Music has always been my church. I might go to buildings, participate in rituals, and even make a living by engaging with more traditional forms of church and religion, but in my heart, music is my religion. It was in music that I found a space to hear and voice my desire, melancholy, sexuality—everything. I remember, with a fondness I don’t reserve for many things, when I bought my first record player. It wasn’t the machine itself, but what it represented: liberation from the family sound system, from my parents’ radio choices, from the tyranny of a world shaped by ideas, values, and aesthetics that meant little to me as I tried to voice my own. That record player became a shrine, a holy site at which to make incantations and supplications. I learned about life’s pains, struggles, joys, and freedoms as the records revolved. I dreamed of a different life through blues, gospel, R & B, soul, reggae, punk, rock, and pop artists whose music became a soundtrack for my own.
Lately I’ve been reading The Art of Nick Cave, a 2013 collection of essays about Cave’s music, writing, and influence, as well as the elements of the sacred and the profane in his work. Throughout his career, Cave has often used the Bible as an imaginative lens through which to invite us to look at the world.
In the book’s introduction, editor John H. Baker reflects on Cave as an actor in the 1987 Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, in which he plays Damiel, a fallen angel. Baker likens Cave’s songwriting to the trajectory of a fallen angel whose fall is not to destruction but to empathy. According to Baker, the only way the angel can fulfill his desire is to undergo a radical shift or reincarnation of sorts. He risks, like Lucifer, a fall from the spiritual into the material world. For some who hold a different view of what it means to fall, this might be a troubling turn of events. But in the film and in Cave’s music, the only way desire can be fulfilled and love can be realized is by falling to Earth.
Similarly, David Bowie plays an alien who is transformed by humans in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. The story is like Wenders’s in that radical transformation occurs in the fall. The notion behind these falls is that desire and drive are not met by escaping reality or the material world, but by fully entering into it.
The forms of Christianity I have participated in for much of my life have always focused on escaping materiality. The religious eye is often inclined toward the heavens, rather than the Earth. But lately I have been dreaming that I am continually falling to the ground. At first I was worried—it felt troubling and I wasn’t sure what, if anything, it meant. But I am beginning to see it differently, as an unconscious acknowledgment of shifts I have been making in life.
Many Christians understand faith as a set of beliefs about the world. We are good at reducing things down to religious affirmations. It’s how we think we can determine who is in or out, who is with us, who is part of our tribe. But for me, faith is an expression of a type of life, a material one, an existence focused on this world instead of an otherworld. Christianity is an invitation to fall more deeply into the world, not escape from it. In this sense, every Christian is a fallen angel.