I want you to know
Taylor Swift, “mirrorball”
I’m a mirrorball
I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight
I’ll get you out on the floor
Shimmering beautiful
And when I break it’s in a million pieces
In his essay “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis examines the astounding implications of the Christian doctrine of imago Dei, that all women and men on earth bear the image and likeness of God. “It is a serious thing,” Lewis admonishes, “to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”
As the title suggests, Lewis addresses how this inborn weightiness of glory might properly be transmitted among us. He argues that a Christian version of glory represents the most fundamental yearning which might awaken us to all that is heavenly. As Christians, we blush and bristle at such talk, thinking it prideful or blasphemous, but from page one of our bibles it is there in plain if perplexing sight. And the subject at hand requires that we take stock with Lewis of this serious matter of living in a society of potential gods and (especially) goddesses whom we may be strongly tempted to worship.
The subject is Taylor Swift.
On Saturday, June 3, my family and I had the near-miraculous privilege of attending Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour show at Soldier Field on Chicago’s lakeshore. It was unforgettable, as I knew it would be, which is why I allowed our daughter to miss school for the presale and spent countless hours in the intervening months derailing my sensible wife’s efforts to resell our tickets on the frenzied aftermarket. In the lead-up, during the show, and now after it gave me all the thoughts and feels. These are my mirrorball reflections.
We saw Taylor’s second of three Chicago shows. During Friday’s Chicago opener, we were on a boat with friends in Burnham Harbor, the waterway curving around the east boundary of said venue. At 7:45 we were sitting in the stern of their boat listening for the beginning of the show. The crowd was calm but murmuring like the quiet before a storm, then suddenly a roaring eruption! Even now as I type these words I get chills. It was the sound of 50,000 enraptured souls. I turned to my friend and said, “That is essentially worship.” He gave me a quizzical look, and I continued, “I can’t help but think this is an echo of what it will be like when we behold the glory of God.”
As many have noted, we humans are worshiping beings. If scripture is to be believed, our very nature is worshipful. The originating idea of the English word worship is “worth-ship”; the attribution of worth to a person or object. Thus paying top price and making reservations months in advance for an exquisite meal is worship/worth-ship. So too is stopping through the McDonalds drive-through for a cheeseburger and fries. The attribution of worth determines the value paid and, hopefully, the benefit derived.
In the days leading up to the concert, my family frantically assembled our outfits. As the initiated know, the garb itself is meant to be an homage to Taylor—specifically to one era or expression of Ms. Swift. For my part, I Bic-ed my head and painted it silver like a mirrorball (as instructed by my daughters). My two daughters (aged 18 and 15) spent hours piecing together Swift-themed friendship bracelets, which fans—”Swifties”—exchange gleefully at her shows. They each walked in with thirty-plus bracelets spanning their arms. This was actually a modest number. I won’t even try to describe the hair and makeup, except to say lots of glitter and glue.
Jesus tells a disturbing parable about a wedding banquet in which a guest is thrown out for not dressing for the occasion. (Mat. 22:1-14) This would never happen at a Taylor Swift concert, yet what is equally true is that these adornments are constituents of the full experience and full participation. Like all things ceremonial, our dress at least signals that we get it; we are more than mere spectators. This is something of what Lewis was getting at in his essay: everything we humans are involved with has with it a divine residue. In countless ways, some prosaic and others profound, it is right that our presence affects due honor.
Walking into the stadium felt more like gliding. The air was warm in a way that you could not feel it on your skin, except when a cool breeze drifted off the lake. The crowd streamed in in an ecstasy of anticipation. I’ll admit I was to be counted among them.
I’m a sucker for monumental events: I’m a “you had to be there” or “room where it happened” guy. This is in part why I am writing this essay—using this occasion to ascertain a clearer why.
We entered Soldier Field as the warm-up act OWENN was performing. A former backup dancer for Swift, he was now making his way up and down the enormous stage dancing and energetically performing his own material. Between each song, he would gush his love for Taylor and the opportunities she had given him. (“She could have asked anyone to be up here, but she gave this stage to me.”) After we found our seats, the opener, Girl in Red, took the stage. Her set rocked, and she also extolled Taylor effusively—and vulgarly! My son said, “Is it in her contract to use the f-word between every other word?” Sigh. He at least named it!
During the opening acts, I kept thinking to myself what a big stage it was. It was too much space! It swallowed them up; like a marble on a pool table. I thought, Is there any way Taylor can fill this much space? Stupid question.
