Sinead O'Connor
Repairing God's Broken Windows
Writer: Chris Ahrens | Photography: Greg Waterman
The lobby of Sunset Strip’s Mondrian Hotel is filled with people almost famous or about to become so. I think that guy once delivered a pizza to The Office, and I recognize that woman over there from Oprah’s audience. The desk clerk, the bellmen, the Bluetoothed extension brokering the next big comic genius as if she were that many pounds of pork bellies. Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages are putting on their best somebody else, press photos at the ready, acting hip, which by near definition is mere conformity to what’s left of a once thriving counterculture after being corporatized. All desperately pray for a fraction of their fifteen minutes: Dear whomever, I will serve whatever for however long forever is, in exchange for a callback from American Idol or whatever! Yet most will be back in Omaha before the first frost, where they can peer through the dirty glass of the high school trophy case, recalling how big a fish they were in 1999. So it goes for those burned by the celebrity searchlight.
Many will try to embrace her theology as their own, others will denounce her as a heretic, but all will gain something if they listen very hard. He latest CD, Something Beautiful, self-fulfills. Push record, hope to capture something of the expansive heart and soul and mind behind the voice. For here before me is a singer and more than a singer, a person, a human being, the crown of creation made in the image of the Most High, going by the name Sinead O’Connor, and if you look closely you can see the very spot that was once torn in half, now healed, with a trace of a scar.
Risen Magazine: What sorts of prayers do you pray with your children?
Sinead O’Connor: Uh, well, I don’t pray with my children as such, cuz I’m very conscious of not telling kids how it is. I think they already know. My daughter, she’s eleven now. She said to me one day she wanted me to buy a shed for the garden, she wanted to make a God shed. She said she wants this place where she can … and I think that’s lovely, but if I had been telling her she might not have come up with it.
RM: Are you getting a “God shed”?
SO: When I get a garden (which I don’t have at present) I will be getting a God shed.
RM: If you could only pass one thought to your children, what would it be?
SO: To do their best always to treat people as they would wish to be treated themselves.
RM: How did your childhood influence your music and your faith?
SO: I always knew for sure there was a God. I was born into a very religious [Catholic] country, in fact a theocracy. This had good and bad points. But I was lucky in that I only took on board the good points. When you stepped out of your house in Ireland you were stepping into a church. The whole place was like a church and a large part of people’s lives revolved around Catholicism. My grandmother was very religious, as was my father, but not in a pontificating way, in a gentle, silent way. So they taught me, as did school, that one could have faith in God and believe in angels and believe in prayer. I grew up in a very violent situation also. And I consequently had a very
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