I just want Taylor to be happy.
I guess I realized it on Super Bowl Sunday. The lead-up to the game included all kinds of packaged pieces about the players’ lives and families – you know, stuff chicks like.
There was a big story about fathers and daughters. Not to be confused with the now-accepted but stupid term “#girldad” (as if the term “dad” is inadequate), this was a story about how Sundays were previously reserved for fathers to numb themselves to the world around them and be ignored by their daughters for 3-12 hours.
But lo and behold, now they are times that fathers can enjoy watching grown men maim and concuss each other alongside all their children, even the girls!
Taylor had brought families together.
We are a Sunday football family. I don’t think my daughters are that into it – I’m just a dad and not a #girldad so I don’t pay much attention to them – but my wife and I watch it from pre-game till bedtime. Red Zone especially. I am a lifelong Cowboys fan (in varying stages of grief) but she just loves all of it. We watch Hard Knocks. We watch(ed) Sam Ponder on ESPN prior to her firing and replacement by another host with a beard that came straight out of a focus group.
We are not posers. We are legit fans of the sport. It’s brutal and probably a bad way to spend hours of our existence, but we love it.
We are not fans of the Kansas City Chiefs, per se – but we’re not haters either. We like to watch all the teams. And, since Red Zone cuts to touchdowns, we watch a lot of the Chiefs. Moreso, since they get the prime time games, we watch a lot of them then too.
So when it started happening – the cuts to the box – there was a murmur.
There is a Swiftie in my house.
And not a poser. A legit fan.
A fan to the point of it being dicey when someone outside the house makes a snide comment. If we are in public, or, say, at a family gathering, we dare not laugh at a Taylor joke, we just pretend not to hear it and hope we make it home without seeing bloodshed.
There was an anti-Taylor comment made in our presence in 2020 that still gets quoted derisively in the house.
Swifties don’t forget.
It’s charming when Tony Romo and Jim Nantz refer to the camera catching Tay in the luxury box, awkwardly sharing oxygen with Brit. That murmur I mentioned – yeah, it was me. I have yelled across the house before “there she is!” so I’m not pretending to be above the fray here. It’s nice to feel justified in my football-watching, and having a common interest makes me feel less guilty when I refuse to help with homework because the Vikes and Seahawks are tied in the 3rd quarter of a pivotal October matchup.
So to be clear from the outset – I like it all. I like Tay-Tay, I like football, I like good football, I like the Chiefs, I like the camera-cuts, I like Tony Romo, I like the Cowboys.
But.
I fear.
He sat in a dank prison cell, days from his home, never to see his family again.
And his concern was how to tell the others what was really going on.
He could not say it plainly. The political environment was so toxic that he risked his life – what was left of it – by speaking the truth.
His options were to be silent or to find a way to say it secretly.
His education came back to him. The texts he had studied, recited, written and taught, that were so often misunderstood by people, were in fact the key for him to relay his message.
This governmental abuse was not new. He recognized it, the pattern, the techniques, the inevitable outcomes. But more than that, he recognized the desire that was as old as time – the desire for power. Not power over weaker people, but power to get back at the strong, the bad people who had done damage. If the good people could just get the power back, they could make things right. But they had to find a way to get the power – whatever it took.
John knew the temptation for his friends to seek power was so strong that he was willing to risk his life to open their eyes. Ironic then that the only way to reveal this truth was to hide it in codes and symbols. John had to give his community an apocalypsis – a revelation.
Tom Cruise went to the Olympics. Did you see him? At the men’s basketball Gold Medal game, they cut to him several times. Top Gun came out in 1986. His 7th (not a joke) Mission Impossible movie came out in 2023.
The biggest American movie star of the past 40 years was on hand as the most famous American professional athletes competed for the most important sporting award in the world.
Am I alone in thinking it felt small compared to any Taylor sighting at Arrowhead? That time they-did they?-wheel her in hidden in a cargo cabinet to avoid the crowds?
Not to mention that time she and Travis met on the field after he won the Super Bowl? All-time, right? Maverick’s got nothing on that.
Taylor is as big as it gets.
I tread carefully here, but I am going to say that I understand a little more of her popularity now that I have seen the concert film. Okay, I only made it through a couple eras, but I tried.
The themes are universal, the music is good. There is a massive volume of it. But her effort is attractive. There are some awkward moments in her performance, but she it so committed that it becomes endearing. She is not other-worldly, she maintains her commonality to an exponential degree. The awkwardness tells us she is not conning us. If she was perfect, we wouldn’t trust her, because we know that no one’s perfect.
A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
The first generation held out hope.
They had been the ones to see him, to hear him. Even if they hadn’t, they had friends who did. Who heard him teach. Maybe they even knew someone who saw a healing.
But the first generation were dying.
The second generation had grown up hearing about it. And while they believed, they believed differently. They had a hard time understanding what the waiting meant. What were they supposed to believe living in a world that was bound to be changed, but so far had been the same, year after year? The worst times were past – the times of government-sponsored murder – but it was still not the world the first generation promised them.
