CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Mumford and Sons’ new single Malibu is unquestionably about an encounter with God
Many of Mumford and Sons’ lyrics have spiritual themes. The band’s song-writer Marcus Mumford was a preacher’s kid, and has always asked probing questions about Christianity and religious culture.
But he tells us he has never doubted the existence of God, and has said ‘I really love Jesus. I always have and I always will.’
But there’s a new sense of arrival in ‘Malibu’, a single from the band’s new album ‘Rushmere’ released on March 28. To my mind, the single is unquestionably about an encounter with God, and we presume Mumford is singing of his own experience.
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He refers to his doubt and weakness, the knowledge that ‘I would never make it on my own.’ He discovers someone who will lead him, waiting patiently for him when he lags behind. He senses that the spirit rising within him once more moves also in the one who leads.
‘I don’t know how it took so long to shed this skin,’ he muses. He has been transformed - it’s as if the false self which he thought defined him has been sloughed off, and he has stepped into a new way of being. He lives now ‘beneath the shadow of your wings’ (a beautiful biblical picture) where he knows he will find peace.
All this - the hungering for God, the seeking, the following, the transformation, the peace - will be recognised by all Christians.
Someone told me last week about a friend who had been considering the Christian faith, ‘trying to work it out themselves.’ But ‘working it out’ is only a fraction of the story.
Graham Tomlin, author of a new biography of the brilliant 17th century mathematician and scientist Blaise Pascal describes Pascal’s inability to work God out purely intellectually.
It seems, Tomlin writes, as if ‘the God who is the author of order refuses to be the conclusion of a logical argument but stands waiting to be found by those open to the life-transforming and all-consuming encounter that Pascal experienced.’
Wrote Pascal at the height of this experience on November 23, 1654: ‘Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace, God of Jesus Christ.’ This was not the God of ‘philosophers and scholars’ but the wild, living God of the Bible. These are the words of someone who knows they stand beneath the shadow of God’s wings.
For Pascal, and no doubt for Mumford as for all of us, such profound experience is intermittent. We still struggle at times, beset by questions and doubt. But we hold on to faith, to what we saw so clearly, believing that the One who leads is with us, and will not forsake us, sensing at last the Spirit moving in us once more, hearing above us the rustle of beloved wings.
