This post is part 2 to the part 1 recently posted on Lacuna Coil’s “My Spirit.”

This song is striking in being written from the vantage of the dead person. It is a bold move. In religious traditions, it is rare to take the vantage of the deceased when rendering an account of beyond-death. Lacuna Coil’s “My Spirit” communicates something significant about death: a sense of encompassing indifference, and of a profound relativization of life (“the fate, the hate, it’s all the same”) and of whatever comes next (“the gates of hell are waiting, let them wait a little more”). There is a certain insouciance, the song seems to say, in death.

What I like about this song theologically is its delicately agnostic/majestic and perhaps even mystical refrain, which can create a space for a wonder about the difference between life and death, but does not alight on any single interpretation about what lies beyond death. This is effected through the remarkable phraseology  that both indicates a direction and outlines a suspension: “Where, where I go….” These seem to me to be the key words in this song’s theology of post-death.

The compelling melody of the verse is, in a way, the whole message: “Where, where I go / My spirit is free, I’m coming home”. The home is not specified, neither is the endpoint of this freedom. “Where, where I go…” This event language is barely even that. But it is also a way of saying, as Cristina Scabbia essentially said in her introductory remarks: it is not as if nothing survives. “My spirit” is the incomprehensible language fitting to this experience of post-death.

And then, after these words, the lyrics shift to address those not yet dead, giving the admonition: “Remember me, but let me go.” In other words, do not think that you comprehend what happens next!

“Let me go” means not only “release me,” but surrender what you think “me” means. Dispossess yourself of “me” — into …. “go.”

And then there Scabbia’s beckoning background vocal, “You will become who you are.” Is it a gloss on the post-death testimony? Is it the blessing of (more…)

Tonight in a class I taught at Fordham, a graduate course on “Foundations of Pastoral and Practical Theology,” we discussed theologian Karl Rahner’s proposal, in the 1970s, for a discipline called “practical theology,” that would instantiate the radical new programme for Christian experience announced by the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church (1962-1965).

Rahner argued that theology had to undergo a strong reorientation toward conducting modern persons into their own mystery on their own modern terms. In short, theology “must inquire more precisely where and how modern [persons] can so experience [contingency and transcendence] that [they are] enabled to realize genuinely and confidently the objective nature of its implications.”

One song that makes me think of this is “Territories” by Rush. Here is the song with subtitled lyrics:

I saw Rush — my favorite band, ever, ever, and ever — live on Saturday night at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, along with thousands of other mostly white middle aged “dudes.” “Territories” is about the petty maintenance of boundaries that indicate the fear of loss of power and the

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On Saturday night, I saw the Italian rock band Lacuna Coil perform at the Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City. (Last week they released their new album “Dark Adrenaline,” and were the opening act on the Gigantour, a collection of metal bands headlined by Megadeath.) Do you know what it feels like to be way, way into a band? I am that way with this band. It has to do with their cocktail of rockish bombast, unabashed respect for melodic hooks, and restless and searching spirituality in the back-and-forth between Christina Scabbia’s arena-rock vocal soaring and Andrea Ferro’s spoken word chant-yell, dealing out lyrics about ruptures in relationship, about the taste for something more around the corner, about the “no” to everything small about the present, and occasionally about the grandeur of something calling out from existential rubble. References to saviors, angels, churches, sins, desolations and consolations, and more are distributed liberally throughout their tunes, in an almost baroque display of references from theological tradition admixed with a spirit of introspection. In other words, they are well within the atmosphere of metal, but a strong female lead singer puts them in a somewhat different relationship to the typically male-heavy genre.

Here is their new tune, “Trip the Darkness”:

Making use of her power all along the front of the stage, a dynamism erotic but not cheap, spiritually open but not banal, Scabbia is the difference between Lacuna Coil being just another metal band and something more compelling. And witnessing Scabbia trading grandiose strides, dramatic gestures, and the vocal pouring-out-of-self with Ferro all along the front of the stage on Saturday night, I was not so much taught any particular lesson as I was drawn into an atmosphere of at-stake-ness that I want to inform my everyday life.

In this kind of rock, things matter, which is why I have never been too interested in jokey/ironic rock. Even though

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Over breakfast Tuesday morning, I was reading the newspaper, and alighted on a story about an anti-Borat film by a director from Kazakhstan, who is out to lampoon the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s infamous Borat and restore a sense of honor to many Kazakhs that was taken away by Cohen’s film. Halfway through the story, I was doubled over in laughter. When my wife (who is, by the way, a full participant in a household that finds all sorts of things funny all the time) asked me what was so funny, I could only laugh more.

The reporter, Clifford J. Levy, had interviewed this Kazakh director, Erkin Rakishev, about his forthcoming film, “My Brother, Borat.” I will leave the complete details to your reading. But in the course of interviewing Rakishev, Levy writes that “It was evident that he was pleased with the script — so much so that while recounting various scenes, he burst into teary-eyed laughter and the interview had to be halted temporarily.”

Between Levy’s very decision to report this, his deadpan tone, and the conjuring of a scene in which someone’s own delight in their work makes them laugh so hard that they cry, I myself could not stop laughing. And so I repeated those lines, oh, four or five times to my family. In vain!

This episode got me thinking about Rahner’s theology.

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Over at the America magazine blog, I’ve just posted a revised version of my post below on “Madonna of the Bikers,” and have included a short story about the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner involving a motorcycle. Make that two.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States