The song “Ordinary” by Alex Warren begins with a problem. “They say the holy water’s watered down, and this town’s lost its faith,” declares the singer, in a track that spent several weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 until recently. Where is he to find a transcendent experience, then, if not in his faith? He finds it in his wife; their relationship takes “me out/ of the ordinary,” and he declares, “I want you laying me down/ ‘til we’re dead and buried.”
A secular listener might stop their interpretation there: A man replaces his religion with his lover. But in reality, Warren has—albeit imperfectly—tapped into a very rich Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality.
Many believe that we Catholics view sex as something negative, given all the rules we have around it. This misconception is partially due to ignorance, but it’s also somewhat attributable to the way more prudish Christians across denominations speak about sex as though it is something to be ashamed of. But recent popes have affirmed that the official teaching of the Catholic Church does not oblige us to reject erotic pleasure. Bringing our passions in line with God’s plan for family life “does not mean renouncing moments of intense enjoyment, but rather integrating them with other moments of generous commitment, patient hope, inevitable weariness and struggle to achieve an ideal,” wrote Pope Francis in his Amoris Laetitia.
Francis wrote in line with the legacy of Pope St. John Paul II, who throughout his pontificate developed the “Theology of the Body,” a series of addresses that biographer George Weigel called “one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries.” During these talks, which he gave at his regular Wednesday audiences, John Paul explained why Catholics have rules around sex: When we live in accordance with the Church’s teachings—i.e., keep sex within the marital union of one man and one woman open to having children—we tap into the true joy of the plan that God has for human sexuality. “The body … has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it,” John Paul said.
Author and speaker Christopher West puts that thesis in layman’s terms in his Theology of the Body for Beginners (which is where most of the theological references in this piece come from). John Paul’s teaching, West says, asserts that the union of man and woman in marriage is a reflection of the union we are destined to have with God in Heaven. As West puts it, “God wants to marry us.” Thus, the desire for an earthly intimacy in which the partners exchange a “total, faithful, and fruitful” love—to use the words of John Paul that Pope Leo XIV recently echoed—is a sign of the longing for the spiritual intimacy with God we will (hopefully) achieve after death.
It’s this same longing that Warren, who was raised Catholic but now identifies simply as “Christian,” explores in both the lyrics and music video for “Ordinary.” The video begins with the singer waiting for his clothes to finish drying at a laundromat, a mundane activity if there ever was one. He notices a beautiful woman—played by Warren’s real-life wife, Kouvr Annon—folding her clothes. She sees him looking at her before she picks up her laundry basket and walks out, but she “accidentally” drops a sock. Warren’s got an opening, and he doesn’t exactly play it smooth. He goes to pick the sock up and then rushes like a bat out of hell through the doorway to give it to the woman.
He’s being guided by eros, one of the several different types of love in the Greek language. C.S. Lewis famously explored four of them: eros, romantic or passionate love; storge, natural or familial affection; philia, deep friendship; and agape, self-sacrificial love. All four are supposed to be present in marriage, just as they are in God’s love for the human race. That God feels three of them is obvious. He created us, so he has a natural affection for us with storge. The Greek text of the New Testament has Jesus himself use philia to describe God’s love for us. And Jesus’ act of dying on the cross for us is the ultimate expression of agape.
But what about eros? Pope Benedict XVI would say God’s love is indeed erotic—not in the sense that it is literally sexual, but that God pursues us with a passion similar to that with which a lover pursues his beloved. “Eros is part of God’s very Heart: the Almighty awaits the ‘yes’ of his creatures as a young bridegroom that of his bride,” Benedict wrote in his 2007 Lenten message. In this way, God acts similar to Warren’s character in the music video.
Warren has—albeit imperfectly—tapped into a very rich Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality.
Once Warren exits the laundromat, he does not find himself in a parking lot, but a forest. Confused, he looks around for the woman. He sees her, but he is then transported to a beach. He sees her again, but as he tries to get to her he is once again transported away, this time to a desert. All the while, the song plays, with lines that exude religious imagery. “Shatter me with your touch/ O Lord return me to dust,” we hear, in a reference to God’s creation of Adam from the dust of the earth.
Warren also compares the pleasure he feels from being with his wife to being under the influence. He describes the feeling as “higher than ecstasy” and says to his lover that he wants to stay “drunk on your vine.” While the Bible warns against excessive drinking, it also uses new wine as a symbol of God’s love and grace: It’s the “new wine,” for example, that Jesus says cannot go into old wineskins. When the Apostles are emboldened to preach the gospel on Pentecost, some accept it and get baptized, but others reject it and joke, “They have had too much new wine.”
But these lyrics are especially reminiscent of Jesus’ first public miracle. A couple runs out of wine at their wedding, and he turns water into wine. Jesus’ choice to perform the miracle at a marriage was significant for John Paul. “The context of a wedding banquet, chosen by Jesus for his first miracle, refers to the marriage symbolism used frequently in the Old Testament to indicate the Covenant between God and his People … and in the New Testament to signify Christ’s union with the Church,” he said in 1997.
In the video, when Warren finally catches up with the woman, he puts his jacket over her shoulders. He then takes her hands, and—lest the viewer miss the point the artist is trying to make—the two start ascending into what appears to be heaven. As they levitate, the camera features a closeup of the woman’s left hand, showing that she’s wearing a diamond ring. And as this happens, Warren sings, “My world was in black and white until I saw your light/ I thought you had to die to find something so out/ of the ordinary.”
We do have to die to experience the most extraordinary thing—namely, heaven. But John Paul II taught that we can still experience it in some capacity here on earth, especially through marriage. The Theology of the Body offers a beautiful vision of sexuality to a world that is thirsting for both the transcendent and a healthier view of sex. In contrast to the pornographic expectations and casual hookups that have degraded sex for younger generations, it articulates the plan of a loving God who created a profound union that two people can enter through the gift of their own bodies. And given that a song that articulates this profundity is the most listened-to one of the summer, it seems safe to say that people are receptive to it.
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