GLOBAL PRAYER NETWORK: Tantalizing clues to David Bowie’s faith in God

Rabu, 20 Januari 2016

Tantalizing clues to David Bowie’s faith in God

By Mark Ellis and Michael Ashcraft, Special to ASSIST News Service

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS - January 20, 2016) -- In the months before he succumbed to cancer, David Bowie, the moré-smashing hedonist who resonated with a generation of young people, reconsidered the God he flouted most of his life as a rocker iconoclast.

As his life ebbed away quietly in the grips of end-stage liver cancer, there were signs the 69-year-old titan of rock and rebellion found peace with the Creator.

“He reassessed everything when he was terminally ill a year ago,” a family friend told the Sun UK. “He concluded there was something greater than all of us, and that may be some version of what others might call God. This was probably quite comforting. He certainly wasn’t scared of death.”

While he mostly abused drugs and lived like a libertine, Bowie searched through Buddhism, Satanism and Nietzsche’s existential philosophy for the balm to the raging angst in his soul. At one point he quipped that he had even tried to make a religion out of pottery and finally settled on singing as his faith of choice.

Still the London-born glam rock pioneer was searching. In an interview in 2003, he recognized he could never utterly reject faith. “I’m not quite an atheist,” he said. “I’m almost an atheist. (But) all the clichés are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God.”

Bowie’s final music video based on his song, “Lazarus,” portrays him bandaged in a hospital bed while the opening line sings hauntingly: “Look up here, I’m in Heaven.” The track was on his last album, “Blackstar,” a hodgepodge of mysticism and the occult, released three days before his death.

His 1976 track “Station to Station” was about the cross of Christ, Bowie said. “The ‘Station to Station’ track is very much concerned with the Stations of the Cross,” Bowie told Q magazine. “I’ve never read a review that really sussed it.”

Photo captions: 1) David Bowie. 2) Mark Ellis.

About the writers: Mark Ellis is senior correspondent for the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net), and also founder of www.GodReports.com, a website that shares stories, testimonies and videos from the church around the world. He is also co-host for "Windows on the World" with Ans founder, Dan Wooding, on the Holy Spirit Broadcasting Network (http://hsbn.tv). Michael Ashcraft is a teacher at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica, California.