I wrote this short “think piece” just before heading out the door on a trip to our old stomping grounds in South Florida.

The timing is a coincidence, with zero connections to some follow-up reflections on my recent post — “New York Times offers flashback to sacraments offered by the priest of the Parrotheads” — about some religion “ghosts” linked to coverage of the late singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett.

I had no idea that there would be some Catholic-press coverage pointing to some faith-centered threads in his music. Hold that thought. Here is a small chunk of my GetReligion post noting the Big Idea in the Times story:

The basic idea is that the singer-songwriter was a kind of guru-priest who was looking at the humdrum lives being lived by millions of Americans. He saw this and, looking out from the center microphone on stage during his never-ending tours, he had compassion on them.

After all, he had seen this relationship before. When fans sang along in the crowd, it created, as noted in the Times feature, a “unified hum, reminding Mr. Buffett of the recitation of prayers in church during his altar boy days.”

Was there more to the theological content of Buffett’s lyrics than that? The Catholic News Agency offered a feature with the headline, “Jimmy Buffett: more Catholic than you think?”

While admitting that there was little overt Catholic content in the singer’s public life and remarks, this new piece dug back to earlier interpretive work by Stephen M. Metzger, writing for the Church Life Journal at Notre Dame University.

“[I]t is clear that Catholicism left an indelible mark on his imagination,” wrote Stephen M. Metzger, a scriptor (cataloguer of Latin manuscripts) and graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. … Buffett attended St. Ignatius Catholic School and went on to graduate from McGill-Toolen Catholic High School, which remains the most prominent Catholic high school in Mobile, Alabama. 

Metzger said evidence of Buffett’s Catholic upbringing shone through in his work, even if his songs weren’t explicitly Catholic. His easygoing, escapist songs display “an instinctual dissatisfaction with the demands of modern work and a desire to get away, to escape and have a good time, to have fun.”

OK, hang on. This is the deep part:

“Buffett[‘s] at times subtle and at times overt criticism of the modern obsession with work and the demands of the capitalist economy betrays a formation in Catholic teaching, especially in the Church’s social thought. In Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII argues for the fair and humane treatment of workers, emphasizing that time should be allotted to them in order to fulfill their religious devotions and obligations. After all, there is more to life than money and profit. It is clear that in a deep way Buffett internalized this outlook, which found expression in his celebration of the leisurely island and beach lifestyle,” Metzger opined.

“Of the many challenges facing the Church today, perhaps one of the most important is whether her educational institutions and her parishes can still form young people in such a way that they will retain a fundamentally Catholic outlook on life, even when living at their most prodigal.”

More? Try to imagine Buffett as a Jesuit:

Metzger noted that in Buffett’s 1983 song “We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About,” Buffett reveals that “I was supposed to have been a Jesuit priest or a Naval Academy grad.” 

“Like most Catholic boys, especially in the middle of the 20th century, Buffett would have been introduced in a serious way to the priesthood as an altar boy, and this experience plays an important role in a few of his songs,” he continued, mentioning a song that includes the line “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

“There must have been a strong Catholic culture in place, if his parents thought that a religious vocation was of equal value and prestige to attending one of the country’s elite military colleges,” Metzger opined. 

There are more articles of this kind out there in niche media (surf this Google file to see what I mean).

However, toward the end of the week I bumped into some interesting musings by journalist and canon lawyer J.D. Flynn at The Pillar — in a news wrap-up email that started with St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta and ended with, well, a lost shaker of salt.

Here’s the Big Idea: It’s amazing how many lives — people famous or unknown — include some themes that are connected to the issues discussed, for centuries, in ancient forms of religious faith. Flynn starts with a wink about this reality:

There’s a thing that most Catholic media outlets do that drives me crazy, and it’s this: When a celebrity dies, or is in the news for any reason you’ll start to see stories pop up making tangential connections between that person and the Catholic faith. 

The person needn’t identify as a Catholic, or practice the faith, or even have spent much time around Catholics to get the Catholic celebrity treatment — you’ll see articles like:

“That one time Doja Cat stood next to a priest in an elevator”

or:

“Five surprising Catholic themes in Bollywood rom-coms!” 

Those kinds of articles make me laugh. And you know, I get it. They’re designed to capture readers who are searching for a trending topic, and give them something Catholic to read — plus the ad revenue that comes with the click. 

Often, these articles are a “bit of a stretch,” something like, “When Patrick Mahomes went to a Catholic wedding — and what he probably learned!”

But the more Flynn thought about Buffett, the more he found it logical to connect a few Catholic dots.

So read this carefully:

Jimmy Buffett understood that we’re made for something more. He understood a human longing for, well, eternal beatitude. He wouldn’t have put it that way — though “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude” comes kind of close.

But Buffett spun a world for his listeners — this idyllic place called Margaritaville, populated by pirates and surfer chicks and a kind of epicurean or Elysian happiness. He wasn’t selling the beatific vision, don’t get me wrong. But Buffett understood that everyone is looking for some transcendence. He understood that there is something punitive about eating bread “by the sweat of the brow,” as the Lord put it in Genesis 3.

Of course, we know that work can be redeemed in the Incarnation, and sanctified, that we can share in God’s creative work through God’s redemptive work on the Cross.

But there is something Edenic about the myth of Margaritaville. It represents a place of prelapsarian bliss — and in that sense, it points us past consuming and gloomy materialism.    

The piece isn’t very long, obviously. But read it and think about it.

I don’t think that this one is “a stretch.”