Where's the Line, Again?

Leonard Cohen's song, Hallelujah, defies a market flooded with thumping bass, orchestra backups, electronic loops, vocal gymnastics, and never-ending trivial variants on "You're great, I love you" lyrics.

Cohen gives us an almost minimalist combination of spare instrumentation, often a single guitar, playing simple broken chords under a solo voice. The bare texture grabs our ear as suddenly and irresistibly as an unexpected scream.

And then, in the silence following the quiet message, we're left to ponder his meaning.

I think the song defines a relationship won and lost. I hear a tale of passion fired and then cooled, told in a metaphor of sex as religious experience.

There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

And here I come at odds with myself. The language is not nearly as explicit as the images it conjures, but in conjuring those images, does the song cross a line between beauty and vulgarity? And maybe even more importantly, does Cohen's juxtaposition of religious and sexual imagery cross a line between sacred and profane? Let me ask the question with a somewhat less fine point.

For a Christ-follower, does this song lie within or without the guidelines in Philippians 4:8 - ...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things?

I confess I don't know. But maybe this is what good (maybe even great) art is about - capturing our attention and then leaving troubling thoughts behind for us to sort out.