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As I was preparing to come out of retirement to DJ my niece's "Sweet 16", and programming my ipod with a mixture of secular and Christian music that High Skoolers would like (and which wouldn't garner me any dirty looks from the 'rents), I came across this tune from some old buds (yes, before Hollywood found them, the boys from Buffalo had slept on my floor).
The Goo Goo Dolls went from having moderate college airplay to Top 40 kings, all because of this Westerbergian single they had written for the "Wings of Desire" remake "City of Angels". Having only recently become a Christian at the time the movie was released, I chose to pass on seeing the film due to it's rather unbiblical premise of an Angel choosing mortality to eternity (A-humans get both, B-Angels, being outside of time, have already made their eternal choice). The song also troubled me a bit, although at the time I hadn't thought to figure out why, and I was just happy to see a hard working band of nice guys finally make it.
Listening again to the opening line "I'd give up forever to touch you", thoughts of JPII's Theology of the Body and Dawn Eden's Thill of the Chaste sprang to mind. I thought of how too easily we often take off our own wings for some bit of earthly, and very temporary, pleasure. How in wanting, even needing, another person to, as the song says "know who I am" we go for what appears to be the easy intimacy of nakedness, forgetting the shame that will follow.
Because it is a mortal sin, we are in fact "giving up forever", although only the forever of living in God's presence, because we are eternal beings who are at this very moment, and with each action, deciding which direction we go when we give up these bodies. The other thing about this act is that it takes two, which means you are not only throwing away your own "forever", but helping to take away anothers (often the person who you are saying you "love").
True love would never wish to send their beloved to that fiery place, yet sadly that is what we are helping to do, every time we "make love" outside of the sacrament of marriage.
I must admit, the song does kinda rock, and with that same bittersweet tone we too often feel when we choose to stray from the narrow path.
A side note, Johnny also wrote these lyrics for another movie, showing me that he is still a searcher, and someone who I should still have on my prayer list.
"And I found something that was always there,
Sometimes it's got to hurt before you feel,
But now I'm strong and I won't kneel,
Except to thank Who's watching over me"
i
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1 comment:
love your post, d'art. am currently trying to deal with my despair over several close friends who, in their 40s and 50s, are still having sex outside of marriage. i tell them how it's nothing like that in marriage -- let alone that it's a mortal sin -- but they continue to pursue their activities that separate them from the One True Love!
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