A New Song: I Will Follow You Into The Dark

As my friends could tell you, I'm always seeking theological overtones in songs, films, breakfast foods, whatever--but the religious and spiritual aspects of music have a special hold on my imagination. "A New Song" will be a sometime feature where I unpack the theology in a song I can't stop humming.

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me "Son,
Fear is the heart of love"
So I never went back

This verse in what's otherwise a beautifully eerie love song ("I Will Follow You Into The Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie; lyrics; hear or (gasp!) download it here) always bothers me. Why the driveby smackdown on religion? Given the major changes in religious life post-Vatican II, how many musicians young enough to be making cool music are old enough to have had dealings with black-habited nuns? And whence this weird theology that the singer rejects? He may want to stand against the notion that "fear is the heart of love," an idea I've never heard from a faithful person, but this song doesn't quite get him there.

The singer offers his lover a promise: companionship until death and beyond.

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the "No"s on their vacancy signs [love that image]
If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks
I will follow you into the dark.

It is beautiful.

We don't know from the song that the singer's lover fears death especially. Maybe it's in the singer's reassurance "It's nothing to cry about," but still, seems to me that it's the singer who broached the topic of his lover's death to begin with.

And there's never mention of any fear, on the part of the lover, of making that journey alone.

So which partner can't bear the thought of separation?

Perhaps for the singer, if not his Sunday school teachers, love is the heart of fear.

In case you're wondering, this has NOTHING to do with his arrest.

I assume the peace movement doesn't like to turn down friends, peaceable folk that they are. So I'll say it for them: Mel Gibson is one friend those against war in Iraq can do without.

Chicago closes its seminary high school. Good.

By educating young men who would later become priests and bishops, law enforcers and political leaders, Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary helped shape a city and a church.

But in the end, the same shrinking enrollment and escalating costs that have plagued other schools in the archdiocese brought down the historic high school seminary.

On Tuesday, the archdiocese announced Quigley would close its doors in June 2007, marking the end of an era and signaling a significant shift in how the American church is drawing young men to the priesthood. [...]

A majority of families chose Quigley for its college preparatory curriculum. Even Cardinal Francis George has pointed out that Quigley has produced more lawyers than priests.

I know what you're thinking. The American church is drawing young men to the priesthood? (Rimshot.) Seriously, I hate to stomp on the ashes of a beloved institution, but this is a wise choice by the Chicago archdiocese. There's something disturbingly arcane about steering boys toward a demanding lifetime vocation at an age where some malls won't let them in alone.

Besides, I've resented Quigley since the time I happened to meet five of its graduates at a church mixer. All of the young men were married or engaged (you guessed it--not priests.) When I wondered aloud about the odds of meeting five seminary graduates who ended up choosing lay life, they corrected me: as it says above, most Quigley students don't end up choosing the priesthood. One of the guys, with creditable diffidence, mentioned that he and his parents made the choice because "it's basically a good deal": any boy with "sincere interest in the priesthood" can get financial help to attend Quigley.

Obviously this begs the question: Sincere interest? THEY'RE LIKE 12. In effect, the Archdiocese of Chicago has been offering a free or discounted Catholic education to any child--oops, male child--who agreed to "consider" the priesthood. So now that it mostly turns out lawyers and aldermen, they're closing the school--the investment no longer bringing desired returns. Despite the emotional cost to some in the community, it's a worthy gesture of respect to the laypeople whose dollars keep the archdiocese working.

A teacher should choose his words more carefully

So you must be aware that many Muslims are angry, and a few have acted out in violence, over what they see as anti-Islam statements by Pope Benedict XVI in a speech he made to a group of academics. (CNN helpfully provides a video they title "Watch other Muslims burn the pope in effigy." Sure to be a YouTube hit.) The Pope has offered an apology and explanation, but the extremely mediagenic controversy continues to simmer. Massive furor over a barely illustrative comment made in an intimate academic setting: Pope Benedict's getting the Larry Summers treatment, a comparison I imagine would bemuse them both.

Zenit has the full text of the Pope's remarks up now, although when I checked this link last night they had redacted the offending quote. I'm glad they finally read the speech and noticed that the Pope praises "the will to be obedient to the truth" as a hallmark of both faith and science.

