Transcript: Can Queer Love Help Sanctify the World?

A voicemail about queer love, string theory, other dimensions and transformation

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Welcome to voicemails from Meg. This is not a podcast, it's just a message I'm leaving after the beep.

Beep!

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Sorry it's been a while, friend. My voice just hasn't been excellent for about a month now because of the pneumonia.

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I still don't think that I am delivering dulcet tones to you right now, but hopefully you can bear to listen to me for just a little while. I'm just calling you on my drive to the office which is what I call whichever coffee store - or coffee shop - I can get to to work at for the day. Usually I walk or ride my bike but I was on drop off duty for kids camp today, which required a car.

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I kind of want to talk to you about the letter I sent you yesterday if you haven't read it yet. It's about the Taylor Swift eras tour.

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I spend, you know, part of the newsletter comparing The Eras Tour to the medieval pilgrimage economy. Which, like I know, of course I did. But I really was struck by the similarities, by the way that, at least in a Western tradition - a Western Christian tradition - let's narrow it down even further.

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How veneration has pretty much always been wrapped up with commodification. And while that is complicated and worth interrogating, it doesn't mean that - and I guess I'm talking to myself here - but just because a space sells souvenirs or requires a ticket or offering to enter, that doesn't mean that you can't have real transcendent experiences in that space. And I write about that a lot in the newsletter.

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I think I had to work through it myself because I feel embarrassed sometimes about the way that my convictions conflict with my lived experience.

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In theory, I don't think that profit and transcendence should have much to do with one another.

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And yet I'll be at Disneyland with my kids. Disneyland, which is designed and I understand that Disneyland on top of being capitalist...

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How do you even describe Disneyland?

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I get that Disneyland exists to sell you hope, literally. And I get that it's engineered - imagineered - even to make you feel moments of if not transcendence, then a type of nostalgia that comes close to that feeling. Nostalgia masquerading as transcendence.

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And yet at Disneyland I have felt actual transcendence. I have felt like - I described it in the piece as feeling like the dimension that holds eternity and God or the forces that hold eternity together. Whatever you call that.

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I felt that.

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It's when I feel that dimension kind of hover over the space that I'm in like a slight not emerging of the two spaces, but a superposition just for a moment, everything exists all at once and I get to see that that's how transcendence or feel it that's how it feels to me. And yeah, I have felt that waiting in line with my kids for Pirates of the Caribbean. Like, that's just where I'm at. And I felt it at The Eras Tour.

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In the piece I write about the fact that when I felt that moment at The Eras Tour - when I felt god in this chili's, to quote Beasley - and I didn't really realize it until the next day, but that feeling came when Taylor Swift was not on stage, she was not performing. We were like in one of the transitions from era to era.

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Oh, and I think it's important to note here, if you haven't read the newsletter, that I am not a Swiftie. So I did not expect to feel I expected to feel happy, like watching my eleven year old love the experience. I didn't expect to feel like we are all joined by a cosmic love that ignited before the cosmic dawn and that there is no ultimate separation.

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I did not expect to feel that way at a Taylor Swift concert. But the moment that I felt that way was actually because of a man sitting in front of us. And I wrote about this much more eloquently and with fewer clearing of my still pneumonia racked inflamed throat. (I don't still have pneumonia for anybody concerned. I'm moving about the world with pneumonia. My body's just still inflamed from it.)

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But there was a man named Brady and he and his partner and friends were in the row in front of us. And they knew every Taylor Swift lyric much better than I did. They knew it as well as like Riley and Viola who are Swifties. And it was really just like joyful watching the group in front of know, dance and sing, really everybody.

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It was like the whole audience, it was joyful to observe, but especially this group in front of us, because they were the ones in front of us. And I don't know, it just made me happy. So I was always already predisposed to be like, I think we could be friends. I like all y'all's moves. During one of the transitions between eras, one of the men turned around and looked at Viola, I think he had noticed her earlier and he said, "Would you like one of my bracelets?"

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And he know, his arms stacked with these friendship bracelets that people wear to the Taylor Swift concerts. And then they trade with each other. Viola had spent the couple days beforehand making all kinds of bracelets, friendship bracelets to trade with other Swifties when she got to the concert. But as we were walking up to the stadium, she pulled them know, from around her wrist and handed them to me and said, "Will you keep these in your bag?"

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Because Viola gets nervous about, she gets nervous in large crowds of people and she also gets nervous about interacting with new people. And I think just the thought of even a friendly exchange of bracelets just felt very scary and overwhelming to her. So it was so kind when he turned around and asked, but I kind of swooped in the way that she had asked me to when she handed me the bracelets. And I said, "Oh, she doesn't have any bracelets to trade, but thank you so much." And he said, "Well, I'm not asking to trade bracelets with her. I saw she didn't have any, and I want to give her some of mine."

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And he was just like, so kind and gentle and smiling and Viola felt at ease, which takes her a minute, usually with strangers. And he said, "Would you like some?" And she said, "I would." She nodded her head. And so then he told her the meaning of each bracelet because, like, Swiftie bracelets all have meanings and there's, like, lyrics and acronyms. I'm not a Swiftie. But it's a whole thing. It's a whole journey.

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And, you know, he was like, "This is from Reputation, this is a Pride bracelet..."

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And he went through all of them and she pointed to one and he took it off and gave it to her.

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And he's like, "Would you like one more?" And she pointed to another one and took it off and gave it to her. And that would have been enough. Viola was smiling. I was tearing up.

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Riley was tearing up. It was just like this beautiful gesture. But then the people in his group around him turned around and also just took off bracelets and handed them to her. And then the people to my left, people that we did not know were handing us bracelets down the line. A woman that I did know, that I'm friends with, that was sitting next to me, she called it The Bracelet Moment afterwards.

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And it really was like it was this moment.

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And as Viola's, like, her little hands are filling with bracelets, she starts to cry. And then Riley and I are just crying too.

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So what that man couldn't have known was that he was a queer man. I mean, he knew that. He knows that he's queer, I'm sure. But what he didn't know is that he was a queer man who had just reached out to a queer little girl and offered her, um, I don't know, kind of like this holy object, right? Like this object that in his offering became holy.

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Yeah, I mean, it felt like an offering like that you make at a shrine, which works actually in the newsletter, because I'm comparing The Eras Tour to the pilgrimages that people make to shrines, right? But until this moment and maybe because I'm not a Swiftie, but until this moment, the stadium, even with the stage as an altar and Taylor Swift as, like, a venerated mystical saint, doesn't really feel like a shrine to me until this know, what this man demonstrated to Viola is that found family can be found everywhere.

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And that during a political climate, like in a political climate where kids like her are increasingly made unsafe by the decisions of everyday people and politicians.

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This was a place that she was safe. And that was a big deal because there were 73,000 people in there. And in that moment, it felt like she was safe with the collective, not just me and Riley, not just the group in front of us.

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In the newsletter, I write about how that moment is when that place became holy. To me, that man's actions sanctified that stadium for that moment. It became a shrine. And if you read the letter, you know that shrines function in interesting ways in the medieval imagination. Shrines are places where the saint's physical remains, like the saint's body, and it doesn't have to be the whole body, which is very interesting. It can be a couple of bits of bone or hair, but there has to be something physical there. The physical remains of the saint connect the faithful to the dimension, basically, where God lives. It's like the Court of God, there's lots of ways to conceive that, but at the end of the day, it has to be a dimension different than ours, right? Like that's what heaven is.

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And so when the pilgrim goes to the shrine, if the pilgrim is very faithful, they can receive transmissions from that heavenly dimension through the saints like physical body.

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Those transmissions look like miracles. They can look like healing. They can look like visions.

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For just a moment the dimension that holds eternity is superimposed on the dimension that holds the faithful pilgrim.

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When the pilgrim leaves the shrine, they take holy objects with them to try remain, one scholar calls it, "united to the shrine." So that would be like to maintain this connection to this other dimension. So some pilgrims take holy water from shrines. Others take holy oil. Others take there are some shrines where you take bits of dirt.

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You can take a pilgrim badge, which is a little metal badge that has the saint's likeness of the saint of the shrine that you went to. It has that saint's likeness on it. And once that badge is touched to a certain place in the shrine, that badge, too, becomes holy. That becomes sanctified.

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And what does sanctification mean?

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I think we say, like, holy water, holy places. What does that mean? So holy things have been sanctified, and a sanctification is a transformation of material, of matter into something other, something holy, something that can dwell in other realms.

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And depending on how literal or how much Sci-Fi you've read, it's a reworking of the particle expression. I'm really into Brane theory, which is I won't get too deep in the weeds, but basically it's like part of string theory. String theory says that everything is, like, made of these strings that curve themselves into shapes that look like different particles. So everything is made of the same vibrating strings of energy. But those strings, when they curl themselves into certain shapes, become different particles.

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And those particles make different things, okay?

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And brane theory says, like, that's super, super great. And there are dimensions.... I'm trying to think of how to explain this kind of, I don't know, stacked on top of each other like a layer cake, I guess. And we can't sense the other dimensions that are around us, but sometimes there's basically, like, particle seepage from one dimension to another. Some people think that's what dark matter is, is that they're particles from a dimension adjacent to our own, which is interesting because dark matter is what holds our Universe together and keeps us from spinning apart. And my pet Meg still believes in something beyond us theory is that if there was some dimension or realm that even resembled what we think of heaven to be, like, even a little bit, wouldn't it make sense if it was another brane kind of, like, dimension layered on ours? And wouldn't it make sense if some of the work it was doing was keeping our universe together?

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Anyways. Sanctification.

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If there is some other holier dimension or some more exalted dimension, or there are terms you can think of this that are also, like, just purely scientific, like brane theory. The brane theorists that I've read, most of them are atheists. If there is something, some other realm that is here but we cannot see it because branes are stacked that tightly, it would make sense that to, hmm, be able to interact with that space the strings that make us up would have to unfurl and form new shapes to be made legible in this other dimension that would have different rules than ours. Different kinds of physics, different natural laws.

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Um, so when we sanctify something - whether you want to follow me on my Mad Hatter journey through brane theory or think about it purely within terms of making something holier or transforming something to be a noble medal from an alloy, right -

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Once you've sanctified something, it is changed. It is materially or at least metaphorically changed, right? That is, like, the work of sanctification. That is why shrines are so... that is why people travel for years of their lives in the medieval period and still within other religious traditions to get to shrines, because they're essentially portals that we cannot walk through but can peer through to another place because they have been transformed in a way that other spaces have not been transformed.

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This man did that to that moment in that stadium. I don't think that stadium is, like, sanctified forever, but that moment is.

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And what happens if you sanctify with, like, if you use love, if you use queer love to sanctify, like, enough moments in enough places? Ah.

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How materially will that actually transform our world? Like, what if we approach every day, like, we're shrine building in veneration of one another?

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Ah, I'm not sure if, like, what new what new shapes would our strings make?

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What new world could that form? I don't know.

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So that's what I've been thinking about. And I'm not going to be embarrassed of how weird it is because you're yeah, you feel like you're my friend. So I promise my voice will be better next time I call. His name was Brady. I asked him after the concert as the concert was ending.

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Please, can you just tell me your name? And it was Brady. Brady, I love you. Thank you for helping my daughter feel loved. Riley gave him a big hug as we left, and on the train ride home, he turned to VI and he said, be like Brady.

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Which was his way of saying, much less weird way of saying, go sanctify the earth so it can be transformed into a place where you and the people you love can live safely. All right, talk soon and bye.