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There’s no easy way to admit this: but I came away from Taylor Swift’s concert at Wembley last week not just with a clutch of friendship bracelets but touched to the core by what I’d seen, heard and felt.

I was there with my wife and two teenage daughters - though to be fair we’ve all shared an appreciation of her lyrical and emotional intelligence for years, as well as her musicianship, her fierce role modelling of female savvy, her eviscerating dismantling of smug patriarchy … As a male I’ve learned that I’ve so much to un-learn, through listening to songs of hers like ‘The Man’ -

‘I'm so sick of running as fast as I can,’ she sings,
‘Wondering if I'd get there quicker if I was a man.’

But in great artists, something greater than the sum of all those parts will coalesce, and the collective effervescence in that stadium spoke of something I’m still trying to process.

90,000 mainly young women singing not just in ‘unison’ but with a fierce togetherness, every single word of every song echoed back for well over three hours. It was spine-tingling and goose-bumping, for me especially when I saw my usually reserved youngest giving herself to the moment as if it was maybe the most magical she’d ever lived.

And for that I’m so grateful.

It reminded me of how the theologian Sarah Coakley talks of making a space in which others can flourish.

You know how someone can enter a room and fill the space with their ego so unhelpfully that you just feel smaller and smaller?

Well, we can choose to do the opposite, and in this respect Coakley, from a Christian angle, gives Jesus as the exemplar, calling him ‘the Gentle Space Maker’ - someone with a big presence but who chose to ‘make himself nothing’, as Paul’s letter to the Philippians puts it.

Paul uses the Greek word kenosis, meaning self-emptying. It’s not that Jesus steps away from the spotlight or makes himself a doormat - but he creates the kind of space around him in which others can come to life.

Perhaps you know someone like that, in whose company you stand a bit taller, or even allow yourself to dance. I want to be more like that for my daughters.

I’m sure Taylor Swift is far from perfect - but as her tour continues in Dublin tonight, I’m glad to have felt her presence, along with so many others. A reminder that wherever we go, we can open up the space around us or close it down; we can stifle, or release a soul to sing.

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