When the news broke last week that the singer Bonnie Tyler had died, I put on the song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in her memory. But my connection to the 1983 hit song isn’t entirely nostalgic or positive. There were many years of my life—basically all of my 20s—when I couldn’t listen to it at all.

I know that there are a lot of Catholics, both practicing and former, from Northwestern Pennsylvania who have a similar relationship with the song. For many of us, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” wasn’t the soundtrack to an emotional relationship or painful breakup, but to a formative, spiritual and in some cases traumatic part of our young adult experience. 

In my junior year of high school, I joined a Catholic youth group called Heart and Soul, named after Acts 4:32 (“The entire community of believers was united in heart and soul”), that traveled around the Diocese of Erie putting on retreats for kids in middle and high school. We gave personal witness talks about the role of faith in our own lives, sang praise and worship songs, led icebreakers and performed some silly skits. But the retreats always culminated in a dramatic skit called “Turn Around,” soundtracked by Bonnie Tyler’s song.

I had heard about the skit before I saw it or agreed to be in it; some of my friends from the all-girls high school had seen it at a retreat and been incredibly moved by it. One tried to explain why the skit was so emotionally powerful, but it wasn’t really the sort of thing you could hear about; you needed to experience it for yourself. Nevertheless, here is a breakdown of how it worked, as best I can recall after 25 years (which, since I performed the skit every other week for months on end, is actually pretty clearly).

Biblical drama

Our version of the skit featured three principal characters—a teen girl, Jesus and Satan—and another seven or eight people wearing signs with various sins written on them. The skit opens with the girl and Jesus walking out companionably in silence and passing the “sins,” who are all dressed in black and standing in a row. The girl and Jesus don’t pay any attention to them—but as the opening chords of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” kick in, Satan comes onto the stage (I always played Satan). 

Satan slides between Jesus and the girl and leads her over to the first “sin”: alcohol. At first she politely declines and goes back to Jesus, but then she sees Satan and alcohol having fun together; the next thing she knows, she’s embracing the actor with the alcohol sign, who takes it off and drapes it around her neck. Jesus comes over and tries to lead her away, but Satan pushes him back and then leads the girl over to the next “sin”: drugs. The same thing happens. Satan then leads her on to lust, sex and abortion. 

Abortion marks something of a turning point in the skit. It takes a while for the protagonist to agree to embrace abortion, and, if timed correctly, the music transitions to a momentary crescendo right as she finally does so; she then spends a long time just staring down at the sign, overwrought, during a lyric-free musical interlude. Jesus comes to comfort her but she ignores him, and then Satan throws him off stage. Satan then leads her rapidly to the next “sin,” depression, and then despair; he then tries to pull her along to suicide, the last “sin.” She is being mindlessly swept along at this point. But before she can embrace suicide, Jesus returns and steps between them. The girl wakes up just enough to stop herself. 

At this point, Satan grabs Jesus, pulls him to the center of the stage and “crucifies” him (by spreading his hands out and slapping them, sharply, like he is nailing him to the cross). Satan then turns back to the girl, but she has already moved away from suicide and is coming to Jesus. She kneels down in front of Jesus and breaks down, crying. After a moment, Jesus comes down off the cross, takes all of the sin signs off of the girl’s neck, puts them on himself and embraces her. Then he removes the signs and tears them in half. At this point, the back curtain parts to reveal a large crucifix, and everyone involved in the skit (except Satan) kneels in front of it, and the adult in charge invites everyone to receive the sacrament of Confession. 

Inevitably, almost everyone in the room would line up to go. 

Brought to tears

What can read as somewhat predictable and cheesy on the page is transformed in the skit by the music. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (the extended version, just over seven minutes long) feels like it was written specifically for “Turn Around.” The pace of the music and the lyrics themselves seem to fit perfectly. When Tyler would sing, “Every now and then I fall apart” over and over, people would always start to cry. 

When we put on these retreats, we judged their effectiveness by how many people broke down in tears during or after the performance. So much about that time and those experiences was tied to heightened emotionalism. It was faith as intense, passionate, personal experience. The reason that “Turn Around” led into the sacrament of Confession was because the idea behind performing it was to make the audience feel broken, so that they would recognize their own sinfulness and their need for Christ’s intervention and redemptive love. In Heart and Soul, there was a lot of talk about dying to self. 

None of this is bad, really. Getting high schoolers to think about their faith life is good, and truly engaging teenagers often means appealing to their emotions. But it is also true that “Turn Around,” like so much of high school youth ministry—at least in the late 90s—was intensely focused on purity culture, with an emphasis on sinfulness rather than grace and on the dangers of sexuality rather than the positive aspects of it. The world was an adversary to be overcome; the body a temptation to be resisted. 

Perhaps the kids who broke down and went to Confession at those retreats really were repenting of some of the dangerous choices they had been making in their lives. But surely many people just felt wracked by guilt over normal (and perhaps not all that harmful) teenage activities, and so were ultimately pushed more toward the “sins” of depression and despair. (The whole idea of depicting “depression” as a sin is a problem in its own right.) I don’t know how many teens actually felt the loving embrace of Christ that it was all supposed to point toward. 

Formative experiences

For myself, that semester of high school marked the time when I most intensely lived out my Catholicism. I prayed more during those months and spent more time actively talking about my faith than at any other point in my life. I really did experience what it felt like to try to live like my faith was the most important thing in the world, and as a result, I did feel connected to the movement of the Holy Spirit in myself and the people around me. I don’t regret participating in Heart and Soul, since the intensity of that experience helped lay the foundations for the deeper, richer, more intellectually mature faith life that I developed in college.

But I also know a number of the people who performed alongside me during those days do have regrets. There were aspects of that time that were very performative, and on some level emotionally manipulative. Once the intense emotional highs waned, some found that their faith dwindled along with it; others came to resent the emphasis on purity and gender roles. It was a lot of 1 Timothy 4:12 (“Let no one have contempt for your youth, but set an example for those who believe, in speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity.”) and 5:22 (“Do not lay hands too readily on anyone, and do not share in another’s sins. Keep yourself pure.”) and no Matthew 25. Many of us came to recognize that there wasn’t really much discussion about what we should be doing—the active ways to care for the vulnerable and love our neighbor, for example—but rather just what we had done wrong. 

So I still can’t listen to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” without it bringing up all of this baggage. To be clear, I no longer always picture the skit when I hear it. I no longer put myself in the place of the devil, trying to lead that poor girl towards suicide. But I still can’t hear it as just a simple song. Some formative experiences are too deep. 

Michael O’Connell is a writer, editor and teacher who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. He is the author of Startling Figures: Encounters With American Catholic Fiction, editor of Conversations With George Saunders and co-editor of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies.