Faith is an incredibly personal journey — everyone has their own relationship with their spirituality and their own understanding of what “God” is or isn’t. For me, I knew God was real and present when I first saw a megachurch pastor zipline onstage at a midnight mass in an auditorium the size of the Superdome.
It was the first time in my life I’d felt like I’d witnessed something wholly sacred.
Even though the zipline wires were, like, very visible, simply seeing a 50-year-old man in a power suit glide and spin through the open air changed something inside of me.
Previously a staunch atheist, I now not only believed in God, but knew I had seen him in the form of a $50,000 light show put on by a multibillion-dollar, untaxed super organization.
I knew this had to be what Jesus had died for. What else could possibly be worth it?
While the opening choir composed of children with almost unnaturally beautiful voices had me suspecting I was experiencing something holy, I knew without a doubt I was staring into the face of the Divine when the startlingly limber pastor didn’t miss a beat after decking that kid in the front row. God was speaking through him; I could feel it.
My newfound piety was further confirmed later in the show – sorry, service – when a woman was plucked out of the crowd and brought onstage, and the pastor performed an exorcism on her. She was sobbing, everyone in the crowd was sobbing, I was sobbing — of course, that was quite simply mass hysteria in action, but goddammit if it didn’t feel good to shed a few tears with tens of thousands of my closest strangers.
But, at the end of the day, it was pretty much just all about the zipline for me. Near the end of the service when the stagehands ran onstage to hook the pastor back into his harness so he could soar out of the stadium and into the sky, I knew I would be a woman of God for the rest of my life, if only to see him do this again next Sunday.
Perhaps God really is real, or perhaps I am just incredibly susceptible to bright lights, theatrical prowess, and high production value. Nevertheless, I have tickets to a Cirque du Soleil show next weekend, and I am fully planning to be an Evangelical Christian by the end of it. Praise God and aerial acrobatics.
