History as Adversarial Hopefulness

What a singer-songwriter taught me about rejecting cynicism

I go to bed too early these days to watch much late night TV, but I follow Stephen Colbert closely enough to know that his interviews sometimes depart from the usual celebrity promotion shtick. That’s especially true when he talks about death and loss, as he did when Dua Lipa asked the Catholic comedian how his faith inspires his work.¹ The most recent example of that theme featured Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave.

While Cave is making the rounds to promote his new album, Wild God, Colbert started with a 2022 book. Composed of the musician’s conversations with journalist Séan O’Hagan, Faith, Hope, and Carnage covers everything from art and addiction to the person of Jesus. Perhaps most important of all, the deaths of two of his sons,² which made Cave into what The Christian Century called a “missionary of grief who teaches us much about the endurance of hope and love in the face of death and despair.”

About 12 minutes into their conversation, Colbert asked Cave what he had learned from his grief. “It is the devastation,” he mused, “that turns us from being a half-formed person into a fully formed or fully realized human being.”

At Colbert’s prompting, the singer ended up reading a letter that he’d written at his remarkable blog, The Red Hand, where he’s been answering listener mail since 2018. Two years ago an Italian fan named Valerio confessed to Cave that he was “feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?” In reply, Cave warned that cynicism, “although it asks nothing of us… is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.”

He then went on to make a case for hopefulness. It stuck with me not because I’ve had to wrestle with losses as intense and personal as what Cave has endured, but because Cave’s observations made me think about my relationship to the past as a Christian scholar who frequently finds himself studying and teaching the most devastating tragedies in history, including two world wars and the Holocaust.