So, with the second generation’s stories in mind, of the terrible time, the third generation found a way to prevent it from happening again – they could take power now because the government could be changed, finally. All they had to do was make a few agreements, a few trade-offs. Their grandparents would never have approved, but they were gone now. They were a new generation, one that had to prove they were able to make things right.
So they agreed to the compromises – give a little to get a little. Maybe the words aren’t the same, but they could get what they wanted – get the laws changed in their favor, get the funding for facilities, get out of the shadows. They might have to share the new buildings with their new partners. They might have to send some of their money to some different people, some people who had helped them get this new power. They might have to go along with laws they didn’t like, but which, when you think about it, didn’t relate to them anyway. They could finally get their friends out of exile. It was worth the compromise.
Do you listen to SiriusXM? I love it. I have 5-6 favorite channels. Among them is channel 26, “Life”with John Mayer.
But I have to hide that preset. Not hide, really, but I don’t leave it on there. John Mayer got a song written about him by Taylor. They dated, but it doesn’t seem to have ended well.
So John’s on a list.
It’s a fun list. Everyone on the list is doing fine. They all have a different career path, and whatever they did to earn a song from Taylor didn’t seem to end them.
Some of them are still friends with her, which is very nice.
But most of them, they belong to a different list as well.
They are blacklisted by Swifties. The word cancelled may or may not get tossed around. As far as my experience tells me, John Mayer is on the cancelled list.
That new MMA movie looks interesting, maybe not great, but I’d be curious about it if it didn’t star Jake Gyllenhaal, who’s on the list. I fear even searching for it on Apple TV, it might remain in my search history. And Taylor’s history of search has left a trail of men that are better off not mentioned in the house.
Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down…to the earth, and his angels with him.
They were called Ladies’ Teas. They were ostensibly a gathering of women of churches across America to interact with a live video feed of Laura Bush, first lady at the time, discussing issues relevant to women of faith.
As one not a woman of faith, I don’t know what was discussed, or how the event went off. I just remember hearing about them before they happened and then hearing about what happened afterward.
The organizers of the event, upon its completion, asked women to send in (mail I suppose?) copies of their church directories, which listed, in most cases, the names, addresses, and phone numbers of fellow church members. I have to assume this was presented as a means of accomplishing the goals and desires discussed during the “Tea”. Why not just let the folks at the national level reach out to as many people as possible to make sure the word of this good work was getting out?
Someone caught on fairly quickly and protested that it was not appropriate to ask people to send this private tax-exempt church’s information to a government entity.
Good catch. Not sure how they didn’t see it coming, though.
Because those who seek power can rarely be trusted with power.
The Chads and Brads took to social media to complain about the Taylor takeover of football broadcasts. Taylor smote them in clear and convincing fashion.
But the Chads and Brads were right.
If the most sacred institution you have begins to rely on an outside source for attention and authority, you are screwed. You have ceded power to something you no longer truly know or understand. You should fear this. You should protest this.
If…
If that is the most sacred institution you have.
We watch a lot of football. We love watching and love spending the time together. But never on Goodell’s green earth would we use the word sacred. Or even important. It’s entertainment. That’s it.
Music is different. It’s personal, which is why churches split over it. I love music. I cherish music. There are moments in my life that are more sacred because of the music that was sung at the same time. It is this way for us all. Weddings, funerals, family members playing songs for dying parents, spouses, children. These are sacred. Not because of the singers, but because they are a doorway via the creativity that is distinctively human into the realm of the divine.
That is a power that is transcendent. So of course football will lose to it. They can both be entertaining, and it’s okay. It’s okay to like them, love them to some degree. Taylor Swift is not music, she is a musician. She is less than transcendent, but her music is transcendent for many.
This should be terrifying to someone who believes a sport is the highest point of existence. While that’s not me, I still want her to be happy with Travis. I want to see them smiling on my television once a week in the Autumn. I want them to be a pleasant element for an entertaining day.
My fear, of course, is that if she dumps Travis, I would have to hide football like I hide my John Mayer CDs.
But I’m not at risk of losing my soul.
The cliche is that politics make strange bedfellows. I have seen tea-totaling pastors and liquor stores protest the same ballot measure. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that. This is power thinking.
People who support separation of Church and State have a common enemy — the lies that one side tells the other.
The church that wants political power will be manipulated by politicians who dangle the power as bait. The politician will lie about how much power he will be sharing. The church will lie to itself about how much it’s willing to tolerate.
The politician who wants church support will be bound to a narrow set of values despite her job to govern a broad population. The church will lie to maintain its power over the politician. The politician will lie to herself about her decisions to govern well for her entire community.
The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach. Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent.1
Power is a drug – the more it’s desired, the more dangerous it is.
Beware the one who seeks power by all means. Power that is given is one thing, but power that is coerced, pulled, demanded, romanced, and sweet-talked always turns into something else. That’s what John the Revelator knew. Give the emperor what the emperor deserves, don’t give up the sacred, your being, your baby, in order to win what the emperor seeks. When you think of power as a commodity, you will be proven correct. And you will never be the one who gets more of it.
1 This and all previous block quotes from The Revelation of John, chapter 12, New International Version