The search for meaning

Whether it’s cool or uncool to like Coldplay, it’s hard to deny they are the biggest band in the world. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a fan.

Whether it’s the broken-hearted melodies of songs like Fix You or the joyful anthems of Sky Full of Stars, their music has been an accompaniment to my life for the past two decades.

So on a balmy August evening I made my way with 90,000 other people to Wembley Stadium to see Chris Martin and band on their Music of the Spheres World Tour. It was not only, as The Guardian reviewer put it, ‘one massive euphoric sing along’, but also a breathtaking visual spectacle as 90,000 LED wrist-bands, given to each of the audience on entry, pulsated around the stadium in rhythm to the music, while explosions, fireworks and celestial globes lit up the London night sky.

My wife described it as ‘a religious experience’, which is perhaps not far away from what Coldplay frontman Chris Martin had in mind for their live shows. Having grown up in a Christian family in Devon, he said in an interview: ‘One of the great things about being forced to go to church services is that we’d sing all these big songs. That’s partly why I am obsessed with getting everyone to sing along at our shows. It makes me feel like I’m part of something.’ But what are we being invited to be a part of, other than one of the best live shows in town?

If the 60s and 70s were the decades of the hippie ‘truth quest’, the 80s and 90s the quest for happiness, then the first decades of the 21st century could be typified by the search for meaning. Meaning is the connection between things. When we ask what life means, we are asking: ‘How does my small life on this insignificant planet in a lonely corner of a vast universe, connect with anything bigger, anything significant, anything lasting?’

As Western culture has abandoned its Christian roots, we have lost the vision that our lives are part of a bigger story; the story of cosmic redemption that Christ is bringing to fruition. There has developed an existential vacuum, a meaning deficit, that we have tried to fill with iPhones and Prozac, but to no avail. It is perhaps this search to connect to something bigger as a source of meaning for our lives that leads many young people today to throw themselves into causes such as environmentalism, social justice, or even violent extremism. And maybe this is part of the attraction of Coldplay too.

Coldplay’s latest album and current tour is called Music of the Spheres. The term relates to an idea that originated with the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, in which the movement of the celestial spheres – the sun, moon, stars and visible planets – produce a universal music which can be tuned into by the attentive human soul, thereby bringing harmony to relationships on earth. Chris Martin has described himself as an ‘alltheist’, saying in an interview with The Times, ‘I think God is love. And God is the magic in every molecule, even in people you don’t like.’ Perhaps then, what Coldplay are desiring to capture, and what makes their music so appealing to so many of us, is a quality of transcendence; a music which while not ignorant of the hurt in our lives, can connect us with some bigger meaning that can bring healing, hope, and love. As Martin sings in Higher Power, the anthemic opening song of Music of the Spheres, ‘You’ve got a higher power/ Got me singing every second, dancing every hour/ And you’re really someone I wanna know…/ When for so long I’d been down on my knees/ Then your love song saved me over and over.’ What is interesting about these lyrics, and the same can be said for many of their songs, is the ambivalence as to whether this ‘Higher Power’ is located within us or beyond us. Is the ‘someone I wanna know’ a human lover or the divine Love that created the universe?

It is my observation that the contemporary evangelical church has not been good at pursuing, what author Andrew Fellows called in a recent lecture, an ‘apologetics of meaning’ (https://englishlabri.substack.com/p/a-world-charged-with-the-grandeur). We have been better at deploying an evidentialist apologetics to ‘prove’ Christianity is true in an almost mathematical way. This is not wrong. But what we have neglected is to love this generation by taking seriously their longings for meaning, and then to carefully show how those longings are signposts to the Higher Power who is there, to Jesus Christ. This is what the apostle Paul did when, rather than criticise, he affirmed the Athenians for their religious inclinations, even using the song lyrics of their day as signposts to a truer reality (Acts 17:16-34).

It is what Francis Schaeffer, the founder of the L’Abri communities did, when in the 1960s he encouraged evangelicals to read Jean-Paul Sartre and listen to The Doors. But both the apostle Paul and Dr Schaeffer encouraged us to do more; not just to speak of the meaning, but to live the meaning in front of a watching world. And there is the challenge; if Chris Martin walked into your church, could he sense the meaning?