Finding the Sacred in the Secular

“I don’t wanna know... who I am without you.” I’m not sure who the singer of the folk group Bear’s Den was thinking of when he wrote this lyric. Perhaps he was thinking of a dog or an old friend, but I suspect it was a lover, a person who burrowed their way into his heart and opened him up to a greater reality of who he was made to be.
 
I know this almost intuitively. When all of the instrumentation drops out at the end of the chorus and only a single banjo strum punctuates this harmonized expression, my heart is left completely torn open alongside his. What I experience is not quite a pain, but rather an ache of recognition, that ache of knowing my heart has been spoken for.
 
In an address given at the intermission of a Bach concert, Josef Pieper speaks of a “stark nakedness” of the soul that music brings about. Merely reading the lyrics doesn’t quite do it for me, but hearing it sung softly and urgently in harmony over the backdrop of a reverberating echo outlines and exposes an aspect of my heart that no linguistic trappings can articulate.
 
This Bear’s Den song is not particularly light or happy. It expresses fear and pain in the quest for love. Its title, “Agape,” is a reference to the Greek word for a love of total self-gift. It’s the same word Jesus uses when he first asks Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” Perhaps it is mere romantic silliness to read the love of God into a secular song, but the theme of “Agape” is dangerously close to sacred. In the middle of the Bible there is a collection of love songs called the Song of Songs in which the entire mystical union of God and the church is expressed, so why would we think God is above revealing himself in our hearts through love songs?
 
In his song “Stupid Deep,” Jon Bellion sings, “What if who I hoped to be was always me/And the love I fought to feel was always free/What if all the things I’ve done/Were just attempts at earning love/’Cause the hole inside my heart is stupid deep…” This is one of my favorite “secular but sacred” songs. I know that the tug of conviction I feel in my heart is not the result of modern music trickery, but the expression of yearning that mine and every single human heart has for the infinite love we were made for. It is the love that I fight to earn through other people’s approval, only to find it as an entirely free gift in the Eucharist every day. It is the same love that explains who I am, why I’m here, and where I am going: towards the fulfillment of every single one of these love songs, towards that unwritten final chorus where I finally become one with the Father’s love. Lord, I don’t want to know who I am without you!

Mr. Gilmore is a College IV seminarian for the Archdiocese of Washington.