© 1994 Third Way
My songwriting is an attempt to take what I've experienced and what I think is true and distill it into something that is entertaining, then throw it out to people and say, "Maybe you can use this, too." In some ways it makes me a focal point for like-minded people - people who are trying to put their faith in to practice in the same way I've tried to. They hear the stuff in the songs and all of a sudden there's a kind of community.
To me, politics is an external expression of something that people carry round in their hearts. The songs I wrote in the Eighties touched on issues because they had touched me personally, not because I had an axe to grind or an ideology. The songs in support of the aspirations of the Nicaraguan people, for example, were written because I was there and the situation touched me emotionally in a very personal way. There's no great difference between the mechanics for songs like that and for love songs.
When I first came back from Central America, the media attention was quite intense. All of a sudden I was some sort of authority, because I was somebody outside the system who had stood up and said they had been there and seen what was going on. One acquaintance of mine was in favour of the dictator of Guatemala, who professed to be a born-again Christian and would deliver sermons on Sunday mornings exhorting the youth of the nation to behave themselves, practise chastity and what not. In the meantime, his troops were out in the bush slaughtering and torturing people by the thousands and doing unbelievable things. I had met several thousand of the victims of those things and knew damn well they were going on.
But my acquaintance believed the hype that this was a good man supported by Christian groups. I explained what the guy was really doing, and the best he could come up with was: "Well, we have to stop Communism." Where is Christ in that? What a pathetic little god those people believe in that think he needs to be protected like that.
I started losing some of my hardcore fundamentalist fans around the Humans album, which had a couple of cuss-words on it. I got some angry and disappointed letters asking, 'How can a Christian say that?' I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. There's no response to that.
My faith has undergone drastic transformations and reformations. I was brought up as an agnostic, even though we were surrounded by the symbolism, and when I first became a Christian in the Seventies I didn't really know what it was I'd adopted. I've always been aware of the spiritual side to life, and that awareness has sometimes been very tangible and vivid. But it's one thing to have this direct experience of contact with something that appears to be central to existence, but then there's all the uniforms people wear and the customs they adopt. For me, part of the journey has been deciding where I fit in. In the end, I've decided that I don't fit in at all. The proper place for me is outside all the groups.
I still think of myself as a Christian. The only definition of a Christian - I got this from C.S. Lewis - is somebody who accepts the reality of Christ. What is that reality? Well, there we get into fights, don't we? I know my own experience tells me there is somebody - and it's not a thing - at the centre of Christianity. I assume it to be Christ, and assume that's my point of contact with God, whom none of us have a very good definition for. I like to talk about Love rather than God. What we think of as love is his expression of involvement in the universe, and that is the glue that holds everything together, from the subatomic particles up. It is also the hand that breaks us apart, but that has to do with our failure to relate to it properly.
Doubts caused by the behaviour of the church can only be answered by personal experience. Sometimes it takes an effort to remember the experiences you've had and how vivid they were. A lot of shit gets in the way. It's bad enough to have the church pushing you this way and that, but you've also got the rest of society telling you your faith is the result of your own disordered brain.
My spiritual influences include Lewis, Charles Williams, Thomas Merton, the wife I had for a while. You listen to somebody you have that kind of relationship with, and when they tell you the Bible isn't just a chronicle of horrors, that it has some things of value in it, you go, "Oh, maybe that's true." When I read it I'm reading something that isn't what I'm hearing from most of the people who are spouting quotes from it.
But I've been influenced as much by Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as by any Christian writers. The things I've always related to about other people's spiritual experience is the mystical side, because they're talking about that direct contact.