my car crests the big hill by the lutheran church in salem at or around three in the morning, mid-november. emmie and i are driving with the windows open despite the cold, or maybe because of it— there is spastic sitting-dancing, music blaring, singing: ‘when you call my name, it’s like a little prayer…’

i have a lot of memories like this, because ‘like a prayer’ happens to be among the songs of my life and, if not many others feel the same way, those who do gravitate to me as good friends. sometimes, they need a ride, and will readily sing-scream with me in the manner of the insane, the possessed, the blessed.

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‘like a prayer’ was, and remains, the center of an experience i had that, while logically explicable, is my only brush with transcendence that stuck. in late nights of my youth, i tuned the archaic radio set into the recess of my headboard to a dance music station. my head was just below the speaker, and i would thrash it from side to side with the beat, tiring myself at last; occasionally i went beyond this mechanical purpose to actually enter into a song. there seemed to be a pretty regular playlist, so i got to know a few songs very well (this is before i owned any recorded music), to the point where i could reproduce them in my head when the power went out (which always seemed more frequent and catastrophic in childhood) or when i wanted a distraction in school. this accounts for my encyclopedic knowledge of mid-90's hip-hop singles, if you're keeping score at home.

one night, in drowsy half-sleep, the opening of ‘like a prayer’— orchestral, churchlike, everything serious but with a hint of the personal that makes you think that this is part of the officially sanctioned Big Thing but that it is meant for you— brought me back up. i was on automatic recitation, channelling the songwriter. this is what happened: i sang along, knowing every word and being able to visualise words and lines ahead just as singers do, even though it was the first time i had ever heard the song. i surprised myself even as I did it, trying to find an explanation as i teared up on ‘no end and no beginning,’ touched that the radio, with my help, was bringing that fleck of ephemeral beauty into the dark world.

it must have been playing before that night, of course. it seeped into by brain as i slept. ‘like a prayer’ was sponging out old memories, or filling in unused space— one intense night, or a string of them, in which it must have been producing the most beautiful dreams i don’t remember having.

there i was, an impressionable pre-catholic, not yet in enough to comprehend the faith, let alone reject it (although that would come later). i realise now that the theological engine driving me those nights was more akin to that which is familiar to me now— anything that sounds angelic must be angels, anything that means something means everything. these are signs, provided for you, wherever you may find them. madonna may very well have been the actual queen of heaven of my french-canadian grandfather’s favourite prayer, ‘hail, holy queen,’ which my uncle recited at his funeral in after years. the song carried me into sleep, and each word became embedded into me night after night as the song entered regular rotation, or as i modified my sleeping patterns to be awake around the time it played every night.

these are not point-by-point observations on the song’s lyrical precedent for heterodoxy. the message of the song, taken on its own, is that sex is the closest thing to authentic religious ecstasy. this is likely the best systematic theology humanity has ever come up with up to this point, or is likely to in the future, despite what sex-phobic religious will tell you. but my idea at the time was that religious things were not to be discussed lightly and on that everyone was copacetic. there was an amicable agreement at regions above and nothing would filter down that was not God’s truth. therefore, any discussion of religion was received wisdom, or what they used to call a revelation. ‘like a prayer’ was a prayer, and the sexual subtext (or, if you will, text) present was irrelevant in what i took away from the song.

so i learned to take my religion where i could get it. this took years of reactionary attitudes and sexual guilt before it sunk in, even though i should have known it when the madonna first visited me in my bedroom all those years ago. i still want that transcendent moment, but not necessarily for the eerie autosuggestion, but for a manifest identification with a creation. musical, literary, otherwise— i want to enjoy something that i could have made myself to the point where it feels as though i create it simultaneously with my first witness of it. that it was meant for me because it testifies to my condition— that my name is being called. we all build our own vocabulary of what attracts us as well as what ails us, but the interactions necessary for that to come about, the common points of culture we rally around, the moments we share and need others for— your voice can take me there.