During my first sleepaway church retreat, I thought I felt God for the first time. Months of fruitlessly pestering small group leaders about what the holy spirit actually was and how I was supposed to sense it had gotten me nowhere. I’d become convinced that the adults (AKA twentysomething church volunteers who definitely weren’t equipped to handle my crisis of faith) were either lying to me or deluding themselves. Was I really to believe that this brick-and-mortar institution that had always been as immutable and essential to my understanding of the world as school buildings or soccer fields, with all its money and rules and pomp and circumstance, was built on a foundation as flimsy as thinking about God really hard? I had an active imagination, but even I needed something more tangible than hearing my prayers echo off the walls of my own mind and calling it worship.
At a whitewashed retreat center in Virginia’s rural Culpeper mountains, surrounded by fellow eleven-year-olds all kneeling on carpet so worn and poorly insulated that it might as well have been the cold, densely packed dirt beneath, I finally found my answer: rituals are the secret to spirituality. Rituals are how we feel God. They form the rhythm and cadence of religion, making what’s essentially unknowable into something predictable, legible, and regulated. As the retreat center lights dimmed and the praise leader began strumming the same three chords on his acoustic guitar, I fully committed myself to this performance of piety for the first time – palms opened to the ceiling, head bowed, pleas for God’s mercy spilling out of my mouth in a rush of feeling I hadn’t even known I was capable of producing. The unfamiliar environment and the fact that none of us would be going home after this service like on any other given Sunday lent an air of greater intensity to the scene, and I began to sob. My memory of that night is entirely physical; knees aching, vision blurred, head pounding. The denial of my bodily comfort became its own form of worship, and the longer I endured, the greater my ecstasy.
If I had any concrete thoughts, like what I was crying so hard about or what I thought I needed God’s forgiveness for, they’ve long since faded from the record. I remember my parents, who were chaperoning the retreat, hovering behind me and smoothing their hands over my hair when it became clear that my tears weren’t going to stop any time soon. They seemed proud, if a little taken aback, by my display of apparent devotion. Where had my inhibition gone? Why didn’t it feel like faking it this time? Maybe it was the holy spirit after all, or maybe it was an imbalance of pubescent hormones. It was the most aware of my body I’d ever been without feeling insecure about how I looked to other people. Every cell in me was doing what it was supposed to – my miraculously productive tear ducts, my miraculously quiet brain. Such is the power of ritual to make us feel wholly at home in ourselves and yet capable of transcending our own limits.
For years afterward, I tried to recapture the magic of this night on subsequent retreats and Sunday morning services to no avail. The freedom I’d briefly tapped into remained elusive, and there was no greater obstacle to blissful oblivion than my own mind. No matter how hard I squeezed my eyes shut or tried to tune out everything other than the strum of the praise leader’s guitar, there I was in my own way – watching myself critically from a distance, scoffing at every false note in my performance. Saul had become the most relatable figure in the Bible to teenage Iris. Abandoned by God without ceremony, left to fumble aimlessly on my own in the dark. My kingdom for the feeling of some higher power embracing me and elevating me once more. If it weren’t for the heathens of pop music, I might have given up on encountering that kind of wild, unbridled abandon ever again.
You don’t need any experience with organized religion to understand the transportive enchantment of ritual – you just need to have attended a truly excellent concert, the kind that splits your life into two distinct eras, BC (Before Concert) and AE (After Encore). There are the requisite steps one must take as proper concert observance, like losing hours to Ticketmaster’s mercurial moods, your feet going numb while waiting in line, and paying obscene amounts of money for merch you probably won’t wear much anyway. All this is in service of the holy communion between artist and audience.
When Jesus broke bread and drank wine with his disciples during the Last Supper, it was an act of intimacy, nourishment, and love. It was his way of giving them a final, perfect image for them to remember after his sacrifice on the cross. It was, above all, extremely dramatic. There was no way Jesus hadn’t choreographed and rehearsed the scene, down to every last pause and meaningful sigh. Bread first, then wine. Make the vibes really weird by hinting heavily at my imminent earthly demise. Conclude by driving home the whole eternal life thing one last time. In other words, it was a performance.
Musical acts staging their art for crowds of acolytes is also a form of communion. Lyrics are scripture, melodies are consecrated, and you’ll come out on the other side exhilarated and exhausted from the emotional catharsis. At 11, I communed with God. At 22, I had a spiritual experience at a BTS concert. Blasphemous as it may sound to some, it’s all praise and worship to me.
The Britannica entry for the Last Supper says that “[all Christians] would … agree that participation in the Eucharist enhances and deepens the communion of believers not only with Christ but also with one another.” You know who else would agree? Carly Rae Jepsen fans.
(Side note: apparently her fans are called J*psies?? Absolutely not.)
At a Carly Rae Jepsen concert about a month ago, a woman next to me on the floor for general admission began exhibiting signs of devout rapture that didn’t cease for the duration of the setlist. It didn’t matter what song was played – when the opening notes hit, she let out a wail that sounded equal parts euphoric and anguished, collapsed to the ground for a solid 30 seconds, and then flung herself back into standing position so she could passionately enunciate every syllable. It was like someone had shrunk one of those inflatable tube stick figures from the gas station and set its flailing to the beat of “Run Away With Me.” Everyone in her immediate vicinity, myself included, eyed her skeptically at first, but by the fourth or fifth time we’d watched her melt into a puddle at our feet it became just another part of the experience. The live wire of feverish joy running through her lit us all up with second-hand electricity. It was too much for one person’s body to handle; her cup runneth over. She was there for Carly’s music and Carly’s music alone, so what anyone else thought of her form of worship or how she chose to carry out this sacred rite was irrelevant.
I was forcefully reminded of myself in 2018, losing my entire mind at BTS’s first U.S. stadium show and letting out bloodcurdling declarations of love for Jimin until I lost my voice. He definitely couldn’t hear me all the way from the nosebleed seats, but the concertgoers sitting in my section got an earful that night. In retrospect, I’m amazed that nobody went beyond giving me a few dirty and/or incredulous looks. Maybe they realized it would be a lost cause to try to reason with someone acting with as much decorum (or lack thereof) as the girls in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis who just discovered five minutes ago that men have hips and can shake them to considerable seductive effect. Whatever the reason, I’m grateful for the indulgence and kindness of my fellow audience members to give me the space to feel all my feelings out loud. (Seriously, so loud.) I hope they recognized in me, as I recognized in my fellow Carly Rae Jepsen stan, a true believer whose faith is undiluted by shame.