On Wednesday evening, July 9, my mother took me to see Van Morrison and His Band perform at the Fox Theater in Detroit.

If you know me well, you know that the above statement is a historic one in the trajectory of my life. After coughing up fifteen dollars to park in a narrow strip of cracked concrete that could barely be called a lot, tumbling through a crush of Tigers fans headed towards Comerica Park, and wandering dazzled beneath the indescribably ornate, color-dripping crevices and mirrors of the Fox, we took our seats and were blessed by the presence of Van Morrison himself at 7:30 pm sharp. As soon as the man strolled across the stage through his band's triumphal entry song and took the microphone, my tears started pouring forth. I couldn't stop crying for two whole songs. How can I explain this? Here I was in a theater that felt like a giant jewel-encrusted vulva-temple to the glorification of the Goddess. My mother was sitting just up yonder in the mezzanine with the man she would marry in ten days. (We couldn't afford seats together after an initial ticket-buying muddle). My mother, who I have been through it all with, who I have been dragged through the dirt with, who has often been the one dragging me through the dirt—whether to help me out of it or because she needed something to be in it with her has never been clear, but those kinds of questions melted away in the heat of the moment. There we were at a show it felt like we had both been waiting our whole lives to see, and in metaphoric parallel to everything else I have been working through with my mother, I was experiencing it with her but also in a separate seat—also as an individual. My mother, who since the age of fifteen has fed her soul with Van Morrison's deep throat and preternatural vocal chords and furious passion and subliminal wisdom. Van Morrison, I realized, is the reason I am alive, because he is the reason my mother is alive, because he is the reason we are all alive. There is no way to understand this but to feel it.

But perhaps I should try to explain. This goes far beyond Van Morrison, of course. He is just one of the more powerful manifestations, in my own life, of a universal phenomenon. The phenomenon to which I am referring is just how it is we are able to move forward with our lives so gracefully, in spite of all the dirt we're dragged through, the uncertainty, the desperate longing to be the right kind of people when we don't even know what that means. This is a question of spiritual imperative, of the very sort of "life trajectory" I described, in my case, as being shaped significantly by seeing a Van Morrison concert. I have been thinking about this lately because I am finding myself at a perpetual crossroads. Every day, it seems, I must decide anew to be the person I am, to move further in the direction I am moving. Maybe every day has always been like this, and I am only now becoming aware. I wake up and decide things like:

. I believe in God. (What does that mean? Some guy in the sky? No, probably not.)

. I trust the process. (Terrifying! Terrifying! What the fuck is The Process? Why should I trust it?)

. I will sing my songs today, but not so that other people can hear them, not to get something back for my ego. (But then where does that leave Sharing? Does singing have to be about ego? If I can help somebody as I am singing this song, then my living is not in vain, Mahalia Jackson belts out.)

. I will dedicate myself to making our broken world feel a little more loved today. (But isn't it also a form of egotism to insist I must accomplish this personally? And what about tomorrow, and what about outside my piddling reach? How do I make this love last and multiply?)

I decide these things, and despite how they challenge me, they also keep me breathing, they keep me beautiful, they keep me believing life is worth doing. But where do these decisions come from? What gives me strength and the wisdom to make them? Is it from an established moral and spiritual structure, i.e. my Good Christian Faith? Is it from the wisdom of elders, like all the activist luminaries whose essays I am reading voraciously in Paul Loeb's The Impossible Will Take a Little While? Is it from a tried and tested rational process of discerning what is ethical and true using my own honed mind? While all of these things help, it seems that life's big decisions, and the very decision of choosing to engage in life at all, revolve around something far more primal and far more mystical. They revolve around Van Morrison, and music, and theaters that make you feel like you're entering the loving vagina of the Goddess, and inexplicable moments when your heart almost explodes.

During the finale of "Gloria" tonight, as I jumped up and down and screamed "G-L-O-R-I-A" like my life depended on it (it did), there was one moment I almost let go of everything. I was thisclose. I don't mean that kind of letting go where you think, "Wow, man, I'm really letting go! This feels great!" I mean the kind where you don't think. The complete surrender to Whatever You Want to Call It—the divine, the moment, the light, the dark. It's all the same.

At some point in all this, I reflected on the place I have arrived at in life: living in Detroit, working for a beautifully empowering social services organization, planning my return to Marlboro to learn more about harmonizing those sweet elixirs called religions that sour so often when you try to blend them, deciding every day to fall in love with the world despite the great vulnerability this entails. I realized that I have ultimately made each decision that brought me here by connecting to an irrational, soulful state. Songs decide my life. When the crowd holds its breath while Van whispers-chants, "When the healing, when the healing has begun, when the healing has begun," I understand that the healing has begun, and that that Van is preaching a sermon. The meandering poetry of sermons themselves decides my life. Dancing so hard my lungs hurt with happiness, too. Walking through the glowing world after five o' clock rain. And That Feeling. That feeling of just knowing, of just knowing something is right—that's how I know. That's how I know there's something that transcends all these structures, whether religious or rational or in between. There's something much more elegant and personal guiding each of us—something I like to think of as the common person's mysticism. "If it feels good, it's too late to stop now," Van Morrison bellowed over and over again that night. I think he was improvising. I think he was singing about Making Love in the Afternoon. I think that some of the improvised lines closely preceding this were: "Can you feel my leg? Because if you can feel my leg you'll want to feel my thigh. If you can feel my thigh you'll want to go way up high." I think there was a cheesy backdrop of twinkling night stars behind him. But I also think he was absolutely right, perhaps righter than he'll ever consciously know.