Around 7:40 an enormous clock displaying a five-minute countdown appeared across the sprawling digital backdrop, and the crowd exploded with excitement. Time typically stands still in such moments, but after each glance from crowd to stage another minute had ticked by; each met with a spontaneous cheer. When the clock struck zero it morphed into a doorway, from which emerged one dancer after another trailing twenty-foot high feathery plumes. A recording of Taylor Swift piped through the speakers, “It’s been a long time coming…” as these seven seraphic figures swirled around, before draping their plumes in layers across the diamond-shaped center of the stage. The iridescent enclosure suddenly burst with light from within, the layers peeled away, and there she was, resplendent in her rhinestone-festooned purple bodysuit.
There was now no stage, no stadium, no city: only Taylor. A hydraulic system lifted her heavenward, as she belted out a stanza from “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,”
It’s you and me,
that’s my whole world
They whisper in the hallway,
“She’s a bad, bad girl!”
We knew well that bad, bad meant extraordinary.
Beholding impressive figures—often entertainers—at their apex has long fascinated me. In the fall of 1990 I waited for many hours to buy tickets to watch Michael Jordan play against the Denver Nuggets. Jordan poured in 38 points that night in an absolute barn-burner of a game. He would go on to win MVP and his first of six NBA championships that season. In those days, Jordan moved on the court as a god among men. These were the “Be Like Mike” years, enthralling all: “Sometimes I dream / that he is me. / You’ve got to see that’s how I dream to be / I dream I move, / I dream I groove / Like Mike / If I could be like Mike.” This basketball player transcended the sport, and his play spoke evocatively to some transcendent yearning in all of us.
In the summer of 1991, I was visiting my mom in New York City when we trekked to Central Park to stake our spot among hundreds of thousands of others to watch Paul Simon’s Concert in the Park. I will never ever forget that night. I was watching one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time absorb all the energy of the world’s most important city to himself. From the percussive openings of “The Obvious Child” to the final strums of “The Sound of Silence,” we were transported. Central Park was transfigured that night, maybe even redeemed.
This is part of why I fought for us not to cash out our Taylor Swift tickets. Experiencing such singular persons first-hand amid their time of peak incandescence almost defies words, which is why we scream and clap. My daughter’s friend told her when Taylor Swift emerged from those plumes she began crying. She wasn’t alone.
The closest theological term for this is apotheosis; “of god” or “god-ish.” In a way, we view something divine and eternal emanating through such persons. In The Last Battle, Lewis suggests a human agelessness beyond “the Shadow-Lands,” expressing in The Great Divorce, “One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless…” It is a preternatural vitality—life inextinguishable. This is the part where we Christians start to fidget. The fidgeting may be appropriate. No doubt, many in these Eras Tour audiences are being swept up in an all-too-elevated relationship to this flesh-and-bone person. Maybe Swift’s lyrics apply here: “You need to calm down / You’re being too loud.” Then again.
What makes these apotheosis experiences so impressive is not only grandeur but a sense of being swept up in a spirit of generosity. At one point of the show, after lamenting how covid not only canceled hers and many tours but placed the whole notion of stadium shows in peril, Swift said, “I live for times like these with you all. This is my whole world; my whole personality.” This may also trouble us, cue the language of egocentrism, false self, or even narcissism. Swift toys playfully with all these complaints, as we all should, “Did you catch my covert narcissism, I disguise as altruism, like some kind of congressman?” she sings with a wink in her self-dismantling “Anti-Hero.” The ploy may be real. I’m sure it often is. But I will say that throughout the show I experienced some type of sensory rush that I finally named gratitude. In the Christian life, generosity and gratitude are meant to be almost indistinguishable. My whole family sang one hit after another in rapt mutual joy, and I kept saying to my wife, “I’m so grateful Taylor is putting her entire heart into this. It’s such a gift to us!”
I mean, who gets to drop chart-toppers like “Cruel Summer,” “Lover,” “Love Story,” “22” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” before the halfway point of a three-hour tour de force like just some more songs? Who croons “tolerate it” at a piano in a flowing golden gown, disappears into the stage, then reappears moments later in a serpentine, one-legged black and red bodysuit rocking the bass-pumping “…Ready for it?” with a troupe of dancers? Swift, as Bob Dylan put it, contains a multitude.
At one point I said to my wife, “How epic is Taylor Swift right now?” (Answer: utterly.)
What I’m saying is that all Swift’s work in mining her story, refining her gifts, reinventing and, yes, promoting herself, resulted in my family and 50,000 of our newest, Swiftiest friends receiving a three-hour singalong with one the the most gifted performers of our generation. And when I say “gifted,” I am thinking explicitly of this unique divine refraction who is Taylor Swift. This is the parable of the talents, right? The ancients believed the poets were conduits of the divine; conduits through which gifts are shed broadly. The psychiatrist Carl Rogers observed, “What is most personal is most universal.” This is the singularity of Taylor Swift, the capacity to extract what is personal and make it not only universal but reveal it all—the good, bad, ugly, and inane—as improbably glorious. This reciprocating alchemy is her genius.
