Once upon a time, clear back in 2007, PBS and Frontline produced a surprisingly sympathetic documentary of the Church entitled The Mormons^[1]Of which I am no longer able to find any clips online that don’t require Adobe Flash, sadly; how quickly we forget that “All things must fail” even in the digital age, featuring a host of talking heads from both within and without the faith. Among the heavy-hitters was famed Jewish-American literary critic Harold Bloom, who late in the documentary intoned the following in his inimitable faux-British cadence^[2]Bloom was born and raised in the Bronx:

“What is the essence of religion? Sigmund Freud said it was the longing for the father. Others have called it the desire for the mother or for transcendence. I fear deeply that all these are idealizations, and I offer the rather melancholy suggestion that they would all vanish from us if we did not know that we must die. Religion rises inevitably from our apprehension of our own death. To give meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of all religion. When death becomes the center of our consciousness, then religion authentically begins. Of all religions that I know, the one that most vehemently and persuasively defies and denies the reality of death is the original Mormonism of the prophet, seer and revelator Joseph Smith.”^[3]Though lest we get too carried away with Bloom’s glowing remarks, remember that in 2011 he also derided Thomas S. Monson as “indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who … Continue reading

Although I have my own issues with Bloom’s unapologetic elitism, euro-centrism, and bizarre insistence that politics has no place in literary analysis,^[4]Hamlet is literally about monarchical succession and Paradise Lost was written in response to the failures of the English Civil War, how can they not be read politically?? this quotation has stuck with me over the years. As we’ve noted before, if religion sometimes feel like the cause of all our anxieties (as often happens on a Sunday morning), it’s important to also remember that religion provides the only consolation for the one thing we will all need consolation for more than anything: the fact that we are all going to die.

We call ourselves the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints not only because we believe the Second Coming of Christ is imminent, but because every day is always the Last Day for somebody. It is this acute awareness of our mortality that stirs our religious sentiments–or at least it should be. Religion should not be a mascot, or a tribe, or a lifestyle: it should and must be a form of confronting the Great and Final Fact, of what happens when we reach the end of life.

Such is the theme of the two songs under consideration today. First up is New Order’s 1981 debut single “Ceremony.”

At this point, the backstory for “Ceremony” is almost more affecting than the song itself. The track was one of the last written and recorded by Joy Division, the seminal post-punk band that abruptly ended in 1981 when frontman Ian Curtis committed suicide at the tender age of 23. The remaining members swiftly regrouped and reinvented themselves as New Order, which went on to become famous for some of the cheesiest^[5]I mean that as a term of endearment, by the way, but I don’t think it’s up for debate that New Order was undeniably cheesy synth-pop hits of the ’80s. But first they had to exorcise the funeral pall of Ian Curtis, which they did by releasing “Ceremony” under their new moniker.

Certainly it is impossible to hear “Ceremony” without Ian Curtis’s untimely death in the background. “This is why events unnerve me,” he opens–a line that perhaps now resonates more than ever in our era of Russian invasions of Ukraine, climate crises, COVID and its variants, and all sorts of other earth-shattering events. Yet note that the singer doesn’t specify whether it be bad events or good events that unnerve him, but just events in general. It is the sheer fact that things just keep happening–plagues, wars, crashes, terrorist attacks, coups, car accidents, plane crashes, yet also marriages, births, graduations, elections, movements, just events in general–that are a near-constant reminder that nothing ever stays the same, that all things must change, that all things must pass.

Even happy events are incessant reminders of our own impending mortality. This hyper-awareness of our mortality is what fueled the anxious guitar-riffs, unsettled bass-runs, and nervous drum-lines of Joy Division, but it was also what exasperated Ian Curtis’s clinical depression, until he apparently decided to beat death to the punch.

Indeed, the lyrics themselves appear to be moving Curtis towards some sort of ultimate self-destructive act: “All she asks is the strength to hold me,” “I’ll break them down, no mercy shown,” “Too frail to wake this time,” “Heaven knows it’s got to be this time” and so forth. Yet he also ends on a strangely triumphant note, as though he were already looking ahead beyond his own suicide, singing “Picture me and then you start watching/Watching forever/Forever, watching love grow, forever…”

We, too, as Latter-day Saints, are supposed to be looking forward to not only the end of the world but beyond it, as though the end were already accomplished^[6]Jarom 1:11, “persuading them to look forward unto the Messiah, and believe in him to come as though he already was.”. Just as we, too, are supposed to watch love grow forever–or as our own scripture declares, “cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail” (Moroni 7:46).

