by Barbara Coeyman, Intern Minister

A sermon given December 30, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

The Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka tells a story about interviewing a Catholic priest. The priest spent several months in Ethiopia doing famine relief work in a devastated village, where he had an experience that changed his life. Soon after the priest arrived in the village, an airdrop of food was several days overdue. Rather than just sitting around waiting, the members of the village danced a circle dance for hours on end waiting for the delivery. To the beat of a single drum, the dance consisted of a simple step sequence—1-2-3-jump—so the priest decided to join in. But when he started to dance, he discovered a horrible reality . . . he was dance impaired. He could never jump at the right time; he was sometimes too soon, other times too late. Even while the villagers continued the ritual dancing, some would break out in peals of laughter watching him, and some kids laughed so hard they fell on the ground. The priest said he learned what it was like to march to the beat of a different drummer, literally.

He also learned something else much more important. Tears welled in his eyes as he told his interviewer Thandeka that all his life he thought he had known God. But it was only there and then, as he danced with that Ethiopian community, that he felt

God . . . he felt God, as the unconditional love of the community merged with the bodily experience of the dance.

The concept of dance is frequently used metaphorically. For example, there are book titles like the bestseller The Dance of Anger or Dancing in the Empty Spaces, a meditation manual available in our own church bookstore. Today, however, I am interested in exploring dance not as metaphor, but dance as human bodily movement, dance as an art form that humans intentionally engage in, usually to music. Most dance is not primarily about the feet. Instead, it is about being in sync with other dancers and music. The priest knew, and many of us as both participants and observers know, dance as a spiritual experience. Certainly, other physical activities may be spiritual experiences for you: you might even want to substitute these activities for “dance” during this sermon.

Dance occurs in many styles—and some of us like the priest even make up our own styles. The style we illustrate today is called English Country Dance. This is a social dance; it can be performed and observed by anyone, no special training is required, and this style is filled with potential for communicating many right relationships that are also the stuff of spirituality.

Now before I go any further, let me dispel any possible anxiety: no, you the congregation will not be asked to dance in today’s service, but you are invited to attend dances sponsored by the Portland Country Dance Community. Just talk to any of the dancers after the service. The choreographer Martha Graham once said that the art of dance does not exist without dancers, and so I want to take this opportunity to thank the members of PCDC for participating in our service today. Without them, we would not enjoy the experience of dance this morning.

I have heard spirituality explained in many ways, but the explanation that has always made most sense to me is that spirituality is about connections. First, spirituality involves connections within myself: how I feel and experience the highest and the best in myself. Spirituality also involves connections from myself to my surroundings: to other people, to other living creatures, to the natural world. And especially, spirituality involves connections to something beyond the known and the mundane that we call God or Buddha or goddess or many other names.

The priest certainly was not alone in discovering how spirituality can occur through body movement and emotions. This fall, members of my adult religious education class affirmed the role of the body in their religious pasts. They recalled kneeling during worship in some past religious traditions. They had no desire to return to those traditions, but they agreed that there was something in the physicality of kneeling that used to enhance worship for them. In a similar way, a life-long UU recently recounted how she “got religion” in new ways not by dancing herself, but by watching teenage boys in Dallas in an African-American megachurch dance to the music of the church’s gospel choir. Through the dance this UU felt the same sense of renewal and hope that I think many of us find in coming to church.

However, we should not be surprised that the priest described his prior relationship with God as one of knowing over feeling. During at least 2000 years of religious practice, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, spirituality has been associated primarily with the mind, not the body. And with verbal rather than nonverbal communication. Western religions and theologies have a long history of knowing the sacred, rather than feeling the sacred.

Actually, pre-Christian culture was not as dismissive of physical experience as later Christianity. Dance is mentioned frequently in Hebrew scriptures and the concept of “knowing” in ancient Hebrew was associated with touching, as in “knowing God.” It was the later influence of Greek culture that moved spiritual knowing from the body to the mind. Greeks located “knowing” in the mind. Consequently, religion became an endeavor of the intellect, of the non-physical and was rooted in words, not feelings.

During the first millennium of Christianity, many other factors discredited the body. Life on the Medieval earth often was not good, so God was situated safely away from the earth, in the heavens. The body was associated with the corrupt earth, while the mind and the spirit, pointed heavenward, transcended earth’s carnality. In this religious context, certainly an activity as bawdy and lewd and bodily as dancing never stood much of a chance of gaining approval as a valid vehicle for spirituality.

