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.