The fact that this song is even called “Ceremony” in the first place should hold especial interest to us as well, since we are a deeply ceremonial and ritualistic religion as well. Between the white burial shroud lain over our sacramental emblems, the symbolic burial and resurrection of the baptismal rite, and the Temple endowment wherein we dress in the robes we are to be buried in and practice passing through the veil into the next life, our faith is replete with ceremonies that continually confront not only our deaths, but beyond.^[7]Indeed, I sometimes fear that if we partake of the sacrament and visit the Temple, but then just go about the rest of our day as though nothing happened–as is our usual M.O.–then we are … Continue reading New Order may have meant the title “Ceremony” only metaphorically, but they correctly intuited that some sort of ceremony is necessary if we are to move beyond our grief and into the next life.

Of course, Ian Curtis was still a very young man when he forced his encounter with death. The legendary David Bowie, by contrast, was well into old age and a terminal cancer diagnosis when he released “Blackstar” in late-2015.

Bowie had done such an excellent job of keeping his cancer a secret that it genuinely caught the world off guard when he passed away only 2 days after the Blackstar album was released in January of 2016.^[8]I confess I didn’t realize how big of a Bowie fan I was till I heard of his passing–it just bummed me out so much. This, despite the fact that Blackstar is explicitly curated as a funeral: the title is an allusion to an obscure old Elvis Presley^[9]of whom Bowie was a massive fan growing up song about a Cowboy knowing when his time has come; second single “Lazarus” alludes to the Bible’s most famous dead-beggar^[10]Luke 16:19-31, even beating you over the head with the opening line, “Look up here, I’m in heaven;” “Girl Loves Me” asks “where the f*** did Monday go” as he braces for the proverbial end of his week; penultimate track “Dollar Days” expresses regret for “those English evergreens” he knows he may never see again; and album closer “I Can’t Give Everything Away” finds the famously forward-looking Bowie gazing back on his life at last, as the finishing harmonica line recalls 1977’s “New Career In a New Town“–implying that he knows he is about to move on to a new place as well.

And then there’s the title track itself, which from a Latter-day Saint perspective holds the most interest for us. It also opens with a death: “On the day of execution/Only women kneel and smile…” and what I think even the Bowie obsessives have missed so far, is that an executed man mourned only by women, one who is “At the center of it all,” who moreover “trod on sacred ground” and “cried loud into the crowd,” and of a surety knows “How many times does an angel fall”^[11]Luke 18:10 “And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”, can only be a description of Christ.

This reading is not only confirmed by the aforementioned song title “Lazarus,” but during the bridge of “Blackstar” itself when he off-handedly declares “I’m the great I Am.”^[12]Exodus 3:14 It would be easy to just read the line as just a performative bit of rock-god arrogance, from an artist who has tried on so many different identities over the course of his long and storied career that he might as well try on being the Almighty at least once before he kicks it himself–save that, as we have written repeatedly before, this idea that we are not only to return to our Heavenly Father after we die but to actually become like him in a very literal sense, is one of the most radical and unique ideas in Mormonism. In this sense, Bowie’s declaration of “I’m the Great I Am”–even if only facetiously, only in passing–would be entirely consistent for a song anticipating his imminent demise.

And lest anyone accuse me of projecting too much Mormon theology onto the song, I would here remind you that Mick Ronson–Bowie’s guitarist and closest collaborator during his ’70s glam-rock period–was born and raised Mormon himself (Ronson’s 1993 funeral was even held at an LDS chapel in London). It is entirely plausible that Bowie had been exposed to LDS cosmology early in his career.^[13]For that matter, the fact that in the music video, he holds up a book of sacred scripture with a black star on it could just as plausibly read as a type for the Book of Mormon–if for no other … Continue reading

All this of course is pure speculation. But it is still a song with a religious vocabulary that addresses the themes that should be central to every religious sentiment.

On a much more personal note, I will also add that Bowie’s cancer death at age 69 only two days after Blackstar‘s release shook me not only because I was a fan, but because my Mom passed away from cancer at 51 only two days after I got home from my mission. Again, that experience will have to be the subject a future writing project; for now, I will merely observe that when I turned 26 (only 3 years older than Ian Curtis was), I suddenly realized that, at my age, my Mom was already middle-aged herself and didn’t even know it yet. There is always less time than you think; it is always the Last Day for someone. Such was understood by both Ian Curtis and David Bowie in their final recorded songs.

And I guess that’s why both “Ceremony” and “Blackstar” are on my Sunday Morning playlist: because like most of us living through these apocalyptic latter-days, the thought that this will all be over sooner than any of us realize is both my terror and my consolation.