Cab fire brings death for cutie near arcade

Perhaps you remember the mashup phenomenon, like, what, two years ago? Where has that gone? That was pretty fun while it lasted. One of the principles of mashup titling seemed to be the "versus" convention. So ignore the mashed title of the post and see that I really meant to say "Death Cab for Cutie vs. Arcade Fire." Only in this case, it has nothing to do with a mashup and everything to do with classic high school literature comparison and contrast!

The songs in question are Death Cab's "Where Soul Meets Body" and Arcade Fire's "My Body Is a Cage." The latter features a line that my co-workers and I see as an incredibly succinct articulation of a gnostic worldview: "My body is a cage that keep me from dancing with the one I love, but my mind holds the key."

Tears came to my eyes as I was driving through western Kansas last Wednesday, not because of boredom, but because I was listening to "Where Soul Meets Body." It contains the most beautiful articulation in semi-pop music of a Christian worldview of embodiment: "I want to live where soul meets body" followed by a number of lines and ideas about living in a fully embodied way with a view toward the transcendent.

I doubt either artist lives or thinks in a way that fully embodies the worldview that their song articulates. But it's fascinating to see these worldviews expressed in music. I want to clarify that hedonism is a more approximate opposite of gnosticism than the Christian worldview. Hedonism focuses on physical gratification without regard for transcendent reality, while gnosticism works for the perfection of the spiritual through eschewing the physical. Christianity is a balance between the two: A full engagement of the physical world, seeking to bring it into submission to the Creator while longing for the Creator to bring heaven back to Earth where all will dwell in unity once again. But what we have today is the attempt to bring peace and concord to body and soul by fully engaging both. "Where Soul Meets Body" provides a beautiful picture of this idea.

It seems to me that it's pretty easy to get this soul and body thing wrong. Most Christians I've know through my life are more gnostic than anything else. There are a few "pagan" gnostics out there, a whole bunch of "pagan" hedonists, and very few Christian hedonists (unless they're titling a book to sell). It's quite interesting to me that a presumably "pagan" musician would come up with this Christian worldview balanced between gnosticism and hedonism.

Is the desire to live "where soul meets body" a natural enough idea that one could come to it without a strong understanding of the Bible and the Christian worldview? Or was Death Cab merely being poetic? Any other options?