It was roughly 30 years ago that I walked away from writing for The Washington Post. The editors had started rewriting some of my copy to say things I didn’t mean.
One of those instances involved using Easter as a metaphor for a jazz record I was reviewing. I wasn't doing any Holy-Roller preaching, just briefly noted at the end that the themes of resurrection and rebirth on the records bring to mind the Christian story of the resurrection of Jesus. The Post editor took out the religious reference. I put it back in, and on the editor’s day off re-submitted the piece to a different editor. It ran.
I was thinking of this while listening to Something Beautiful, the great new record by Miley Cyrus. As is often the case, it’s full of spiritual longing for love and transcendence. Because most journalists are religiously illiterate, they can’t understand Miley’s theology. That’s why Something Beautiful got a lousy review in Pitchfork.
In his Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict explores “that love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings, [which] was called eros by the ancient Greeks.” The Bible avoids the term eros, meaning erotic love, preferring the terms philia (the love of friendship) and agape, the love of God. Pop music has no problem celebrating eros. When eros is channeled through the longing for God, you get Miley Cyrus songs like “Reborn,” “Pretend You’re God,” and “Give Me Love.”
According to Nietzsche, Christianity poisoned eros, with the church and “all her commandments and prohibitions.” As Pope Benedict explains, the charge against Christianity was that it “turned to bitterness the most precious thing in life.” Doesn’t the church “blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?”
No. The Greeks considered eros to be a form of intoxication, a “divine madness” which “tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness.” Yet Christianity “in no way rejected eros as such; rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it… An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man.”
Eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it’s “to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.” This is the message of Miley Cyrus. And Taylor Swift. And Dua Lipa.
Miley’s Something Beautiful is about what most of our lives are about—an attempt to commingle friendship, erotic love and the love of God. In the album’s best song “Pretend You’re God,” Cyrus craves union with a lover.
Hold me in your arms
Pretend that you're God
Recreate the stars for me, one by one
I'll give you what you want
Pretend that you're God all night long
Like a lot of pop songs, “Pretend You’re God” cites dreams as the source of special divine knowledge. The Bible is also filled with stories about dreams, as when Pilate’s wife dreams of Jesus.
When pop music is great it always manages to surprise and delight. This is why it has always reelected my idea of what heaven must be like. In Credo, his great examination of the Apostle’s Creed, the Swiss Jesuit theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar has this passage describing the dynamic nature of heaven:
“I am the resurrection and the life.” “I’m the way, the truth, and the life.” “He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” Being, being conscious, being a person—as things eternally worth striving for? Yes, assuming that we understand the word “eternal” as “divine,” for in God being a person means surrender, love, and fruitfulness, and only in that way is God eternal life: as something which holds sway eternally in the process of giving of itself and being given to, of making blissful and being made blissful. The pure opposite of the boredom of an exitless being-for-oneself. No, essentially a being-above-and-beyond-oneself, with all the surprises and adventures that such an excursion promises. One need only think away all temporality, which infallibly brings every path to the attainment of some goal, and what then? In eternity, the departure is always “right now”: Right now I generate a God who is my Son, right now I experience the unutterable miracle of originating from the Father and owing myself to him, right now the forces of our love collide and produce—O unhoped for miracle—the common Spirit of love as a third, as fruit and witness and eternal kindler of our love. And because this now is wholly a process, the opposite of a standing still, it is the most exciting thing that there is; just as, on earth, there are stirrings of love even before they pass over into knowledge, habit, and perhaps surfeit. “The resurrection and the life”: just as resurrection implies an enormous reversal, from emptiness to fullness, only once and right now; so, too, does the life everlasting. For anyone who is permitted to step out of his or her own narrow and finalized life, and into this life of God’s, it seems as if vast spaces are opened up before one, taking one’s breath away. Spaces into which one could hurl oneself in uttermost freedom, and these spaces are themselves freedoms that entice our love, accept it, and respond to it.
Or as Miley more simple puts it in the closing number, “Reborn”:
If heaven exists I've been there before
Kill my ego, let's be reborn
If heaven exists I've been there before
Drown me in love, let's be reborn