I Found god/spirit/universal peace in a Song I Played on Repeat for 6 Hours

A hymn with a beat drop.

Photo by Harrison Mitchell on Unsplash

Raves, the real ones, not the surgically curated influencer meat-markets with LED wristbands and corporate hydration tents, but the pre-monetized chaos rituals held in vacant warehouses with questionable zoning legality and fewer working toilets than people tripping, that was church. Not figuratively. Functionally. Liturgically. You arrived under-slept, over-feeling, wearing some combination of synthetic fabrics and adolescent ache, and entered a space that disregarded hierarchy, biography, and deodorant with the precision of something holy.

The rules operated beneath language. You showed up alone and found yourself swallowed into a collective organism with a pulse of its own. The guy who lent you half a granola bar at 2:37 a.m. because you looked like you were about to astral project sideways became, inexplicably, someone who would hold your hair back during a bad trip and then text you three years later to check if you’d ever finished that poem about your mother. The girl with purple dreads and glitter on her clavicle who hugged you like she knew your childhood became your sister for the night, and sometimes, impossibly, remained one forever.

There was no networking. No posturing. Nobody asked what you did for work because nobody cared. You were not your résumé. You were your breath in sync with the bass. You were the way your spine learned to pray in motion. You were the kaleidoscopic fragment of a moment that would never be photographed, because no one had phones out. The only thing getting recorded was the collective grief and joy held between strobe pulses and snare rolls.

This was not escapism. This was communion. The wild, feral, unspoken kind that cannot be scheduled, branded, or uploaded. You did not know names. You knew frequencies. You knew how someone danced before you knew how they spoke. And that was enough. More than enough. That was trust before context. Intimacy before identity.

Sometimes it lasted a single night, this ephemeral family forged by dehydration and harmonic convergence. You might never see them again. And still, you’d swear on your ancestors that they held part of your soul for you when you couldn’t. Other times, you exchanged beaded bracelets and sloppy declarations of eternal loyalty that somehow, mystically, outlived the venue and the decade.

People left with jawlines sore from smiling. Not the kind of smile you perform at holiday parties or performance reviews, but the full-bodied, slightly deranged grin of someone who just survived something exquisite. A collective exorcism by BPM. An absolution by volume.

And in the morning, when the sun rose with the unholy brightness of consequence and someone’s car wouldn’t start and your shoes smelled like ancient energy drinks and damp drywall, you didn’t say goodbye. You just looked at each other and nodded. Like war veterans. Like monks. Like people who had briefly ceased to exist as individuals and had tasted the raw data of belonging.

No one knew your trauma. But they knew your rhythm.

And somehow, that was enough.

---

And then, twenty-something years later, on a Tuesday shaped like despair and poorly sliced avocado, I accidentally met God. Or something like it. While holding a banana and crying in the bathtub.

It wasn’t even a holy song. It had no lyrics. I didn’t expect anything from it. It just… started. I hit play. And then I hit repeat. And then, for six hours, I forgot to stop.

Not in the passive, oh-look-I-left-it-on sense. This wasn’t background. This was invocation. The song didn’t play. The song performed a surgical exorcism on my auditory cortex.

Around hour three, I wasn’t so much listening anymore as being possessed. It felt like this thing, this very ridiculous, synth-heavy, post-trance emotional banger, had taken off its headphones and looked me directly in the limbic system. Like it knew. Like it had been waiting for me to finally shut up and feel something.

This song did not want ambiance. It wanted agency. It had moods. It had secrets. It had its own goddamn plan. If I even dared to drift mentally, like thought about groceries or taxes, it would slap back with a drop so precisely timed I would forget the alphabet. It had a kind of misanthropic wisdom.

Like a prophet with social anxiety and impeccable rhythm.

It didn’t unfold. It demanded. This wasn’t a crescendo. This was spiritual colonoscopy.

And I, being predictably over-intellectual about everything including my own nervous breakdowns, tried for maybe the first two loops to analyze it. Tried to understand why my entire torso was suddenly convulsing in what could generously be described as sobs and less generously as a malfunctioning goat impression. But the song didn’t care for context. It didn’t require belief. It had already decided to heal me, despite myself.

I started crying like someone had just died and also been born inside my clavicle. The kind of tears with no nouns attached. Just grief. Or grace. Or both dressed up in cargo pants and glow sticks.

And it kept going.

It looped not like a circle but like a spiral staircase you could only descend by giving up linear thinking altogether. This was not music anymore. This was a message. Not one I understood. One I experienced. Not semantically. Somatically. Like being told in every cell: yes, exactly, this is what it means to be alive and a little broken and still capable of wonder.

Somewhere around hour five, I became certain the song had a soul. Not a metaphorical one. Not the "oh, it’s soulful" genre category. No. A soul. It made decisions. It had preferences. It pulsed when I tried to turn away. It beckoned when I got distracted. It punished me with silence if I dared to think about my inbox.

It was, essentially, my priest now.

This was not the calming, cooing kind of spirituality people peddle on TikTok with linen jumpsuits and oil diffusers.

This was anarchic holiness.

This was God if God dropped acid and learned how to scratch vinyl.

This was not peace like silence.

This was peace like full-volume obliteration.

And you know what?

That’s exactly what I needed.

Because nothing else had touched it.

Not the therapy.

Not the yoga.

Not the veganism or the microdosing or the cold plunges or the very expensive somatic workshops where someone yells at you to breathe while you try not to sob on a mat made from recycled rubber and existential guilt.

But this stupid song? It got in. It crawled into the crevices where I keep my shame and my cynicism and my failed relationships and my childhood and just sat there. Looping.

Like it could wait me out.

And it did. Somewhere around the fortieth play, I stopped resisting. I stopped narrating. I stopped needing it to be profound. And in that moment of not-performing-enlightenment, I met something that didn’t speak but pulsed. Something that didn’t teach but insisted.

Maybe God is not a man. Maybe God is not a woman. Maybe God is a drop. At 130 BPM. With just enough echo to feel like memory and just enough bass to feel like birth.

Maybe God doesn’t care for dogma. Maybe God grooves.

And maybe, just maybe, the only cathedral worth rebuilding exists inside your rib cage when a song plays long enough and loud enough that you finally stop trying to earn your existence.

It wasn’t a song.

It was a sermon.

And I, sweating and sobbing and banana-clutching in my bathtub, was finally...finally...ready to pray.

Not with words.

With listening.

Because the divine doesn’t always arrive as thunder. Sometimes it loops.

And if you’re lucky...no, if you’re cracked enough, feral enough, ready enough, it loops until you remember that the point was never to lead the choir.

The point was to remember you were always the beat.

And holy. As hell.

And maybe that’s the whole thing.

There is no thesis here. No epiphany dressed in resolution. Only the truth that sometimes, the only god worth trusting arrives wearing a hoodie, tapping a hi-hat, and refusing to let you go.

Maybe peace isn’t silence. Maybe it’s volume so precise it cracks the shell of your disbelief. Maybe healing isn’t soft. Maybe it’s subversive.

Maybe the divine doesn’t speak. Maybe it plays.

Over. And over. And over.

Until you remember how to listen.

Until you remember you are not the conductor. You are not the audience. You are the note being bent in real time.

And it hurts. And it hums. And it doesn’t let up.

But oh, my god. It grooves.