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Africa. The dragon has indeed invaded the lives of so many. The world is holding its breath.

This Christmas let’s up our Advent game. Let’s put dragons in our nativity creche displays. Take out the baby – he hasn’t been born yet! And let’s hold our breath with the rest of the world, sensing the real and present danger. What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely? What if we used Advent for its original purpose, which is to examine ourselves for our own hypocrisy, our own violence and hatred, our own abuse of power on micro and macro levels? Perhaps then we can truly welcome Christmas. As hope for the powerless. As the possibility for peace in the midst of war. As good news for the world.

As a teenage girl 2,000 years ago prayed in hope,

My spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant…

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

Review

Belief

Creed

Music

Wildness

18 November 2024

5 min read

Did Nick Cave’s tour just take thousands to church?

He’s picking holes in the idea that religion is where freedom goes to die.

Belle Tindall

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

A rock star prowls the stage while behind hundred of faces tined red star.

Cave and the congregation.

Instagram/nickcaveofficial.

I recently went to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Wild God Tour.

I was told that it would be a terrific show, and it was. I was told that Cave would be more charismatic and commanding than he’s been in decades, and he was. I was told that it would be some kind of spiritual experience, and it was…

Kind of.

Those who are likening it to a ‘spiritual’ (including ‘This Country’ actor, Charlie Cooper) experience are certainly onto something, the whole production is designed to be transcendent, it’s just that the adjective they’re opting for is a little too vague. Instead, I would suggest that the show is a religious experience.

Now, hear me out - I know that we tend to feel nice and comfortable with the ambiguity of the former adjective, and much more cautious when it comes to rigidity of the word I’ve subbed it out for. If you just winced at the sight of the big, bad, R-Word, I get it. It comes with all kinds of wince-worthy connotations. A lot of it, deserved. Some of it, not.

But, like it or not, I truly don’t think that Nick Cave is giving us the comfortable luxury of vague-ness.

When I wrote about the Wild God album upon its release, I mentioned that the ‘Wild God’ to whom the record is an obvious ode is not abstract. Rather, the ‘wild god’ is the Christian god. The album attaches itself to a specific story, it finds its home within a specific paradigm. And the same is true of the tour. I would propose, if I may be so bold, that Cave and his Bad Seeds have spent the past few months telling the Jesus-story in every city they’ve found themselves, and subsequently, taking tens of thousands of people to church.

I would hate for you to think that my objective here is to stick a flag on the hill of this album/tour/artist. It’s not my intention to claim Nick Cave for ‘team Christianity’; it’s not necessary, he speaks continuously and profoundly about his own faith. Rather, as someone who has lived her life according to the very same Jesus-story, I’m simply offering you a lens through which you can gaze upon this touring work of art.

So, I’ll suggest it again – the Wild God tour is a religious experience.

And I know that sounds too constrictive of an analysis, but I think that’s on us for ever kidding ourselves into thinking that ‘religious’, ‘Christianity’ and ‘church’ were small words.

That’s certainly not the way Nick views them. In a recent issue of his Red Hand Files, he writes,

‘ I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church – that profoundly fallible human institution – that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.’

Fascinating, isn’t it? The concept feels kind of upside down. How could confinement cultivate liberation? How could boundaries ever encourage freedom, or particularity somehow hold entirety?

Can the ‘spiritual imagination’ truly be ‘both contained and free’? I think it can. In fact, I think that would be my own story, too. And, what’s more, I think the Wild God tour is some kind of proof of concept.

Can art be bursting with rage and religion? I think Nick has just proved that it can. I think he is probing, once again, at the myth that faith and hope can’t sit alongside carnage.

The whole show is framed by Cave’s joyous bewilderment at his own conversion – song by song, it tells the story of how he has been wading through the thickets of grief, his eyes steadily fixed on the God who rescued him ‘just in time’.

It’s specific. It’s religious.

And here’s the funny thing: the show having such a specific story to tell doesn’t seem to have a narrowing effect. Instead, songs about storms in the tiny town of Tupelo and girls who live on Jubilee Street seem to be swept up into a story that’s big enough to hold them, big enough even, to imbue them with yet more meaning. Doubt also sits comfortably here. As does anger and profanity.

Can something be sweary and sacred? Can art be bursting with rage and religion?

I think Nick has just proved that it can. I think he is probing, once again, at the myth that faith and hope can’t sit alongside carnage. He’s finding holes in the idea that religion is a place where freedom goes to die, picking a fight with the claim that ambiguous spirituality, or even outright irreligion, is more freeing.

It’s a big old fight he’s picked, one that’s been fought – in one way or another – since the beginning of time. I guess, as a Christian, it’s a fight that I have picked, too. I have placed my life (and, if we’re going to get weird with it, my afterlife) within the confines of a particular story. Am I certain that I’m right? Of course not – otherwise my faith would be faith-less, no? Nevertheless, I too have chosen to place my understanding of the eternal in the confines of the particular. I, too, am trusting that within the boundaries of the Christian story, there’s space for me to run free.

The word ‘religion’ is roomier than we are often urged to believe. Need convincing? Nick Cave is your man.