Swift herself said, “I hope whenever you hear these songs for the rest of your life you’ll remember these three hours we spent together in Soldier Field.” Of course we will! And the together is absolutely with Swift and her music, but, even more wondrously, with the ones we love. After all the labor of choreographing and rehearsing everything, Swift’s left hand has only reflexive knowledge of what her right hand was doing—usually sweeping her flowing hair away from her face—but it was true generosity. We paid for it in so many ways, but it returned to us multiplied.
Something quite sacred takes place during these performances, tarnished as it surely is by our muddled human proclivities. Lewis wrote,
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations [glory or horror]. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
All dealings. All loves. All play. I suppose it falls to each person in these concerts—including Taylor and her sensational team—to take what is happening and, as Augustine puts it, love it all as a “means of transport” to the divine realm. But isn’t this the case in cathedrals every bit as much as in concerts?
There has been some chatter lately as to whether certain chord progressions in worship music capitalize on our emotional susceptibilities in a manipulative way. I’m sure some worship leaders have used music and chord progressions manipulatively (just as preachers use pauses, inflections, and turns of phrase), and I am sure we all have on more than one occasion allowed ourselves to be thus taken in. It is an inevitability. Yet this invites us into more reflection, not less, resulting in more savor, not less. As Paul advised in all ecstatic and mystical moments, “I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind.” (1 Cor. 14:15b) Self, we might ask, what is being awakened inside you?
Many have described their post-Eras state as P.T.S.D. (Post Taylor Swift Depression) or even post-Eras amnesia. I’ve been asking my kids about these things, and they’ve noticed both phenomena. Certainly, many of us have had “mountain top” experiences during which the immediacy of all things good broke abruptly like some “fever dream high.” On the way to school last week, my daughter remarked, “It’s still sinking in that it happened.” Having “been lost in her current like a priceless wine,” we savor and we reflect through the complexity of the finish, as is fitting with all things fine and flavorful.
For many years now, my preferred metaphor of God’s dream for planet earth and for the human family has been a mirrorball: a shimmering sphere of spiritual light populated with brilliant divine image-reflectors, spilling the spectrum of God’s glory outward, inward, and among in a brilliant panoply. Though this dream became a nightmare it is being reimagined in Christ, the blessed, broken, given One by whom we each, as Makato Fujimura put it, “become a poem.” But we must have provoked in us that which is captured in Walt Whitman’s immortal words:
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
In the present case, the powerful song goes on, and we may contribute a verse—or sing the verses together! These bleeding and brave, playful and layered, catchy and haunting songs are a psalter of common prayers: laments, celebrations, imprecations, aspirations, supplications, and surrenders. The soul-bearing muse through whom they arrive, a living invitation to honor them all, just as she spectacularly has.
So by the time Swift disappeared back into the stage after an electrifying performance of her theologically problematic yet tantalizingly defiant banger “Karma,” we were all on an elevated plane. This unapologetically insecure and heartsick artist had awakened the gods and (especially) goddesses in us all to overwhelming possibilities, if just for one night. She did the same thing the next night. She picked up where she left off in Detroit—then Pittsburgh, then Minneapolis, then Cincinnati…
For my part, I am experiencing the post-Eras afterglow; making a gratified synthesis of this encounter. I know it increased my already-high appreciation of Taylor Swift. I know it was a night my family and I will relish for years to come, along with millions of other Era tourists. I hope it polished away some smudges on the mirror meant to gleam the divine backscatter in each of us.
Regardless, it was a magnificent and magnanimous show, and that is something to be treasured. Even Taylor cannot do this forever. As we saw a petty and score-settling Jordan during The Last Dance or hear rumored of Paul Simon’s manifold relationship problems, we are sobered by how the light sometimes diminishes. But that is not ours to dwell on here. From here we cannot see the vanishing point on the horizons for this singular individual, but we can hope in ways that truly spring eternal.
Early in the show, Swift said, “What a privilege and an honor and a delight it is to say these words to you tonight, Chicago: Welcome to the Eras Tour.” It’s the kind of thing you say from stage, but I chose to accept her earnestness. Without us, she is singing alone. Without her, we’re not sure what to sing. Together we sang our hearts out and went home hoarse but wishing for more. If this doesn’t quicken our eternal ardor, I sorrow for us. It was, as Lewis put it, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” At least it was for me; maybe this is only personal disclosure.
This self-described mirrorball has indeed broken herself into a million pieces, such that even the dullest among us are allowed to see and esteem every shimmering version of ourselves during these wondrous nights. Upon reflection, this may be how the weight of glory is meant to dazzle: through redistribution, making the whole place shimmer.