Keith Flint, Or: Count Your Blessings

Did you know who Keith Flint was? Neither did I.

Keith Flint , of a band called Prodigy, was one of the most famous rave “singers” in existence. I am not talking a niche product, either. 30 millions albums sold and every single album released very high in the UK charts.

Looking at older photos, a rather satanical type. However, they say he had changed. No drugs, no booze, a quiet existence in the country. Time to enjoy the prosperity and, perhaps, evolve as a human being.

Keith Flint committed suicide during the weekend. He wasn’t 50.

I do not know the details. I also do not know whether the drugs had gone for good. But as I read the news, which is rather prominent today, my first thought was this: a life without God is meaningless and empty.

We long for God. Everyone of us, though many are not consciously aware of it. Nothing else will give real peace and lasting happiness even in this life, much less in the next. Without God, everything is ultimately empty. Become a world famous “musician”, and you will have to take refuge in drugs. Sleep with an army of groupies, and all that will remain in the end is a deep spleen. Try, perhaps, to recover the “meaning of life” retiring in the countryside and cleaning up your act, and again the absurdity and uselessness of it all will assault you again and again. When you get all that the world has to offer (fame, admiration, luxury, women) but you don’t have God, you really have nothing.

And in fact, absolutely everything in the life of an atheist must reek of the same absurdity that has, very likely, crushed Mr Flint. If an atheist stops and reflects, he must recognise that nothing, in his life, has any value or meaning. Even the love for children and wife is, if there is no God, ultimately only a trick of a ruthless DNA – a DNA which does not care a straw for our ultimate destiny – to force us to do the only thing that matters: perpetuate itself; and the feelings of lurv are just the way he must admit he has been tricked.

I don’t know what was going on in the head of this world famous – if totally unknown to me – performer. But I will bet my pint on this: the emptiness of a life without God; an emptiness in which Satan could, probably without too much difficulty, introduce himself.

Spare me, please, all the rubbish about “perhaps he had a rare blood condition which, linked to some strange pollen in the air, triggered his desperate gesture”. If you believe that stuff, you are reading the wrong blog. Insane or culpable, has the Church always thought, and taught. Mr Flint is no exception.

Say your prayer for him, too. And thank God for the immense, unmerited, glorious gift of faith; a gift that makes you better off than the famous pop star with all his success, his money, and his groupies.

We who live in faith can barely conceive, I think, the immense void in the heart of the atheist, at least of the one who manages to stop and reflect about the meaning of things. Until events like this one reminds us of how blessed we are.

In your charity, pray for the poor wretch.

And count your blessings.

M