Step into any Christian bookstore and you’ll find shelves overflowing with self-help guides promising spiritual happiness and pillows with numbly-affirming messages. Attend a church service, and it might feel more like a rock concert designed to stoke emotions. But in this constant celebration of joy, something vital is missing: the deep spiritual growth that can stem from embracing loneliness and melancholy. The Cure, celebrated since the late ’70s for delving into the depths of human emotion, reminds us that facing our darkest feelings isn’t straying from spiritual growth—it’s essential to it. As prosperity gospel and MAGA-church culture have grown, they’ve pushed aside the genuine, raw experiences of sadness and solitude.
The Biblical Blueprint of Blessed Bereavement
The Bible isn’t just sunshine and rainbows. Many of its most honored figures were deeply familiar with loneliness. Consider Elijah, who faced his deepest despairs alone in a cave, or Jonah, grappling with his failures in the belly of a whale. These stories illustrate that loneliness is not merely a part of the human condition—it is fundamental to spiritual transformation. Reflect on Moses, who spent forty years in the desert shaping a nation from his isolation, or Jesus’ moments of solitude that marked critical points in his ministry. Moreover, the Book of Lamentations offers a raw glimpse into the depths of national and personal sorrow. Similarly, the Psalms contain numerous heartfelt cries, with verses like Psalms 88 and 22 exposing profound feelings of abandonment and despair. These texts, mirroring the emotive tones found in The Cure’s music, validate the spiritual practice of fully expressing all emotions, not just the joyful ones, as pathways to deeper faith.
The Cure’s Emotive Crusade
Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure, has consistently ventured into the darker corners of the human psyche. Their latest single, “Alone,” approaches solitude not as a symptom to be cured but as a state to be deeply explored. Earlier songs like “Pictures of You” and “Disintegration” navigate through loneliness and melancholy, offering a kind of musical catharsis unmatched by other bands. Their music invites us to experience everything intensely, suggesting that true understanding and transcendence emerge from embracing the full spectrum of human emotion.
The Discomfort of Real Christianity
Modern Christianity often positions itself as the solution to all life’s problems: follow Jesus, and you’ll never feel sad again. This approach tends to suppress genuine human emotions and past traumas, making those who struggle with depression or loneliness feel sidelined. The Cure’s frank embrace of life’s complete emotional range offers a vital counter to this spiritual glossing-over.
How do we incorporate this understanding into our spiritual practices? By recognizing that feeling “down” isn’t veering off the path of faith; often, it is the path. Churches could better support practices like contemplative prayer, solitude retreats, or engaging with art and music as forms of meditation and emotional exploration. Engaging with texts like Lamentations and the darker Psalms can be enlightening. These scriptures confront the bleakness of human experience head-on, teaching us that there is spiritual richness in acknowledging and expressing our deepest sorrows. If life includes a spectrum of emotions, shouldn’t faith do the same?
The Authentic Call of the Christian Experience
Maybe we need to be a bit more like The Cure in our spiritual lives, allowing the full range of human emotions to inform and transform us. As The Cure has shown, it’s not just about feeling better; it’s about getting better at feeling. Perhaps, if we allow ourselves to feel more deeply, we’ll understand our faith more deeply too.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In