Have You Felt Collective Effervescence Lately?

Momentarily, in my youth, I found God in a Dave Matthews song. This is a humiliating canon event, a memory so sharp I nearly cut myself every time it revisits me. At a Young Life retreat in the North Carolina mountains, I stood in a sanctuary with a couple hundred teenagers in American Eagle polos, crying in unison. “Ants Marching” served as irreducible proof that we were forgiven of the sins we’d go on to commit, maybe already had. We were taught that God was everywhere, in everything; would it be so farfetched to imagine He’d choose a pop song as His vessel, reaching me the same way He reached the frat boys chugging solo cups on Chapel Hill lawns?

I’d probably kissed a boy by then, but can’t be sure; I’d definitely kissed a girl, multiple times, which we’d written off as “practice” for our worshipful, heterosexual futures. My memory wavers between lying prone in cabin bunks, bowled over that we could be loved despite what we’d been taught was our own brokenness, and a drunk boy in a bathtub, where we’d snuck into a house under construction. It was powerful to imagine being swept up in a wave of divinity, to cede all the difficult choices to an older man in the sky. I was, then and now, caught between the desire for dissolution and sensation. Dave Matthews — or some college kid with the aux — took me by the shoulders and tried to set me on the straight and narrow path. I’d soon stray.