In 1989, seeing my life from the outside, you would never have come close to guessing where my life was heading. I turned eleven at the end of that summer and knew who I was and what I wanted to do. I loved the Oakland A’s and the Lakers. Mark McGwire and Magic Johnson were my heroes. I wanted to be a bull rider in the rodeo. My summer job that year was working on a ranch where I learned to drive, help castrate bulls and shear their horns, and how to manage a herd. In exchange, they taught me how to team rope and ride bulls, which is what I really wanted to do.

That year, I was heavily involved in the local Southern Baptist Church. This started when I woke up one morning and saw that the church two doors down from my house was on fire, and I went to help. I helped the Texas Baptist Men, a group of retired construction workers who build churches after the fire. The pastor invited me to attend the Baptist General Convention of Texas Youth Conference in Dallas that year. Since I had spent a few weeks in Taiwan with my mom, Dallas wasn’t such a big ask.

The trip lasted ‌three days. When we first got there, our youth pastor took us to the home of a friend of his from school. The family was some of the friendliest people I had ever met. They had a man staying with them who had just recently returned from a mission trip. He was polite and soft-spoken. He was unlike most of the people I had met in similar capacities in my brief life at that point. I talked with him for a while, just polite conversation mainly. However, he wanted to make sure that I was right with Jesus. That was clearly his goal in the conversation. He carried a quiet sense of urgency that did not overshadow his peace. We prayed, ate, and then went on our way to our hotel.

The next day was overwhelming. I grew up in a town with a population sign that read 276. Even if you counted the cemetery, that number was inaccurate. And now, I was in downtown Dallas at Reunion Arena, where the Mavericks played, and it felt like hallowed ground. I was 11 years old and unsupervised with about 20,000 other teenagers. This was a teen youth worship conference, and I was there because of the work I had done at the church despite my age.

We ran around and skipped a lot of the opening formalities, enjoying the freedom of being unsupervised. Once the worship service started, however, they expected us to be in our seats. I grew up on stage with my mom, who led the choir, and we were always in church, and I was usually by her side. It was not a secret that I preferred rock, but I just loved music and always have. I grew up in the Pentecostal church, and even though the Baptists had different ideas about how it was done, the basic premise was the same. As the service was getting ready to open, they introduced a man who was going to lead the praise and worship service, and they said his name was Rich Mullins and that he was a little different from what we might all be used to, but we should give him a chance and listen to the words to his songs. Rich was the man I had met the day before, and I thought it was very cool that he was on stage, in front of all these people.

The whole arena fell silent as the pastor prayed. There was a palpable energy in the air, a sense that something was about to happen. I could sense that most, if not everyone around me, knew what that thing was.

When He rolls up His sleeves
He ain’t just putting on the ritz
(Our God is an awesome God)
There’s thunder in His footsteps
And lightning in His fists
(Our God is an awesome God)

20,000 people singing from the bottom of their hearts at the tops of their lungs.

Our God is an awesome God
He reigns from heaven above
With wisdom, power, and love
Our God is an awesome God

Waves of emotional resonance poured through my body; it was a moment of divine rapture, and I was overwhelmed and in awe and wanted to know more about this awesome god. I wanted to know about this music, which was so different from what I grew up on in church, music that could fill me with such peace and make me lose all awareness of space and time. It was ecstasy.

And then I went back home.

There were the lectures about being careful about getting lost in emotions and how that bordered on idolatry. There was a reason our family wasn’t Baptist. Our house would burn down about a year later; I would be in my first rehab within three years and an atheist by 21.

August 9, 2024, Chicago, Illinois.

Slow, circling strings fill the air; it feels like dawn. There is a sense of vertigo, laced with yearning, dread, and transcendence.

The sound of standing at the edge of something vast and not knowing if it will save you or kill you. Edda Dell’Orso’s wordless soprano filled the air. The vocals do not sound like lyrics; they sound like a siren song pulling someone toward madness. The overwhelming sensation of the sheer scale of what’s building, as if something is chasing you.

This is The Ecstasy of Gold, and it is how Metallica opens every show.

I look to my right at my wife, the uninitiated, and tell her, “This is church.”

67,200 people, fists in the air:

Slaves, Hebrews born to serve, to the pharaoh
Heed to his every word, live in fear
Faith of the unknown one, the deliverer
Wait something must be done, four hundred years – Creeping Death Metallica

It was rapturous. Waves of emotional resonance poured through my body. I was unaware of the pain in my back. For the next several days, I felt transformed, as if I truly belonged. Those were my people, and I was home.

This is Church.

I’m no longer an atheist. But this isn’t about theology; it’s about music, my people, and finding peace in the absence of dogma

All the gods, all the heavens, and all the hells are within you — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell frequently cited the Upanishads, pointing to the realization that the divine or cosmic energy begins in the flesh. In my little world, one that is steeped in heavy metal and supernatural lore, Campbell gets quoted often, almost like scripture. Having read his work off and on for years now, I agree: transcendence is a physical event.

That same sense of awe and wonder, that rapture that poured through me as I lifted my voice to sing ‘our God is an awesome God,’ is the same rapture that engulfed me as my fists were in the air, throwing the horns, chanting ‘die, by my hand, I creep across the land, killing the firstborn man,’ with 67,000 of my closest friends.

I’ve felt that power in mosh pits and as I’ve seen my oldest son heading into his first one. As the crowd ‌roared and my voice ‌‌failed me, as the sweat poured out of my body and my body was on the verge of failure. Music has brought me into communion with the divine. It is my doorway, my drug, my church.

You see, Awesome God and Creeping Death are the same song; one wears a mask of gold and perfumed with love, the other is honest. Sodom, the flood, judgment and wrath poured out, “thunder in His footsteps and lightning in His fists,” this is the same figure, the Angel of Death in both songs. Creeping Death is the Passover plague sung from the killer’s point of view. And both because they are songs, and not because of the words, open the same door.

I have found my peace in the one who asked nothing of me, not even devotion. In the one who does not tell me how I should interpret the divine but simply opens a portal for my soul to find solace.

All shepherds are wolves; one just kills you slower than the other.

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