Mirrorball

My church let me preach about Taylor Swift.

Coming into your inboxes early to share a sermon I preached at my church this past weekend. I had posted that I was doing this in my Instagram stories and was surprised and flattered at the interest—thank you! 🫶 Our sacred text was the song “mirrorball” from the album folklore. If this is your vibe, then enjoy! And if not, no worries, and I’ll see you back here at the end of the month for some August Scribbles.

I didn’t expect to be publishing this on a week so full of Taylor excitement! Screaming/laughing/crying/throwing up at all of the sparkling TS12 news—I’m both a little sad to say goodbye to the Eras Era, and ready to welcome the new Life of a Showgirl Era with open arms!

Two summers ago, when I attended The Eras Tour, it was one of the best nights of my life. No offense to my husband and children—they understand—but wow.

When people asked me about it afterward, I often said that it was one of the holiest experiences of my life. People would laugh a little, which I get, but I meant it. This space that Taylor created felt holy. She may not have been preaching—I could argue that she was—but the Spirit was there. I will be chasing that high for the rest of my whole entire life.

It’s also one of the safest spaces I’ve ever been in. It might have been a crowd of some 65,000 people, but it was mostly made up of women and girls. Honestly, we all felt like girls. I felt 15 again. I imagine it was a very different vibe than what U.S. Bank Stadium feels like on your average Sunday.

One of the traditions of The Eras Tour was to make friendship bracelets. My arm, from wrist to elbow, was covered in them. I think I made something like 35. Each bracelet has a word or a phrase on it, a lyric or album title or something associated with Taylor. Then what you do is go around before the concert and trade bracelets with people. I traded all of my bracelets. I still have all of the bracelets that I traded for: they sit on top of my dresser, on a bracelet stand I bought specifically to display them, to remind me of that night. I traded bracelets with middle-aged women and teenagers and one 9-year-old girl who was there with stars in her eyes.

The trading of the bracelets? It reminds me a little of the passing of the peace that we’ve been doing here recently. I grew up with this in my Catholic upbringing. We called it Exchanging the Sign of Peace. It’s a beautiful moment in a church service. What is holding out a bracelet to someone but saying, “peace be with you?” At The Eras Tour, trading all of those bracelets, there was this sense that we were trading little pieces of ourselves. We’d all taken hours, days, weeks to create these things. Actually, some people didn’t make bracelets, and sometimes they seemed nervous when we would hold out a bracelet for them to take, since they had nothing to give in return. Except literally no one cared. It was fine! Everyone was throwing these glittering bracelets around, stopping to trade with total strangers, whether they had something to give or not. Also…sounds a little like church. It’s part of how there was such a sense of community built that night, how it felt like such a safe and beautiful and holy place.

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Taylor’s music, as she says in the song we just heard, shows us “every version of ourselves” in it. The mirrorball—what’s so beautiful about it? It’s beautiful because it’s made up of fragmented pieces of glass. It’s beautiful because it’s broken, not because it’s whole. Each piece reflects something; they all need to be there to make it sparkle.

Brokenness often shows up in more traditional theology. The idea that we’ve all sinned and we’ve all fallen short. Some people go so far as to claim that we’re born inherently sinful, that tiny babies are just little sinners. I don’t know. I didn’t feel like that when my kids were born, even if our first two didn’t let us sleep through the night for the first fifteen months of their lives. (Okay, maybe a little bit sinful.)

Still, obviously, none of us is perfect. I sure wouldn’t try to claim that. But the idea that I’m inherently broken? That we’re all fundamentally broken? It’s not a great or a comforting thought.

Maybe it’s less about being broken and more about being simply deeply, beautifully, annoyingly, wonderfully human—with all the complexities that come along with it. Humans are layered, nonlinear, multi-faceted kinds of beings.

The pieces of glass that make the mirrorball beautiful might be broken, but look: they’re intentionally cut, intentionally arranged. The fragmentation, the brokenness, isn’t random. It’s broken but not damaged. And there’s room for every piece to shine its light on the mirrorball. We need all the pieces for the mirrorball to be beautiful.

Taylor’s music does this. The journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in her infamous piece in New York Times Magazine about The Eras Tour, wrote that, “You are…your silliest version, your most wholesome, your smartest, your dumbest, your saddest, your happiest — all at once.” That’s what The Eras Tour memorializes. All of these pieces of ourselves make up the whole.

Some people—the haters—claim that Taylor only sings about her exes. But that’s not true. People have written about Taylor’s lyricism, that her genius is that her songs sound like love songs or breakup songs at first listen, but they’re actually about things that go much deeper. She’s sung about her music being stolen and sold out from under her, she sings about the loss she feels growing up and aging—especially in the world she inhabits as a pop star, and she’s sung from the perspective of a teenage boy. She makes room for rage and love and hope and sadness. Another reason it felt so holy that night at the Eras Tour. A crowd of 65,000 people scream-singing along to every song. Singing out our joy and our pain. It’s better than therapy. It was healing. We could show up as our mirrorball selves and feel seen and loved.

I mean:

“I’m still a believer/but I don’t know why.

I’ve never been a natural/all I do is try, try, try.”

That’s a sermon in and of itself. It’s why I love her. She packs a story into a handful of words. On her third album, Fearless, she sings, “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter.” She wrote that when she was 18 or 19 years old. I mean. Come on. That’s an entire story in 10 words. What is that if not a parable?

But back to mirorballs and trying to be believers.

I think a lot of us are here, specifically, at this church, because we’re still believers. Key word: still. And some of us? Don’t know why. Or maybe we know why more on some days than on others. Church can be brutal. Churches have told us that we’re broken. (See above) That we don’t belong. Or we only belong in certain spaces. That women shouldn’t preach. That children should be seen and not heard.

The older I get, the more comfortable I am with disbelief. Sometimes more than belief. Sometimes, honestly, neither seems all that rational to me.

I’ve said that I think if somehow, some way, there was proof that God didn’t exist, if somehow tomorrow there were conclusive proof that there is no God, I think this church would keep on keeping on. I don’t know if we’d still call it church. But I think we’d still be here. I think we’d still sing some of our favorite hymns. Maybe we’d sing more Broadway and Taylor Swift. But I think we’d still keep showing up as a collective, loving this community around us. I think we’d still show up for our neighbors and the unhoused and the immigrants and the least of these. This church is so good at that. I think that YAHS would keep meeting and we’d still host soup suppers and we’d still be trying to teach our kids about loving the world around us.

“I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try” and I think we would keep on trying. We know that it’s not so much about who or what you believe in but how you show up in the world and show love.

Our mirrorball selves recognize and honor the mirrorballs in everyone else. The brokenness that we and everyone else show up with doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re cursed for all eternity, but might just be what makes us beautiful. Less broken and more human with all our trying.