Spirit
Jewel, Atlantic, 1998
Review by Paul Mitchell
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 62
Spring/Summer 1998/1999

THANK GOODNESS JEWEL HAS released a new album. Now I remember what she looks and sounds like I can stop confusing her with her older doppelganger. You know, the one who sings the tackily timed classic hits on Ally McBeal.

Yes, Jewel is back providing songs that fill the gap for those alternative rockers who need chill-out music with an edge, and those pop freaks who need songs with depth when they get sick of Kylie, Tina, Mariah and co.

Spirit is a more consistent outing than Jewel's debut album, Pieces of You. Where the latter had more obvious blockbuster hits, Spirit has an evenness that its predecessor lacked. Musically, there are no surprises, but artists don't have to reinvent themselves stylistically on every album, do they? Lyrically, there is less mawkishness (though not altogether absent) as Jewel follows her postmodern, hippy muse.

The driving force in Jewel's journey is her desire to create a better world; a sentiment which can't help but gain approval among anyone loosely connected with the concept of spirituality. Whether it be in her poetry (her first volume, A Night Without Armor, collected from her childhood and teen years, has sold more than 500,000 copies) or lyrics, Jewel offers simple, heartfelt homilies to peace, love and spiritual fulfilment.

The content of these homilies can be found, expounded more thoroughly, in numerous holy texts and New Age self-help books. But when they are brought to life by the delicate vulnerability of Jewel's voice, emanating seductively from her sultry blue eyes and tumble of blonde hair, they have popular appeal (to say the least). She is the poster-girl of do-it-yourself spirituality.
Pardon? Do-it-yourself? While a cursory listen to Spirit might make one think Jewel has opened herself to a monotheistic spirituality, I think a careful read of the lyric sheet tells a different story.
Many lyrics offer advice with which many of us would concur. The importance of love is promulgated. The idea that we are God's hands and eyes is put forward, along with the importance of 'faith'. The triumph of spirit over outward appearance is celebrated (easier to celebrate when you look like Jewel) along with the need to put aside materialism in favour of pursuits which build up spirituality.

But in any journey we undertake, we find ourselves at a particular place on the road. It could be suggested that Jewel's journey currently finds her in a place of sweet humanistic pantheism. The clue? This lyric from "Innocence Maintained": "We will all be Christed when we hear ourselves say/we are that to which we pray."

A very concise, poetic way of saying that when we realise we are gods, that we have within us the fullness of higher power, we will be spiritually fulfilled. It's not quite the Christian idea that, though Christ by His Spirit lives mystically within believers, the triune God retains an objective existence. An existence we must worship objectively, not fan to life within us by our own efforts.
There is much to enjoy in the words and music lavished on the world by Jewel Kilcher. She aims to seek out, illuminate and spread the good in life and wishes to erase evil from the world. However, pointing us back to ourselves as the ultimate reference point for spirituality seems to ignore the reality that we are all storehouses for good and evil in different measures. Only an encounter with a good higher than ourselves can begin to flush that evil from us.

But she's a journey woman, right? So long as she keeps journeying toward 'good' then she'll find herself in the company of the source of all good. Yes?

On one level, if any heart is connected truly to the search for all good and righteousness, then Jesus' words, "Seek and you will find", would appear to have deep resonance with that searching heart. On another level the words of C.S. Lewis in the preface to The Great Divorce cannot be ignored: "We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre . . . I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road".

Despite the spiritual path upon which Jewel is treading, the beautiful treasures she is discovering on her journey and her desire to see good illuminate the collective human heart, humanistic pantheism is one of those "other" roads to which Lewis refers. I don't think she, and those who would follow the path she is celebrating, will not find upon it the spiritual succour for which they are thirsting.
But nobody looks to pop stars for spiritual meaning, do they?

Paul Mitchell is Associate Editor of Zadok Perspectives.