Tell Me About Your Relationship with Jesus

This was the surprising invitation put to Australian musician Nick Cave on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast recently. Not exactly the sort of thing one expects to hear in a forum typically devoted to the nuts and bolts of music production. But Cave does talk about God rather a lot, so I guess fair game. There was some knowing chuckling and qualifying and maybe a bit of embarrassed hedging. It’s such a retrograde, naïve, provincial question, after all. Who talks about their “relationship with Jesus” anymore, other than perhaps a few benighted yokels from the Bible belt? Right?

Well, Cave did eventually venture forth with a response. He had always been drawn to the drawn to the figure of Christ, he said, the sufferer, the grief-stricken, abandoned one. He talked about being drawn not to the metaphysics or the doctrines, but to the story of this God-haunted man. He wouldn’t call himself a Christian, he said, but he loves the church, attends a church that brings him to tears with the organ, the liturgy, the forgiveness. It’s like music, he said, it puts its arms around you and offers a safe harbour for all the yearnings and longings of the human heart. All in all, it was an interesting and inspiring response, even if I might have hoped for a bit more. You could certainly do worse than faith as a kind of existential aesthetic. You could also do better.

A version of the same question was put to Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a recent interview. I referred to her unusual conversion to Christianity in my previous post. Many people have wondered, as I did in the post, if this was a conversion to a cultural argument or if there was anything personal going on. Hirsi Ali responded to this directly:

Yes, it is a very personal story. I don’t know to what extent it’s useful, but on a very personal level, I went through a period of crisis — very personal crisis: of fear, anxiety, depression. I went to the best therapists money can buy. I think they gave me an explanation of some of the things that I was struggling with. But I continued to have this big spiritual hole or need. I tried to self-medicate. I tried to sedate myself. I drank enough alcohol to sterilise a hospital. Nothing helped. I continued to read books on psychiatry and the brain. And none of that helped. All of that explained a small piece of the puzzle, but there was still something that I was missing.

And then I think it was one therapist who said to me, early this year: “I think, Ayaan, you’re spiritually bankrupt.” And at that point, I was in a place where I had sort of given up hope. I was in a place of darkness, and I thought, “well, what the hell, I’m going to open myself to that and see what you are talking about”. And we started talking about faith, and belief in God, and I explained to her that the God I grew up with was a horror show. He created you to punish you and frighten you; and as a girl, and as a woman, you’re just a piece of trash. And so I explained to her why I didn’t believe in God — and, more than that, why I actually hated God. And then she asked me to design my own God, and she said, “if you had the power to make your own God, what would you do?” And as I was going on I thought: that is actually a description of Jesus Christ and Christianity at its best. And so instead of inventing yet another new God, I started diving into that story.

The interview with Hirsi Ali (including the Q & A at the end) is worth listening to or reading in its entirety. She tackles some vitally important topics head on and answers with a bracing honesty that is rare to encounter these days. And her perspective as someone who has travelled from a quite severe expression of Islam through an overconfident secular atheism and arrived at a deep appreciation of the Christian worldview and all it makes possible is truly fascinating. Hers is a voice worth listening to and wrestling with in the post-Christian West where we seem mostly interested in tearing down and guiltily (if highly inconsistently) self-flagellating rather than living with confidence and grace, unapologetically making the connection between Christianity and many of the things in our world that we hold most dear.

But it was Hirsi Ali’s personal journey that I found most moving. This image of trying to imagine the kind of God you might find compelling or lovable or even tolerable and then arriving at Jesus. What a way to put it. I of course hasten to add that faith isn’t just dreaming up the kind of God you find palatable. We must have theological room for the God who confronts, upends, and disrupts — the God that we struggle to tolerate, but who reaches across our preferences to judge, forgive and heal. So, yes, I would want to say more than Hirsi Ali does here. But how interesting, how completely Jesus-y that Jesus should meet her in this way.

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Image taken from the 2023-24 Christian Seasons Calendar. It is called “Heaven Opens” and was created by Salvita Gomes.