A Vocal Vocation

All the profiles of Sinéad O’Connor after her death drew attention to a song I thought among the least interesting in her output: ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ is a basically schmaltzy piece of work lent dignity and emotion by the power and passion she puts into it, though it made sense to hang her off it for a general public most likely to have known her through her biggest hit, rather than the eerie gothic of ‘Jackie’ or the operatics of ‘Troy’ – for instance.

It was good to read and hear proper acknowledgement of O’Connor’s religion – for this most religious of performers – including from Christian commentators. This is someone who claimed her contract made with the Holy Spirit before she began performing was far more important than any agreed with a record company. In fact that reviewer of O’Connor’s memoir from 2021, Jessica Mesman, I see, makes the good point that religious is a much better word for the singer than spiritual. Religion, the word, relates to a Latin root meaning ‘to bind’, and O’Connor’s pursuit of faith resulted in her exactly binding herself to religious tradition, to successive religious traditions, with a passion that’s a long, long way from the self-centred and dilletante sampling we too often associate with the idea of spirituality. She gave herself to them, even when it invited ridicule. Fundamentally, she wasn’t looking for something that made her feel better, that ‘worked for her’, something experiential that put her at the centre: she was following where (she felt) the Spirit led her, seeking to make sense out of what had happened to her, Ireland, and the world. She admitted she was crazy, but beneath the craziness was a basic unity of purpose that held together a woman who could come on stage as a Christian priest – properly if irregularly ordained – and then a few years later as a Muslim in a hijab. None of it was done for effect. Well, it was: but the effect was not focused on herself, but on the eternal.

Prophets are uncomfortable presences, and O’Connor, like the even less amenable Diamanda Galás, was definitely that, proclaiming to the Church its own corruption and falsehood. The Church will always be corrupt and false, and in a week when the Bishop of Newcastle decides to refuse Lord Sentamu Permission To Officiate on the grounds of his response to being criticised in a safeguarding report, you needn’t think the Church of England differs that much from the Church of Rome.

Of course, she was wrong about the Church, though right enough about the caricature of itself which it so regularly holds up for the admiration of human beings. The Church, it seems to me, exists only to do two things, to state definitely and dauntlessly the reality and nature of God and what he has done, and to demonstrate that we don’t live the spiritual life alone, even when we are alone; that we need one another. That’s why you can’t be ordained without a Christian community to be ordained into, to live out that vocation with: vocation isn’t a solitary matter, and I don’t think O’Connor ever really considered the possibility of taking assemblies in an infant school or talking to old ladies about their hip operations over tea after Bishop Michael Brown laid hands on her. But the Church itself forgets that, and assumes a role God never envisaged for it.

Part of me looks at O’Connor’s religious life and wonders what might have happened if she had found it possible to stay concertedly in one Christian tradition. My instinct is to see people fixed: say the Office and go to Mass, I’d have said, settle and listen and you'll find some healing. But perhaps prophets have to stay broken and difficult to remain true to their calling; perhaps God might sometimes want a priest to turn into a Muslim. The Church can’t dare to say so much, but it ought dare to think it.