Quoting the anti-Mohammed statement in the full context the pope gave it would require pasting several paragraphs. He mentions both the author of the book he read it in and the name of the Byzantine emperor who actually said it, and even notes that the story is tangential to his main point. The speech is a subtle and extremely smart analysis of the role Greek culture played and plays in Christianity's relating of faith to reason. The Pope decides that reason is an integral element of Christian faith, not merely an artifact of scholarly Greek culture. The document with the anti-Islam quote also contained an assertion by the Muslim scholar that God is not required to behave rationally by human standards, which the Pope uses as an entry into his meditation.

As the Times story linked above points out, some commentors are blown away that the pope apologized at all, and others think, because his apology only mentioned the "reactions" to his remarks, he hasn't yet gone far enough. Both sides are right. The speed and sincerity of the Pope's response should make Catholics proud. The very fact that he spent time reading the document he quotes, a medieval dialogue between a Christian emperor and a Muslim scholar, shows his willingness to approach other faiths with deep scholarship and respect.

But a wise man like the Pope should have known better than to use such a negative quote, especially since it has so little to do with the message of his speech. He didn't need to associate Islam and jihad in order to tell the story about the emperor and the scholar conversing about reason, although that is a decent concrete example of assuming that God reasons with a human mind. (The Byzantine emperor asks how God can both condemn violence and advocate holy war.) The emperor's quote against Mohammed, the words that have inspired anger and violence, has no purpose whatsoever in the Pope's speech: in fact, he never refers back to the words once he's quoted them.

As he mentions in this speech, Pope Benedict was a longtime teacher. His colleagues who teach American literature probably have a very clear idea of how worthy texts--like medieval dialogues, or Huckleberry Finn--need to be quoted with sensitivity. The Pope should issue a fuller apology for a use of language that was not malicious--I don't think so--but certainly thoughtless. After all, it's his job to promote the truth that the Word has world-altering power.

Pax Christi hires organizers?

Pax Christi USA and the Catholic Alliance for the Common Good are looking for field organizer types to "identify, build, train and resource a network of diocesan leaders who can promote the common good Catholic message within their communities . . ."

 

Hmm. Common good Catholic message. Reading between the lines, does that sound like organizing Catholic voters around social justice issues like poverty and health care?

 

"Field Organizers will be hired to work beginning in July/August and continuing thru mid-November/December. Placements will include Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. "

 

Why yes, it does. What do you think about this? Myself, while I'm beyond all for "promoting the fullness of the Catholic social tradition in the public square," as the Catholic Alliance does, I do get hinky whenever faith is used as a whip to the polls. Absolutely, our country--any country--needs citizens who inform their voting with the full resources of their intellect and ethics. But pollsters and organizers, whether they're working for a living wage or against marriage equality, have a regrettable tendency to (a) oversimplify the religious teachings that touch on their issues and (b) to exaggerate the importance of adherence to those teachings for a person of faith. 

 

I read somewhere that the current Catholic "cult of encyclicals"--the climate that encourages bishops to deny Communion based on a single political issue, among other things--actually originated with politically liberal Catholic intellectuals in the fifties. The bleeding hearts used Catholic social teaching as a weapon against fiscal conservatives, saying that if you weren't in favor of unions, for example, you couldn't possibly be Catholic. Hmm, where have we heard that one recently? Thanks, Catholic fifties intellectuals! You guys rock!

 

Bringing nasty political tactics into religious discourse is always a bad idea, even before it backfires against one's own beliefs and interests. We don't need a backlash to be hurt: we've already hurt ourselves at the moment we try to shame or exclude those who share our faith. God, not humans, gets to choose the members of the Body of Christ.

 

To bring this back to Pax Christi's organizers, I imagine they'll encourage many Catholics to take a closer look at Catholic social teaching, which can only be a good thing. I hope they'll succeed in electing people who will fight in the interests of the American poor. But if they can't do that honorably--without reducing theology to sound bites or moral encouragement to fear--any gains made for the poor will come at a sad cost to Catholic honor.