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Progressive Christian

Made of Love: A Review of Cloud Cult's "Love"

March 19, 2013 by Greg Garrett

Continued from Page 1

There's real wisdom here, some of it from every spiritual tradition:

If you're asking for directions,
don't you moan about the distance.
Must you lose it, lose it all . . . .
To find your appreciation? ("Complicated Creation")

and some of it, perhaps, from Pascal, to whom is attributed the idea of the "God-shaped hole" we all try to fill:

If you keep trying to fill your holes with the next best thing
The next best thing will give you more and more holes. ("1X1X1")

There is real wisdom here, and encouragement aplenty, but this medicine, if medicine it is, comes dipped in honey, all of it delivered in interesting arrangements, a crazy mix of styles ranging from guitar-driven rock to trance to folk. It is no exaggeration to say that I have come to love Cloud Cult's music, love it as I love Death Cab for Cutie, or Arcade Fire, or Mumford and Sons, and for many of the same reasons.

In my thirty-plus years of writing about music, there have been only a handful of times I have felt myself banging up against the limits of language. While I have tried to write about Love and about its effect on a willing listener, I must also fall back on a plea that I have made only a handful of times in my career: Try as I might, I cannot communicate to you how much you need to hear this album.

On the way back from finishing my novel, driving through the trees and valleys of the Texas Hill Country as I listened to the album one last time, I found myself with tears in my eyes.

And clapping.

And singing.

And, I noticed, more than once, that I was performing that action which in my tradition we use when we feel blessed by the very touch of God: crossing myself.

There is also, in my tradition, a strong sense of benediction, the idea that whatever holiness might have happened during our time together, it is secondary to the holiness we are called to participate in outside in the big, hard, beautiful world. I found that benediction in place on Love as well, in the final song, "The Show Starts Now":

They say we're made of chaos
I say we're made of love
That means our show starts now

And so it does.

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About Greg Garrett

Greg Garrett is (according to BBC Radio) one of America's leading voices on religion and culture. He is the author or co-author of over twenty books of fiction, theology, cultural criticism, and spiritual autobiography. His most recent books are The Prodigal, written with the legendary Brennan Manning, Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination, and My Church Is Not Dying: Episcopalians in the 21st Century. A contributor to Patheos since 2010, Greg also writes for the Huffington Post, Salon.com, OnFaith, The Tablet, Reform, and other web and print publications in the US and UK.

Patheos Logo Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

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