In addition to Greek influence, another powerful influence on the priests’ mind-oriented spirituality was Cartesian philosophy. Seventeenth-century philosopher Rene

Decartes explained the world in dualisms, that is, creating two opposing components to any category of concept. The most harmful Cartesian dualism, in my opinion, was his mind-body split. Not only did Descartes separate mind from body, he also ranked the mind superior to the body, and verbal communication superior to non-verbal communication. The mind-body split paralleled another dualism: male rationality was superior to female earth-centeredness. Under Cartesian influence, religion became all the more a discipline of intellectualizing argumentation expressed through words. Experiences and emotions grounded in bodily communications, especially from the bodies of women, people of color, and the poor, were largely discredited in Cartesian theological discourse.

Even our own Unitarian Universalist heritage, particularly on the Unitarian side, knew some of this Cartesian legacy: during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Unitarians were dominated by a Harvard-trained, upper-middle class white and usually male leadership that celebrated mind over body, and especially facts over feeling. And as recently as the mid-twentieth century, Unitarianism included a strong secular humanist phase that focussed on humanity, not divinity, and that still exists today in some churches.

Fortunately, Western religion and theology have become more diversified recently—some say since World War II and the impact of the Holocaust, some say through the influences of Marxism and, more recently, feminism. These and other cultural developments influenced the development of various liberation theologies, theologies that include experiences located in the bodies of women, people of color, and the poor.

Thus, one positive effect of liberation theology has been the breaking down of many Cartesian dualities, especially Descartes’ mind-body split. Added to new theology, Eastern religions have brought concepts such as the oneness of mind and body into Western spiritual practice. And Western culture generally has experienced much cross-over between high and popular art, literature, music, dance, and other creative endeavors. All of these influences and many others have opened the door to locating spirituality in the body as well as the mind.

Just one of many examples of body theology has been expressed by Sam Keen in a book called To A Dancing God. Keen’s book, which was first published in 1970, promotes what he calls “visceral theology,” a theology that promotes the body as the most valid vehicle for spirituality. Keen argues that not only religion, but our educational system as well, ought to be more bodily oriented. Why do we talk about teaching minds, says Keen, but not about teaching bodies? In Keen’s theology, it is not only humans who dance: God is also a dancer and God is immanent, dancing alongside humans and experiencing their joy, feeling their pain when it occurs. For Sam Keen, God has come down from those Medieval heavens, to dance alongside us humans on earth.

Thus, although many mind-based traditions of spirituality and religion still prevail in our country, as illustrated as recently as a few days ago in a broadcast of “This American Life” on National Public Radio, many doors have already been opened in many religious traditions for new ways of understanding spirituality. It seems to me that the commitment to diverse understandings of truth in Unitarian Universalism is an ideal context in which to promote new concepts of spirituality, including the emphasis on body movement and feeling. It seems that there are many ways UUs can get out of our heads and into our bodies all the more.

In fact, in the past decade I have known many examples of UUs already who have incorporated dance into many activities. I’ve been told that dancers are no strangers to services in this church. I’ve attended workshops on liturgical dance at regional and national meetings of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Also, new approaches to worship are being developed by UUs, such as the Soulful Sundown program created by young adults in Boston a few years ago. Soulful Sundown includes opportunities for young people of all ages to get up and dance to rock, jazz, or new age music during the course of worship.

So in light of the possibility that spirituality can occur through the body, how may dance—and more specifically, English Country Dance—be spiritual? Well, I think dance involves many of the same inner and outer connections that spirituality involves.

Dancing reinforces one’s inner connections, including the connections between body and mind. The body may be the instrument of this art: but dancing also requires much disciplined mindfulness. Even in this style with repeating patterns of movement, if one is not mindful, it is very easy to space out, to forget where you are in the pattern, something that our dancers today hope to not illustrate. The mindfulness of dancing enables one to let go of cares of the world. There have been many times when I have gone dancing tired or fretting, and come away refreshed and renewed, not unlike the process many people know in coming to church. In fact, it is almost impossible to keep from smiling while dancing. Dancing can serve as a reminder that even if things get low, they don’t stay low forever.

In social dance there are also multiple connections with others. We touch our hands and connect through eye contact and our presence with others in the same space.

As Anne Morrow Lindbergh noted, when we are really in step with one another and with the music, we don’t need to hold on desperately tightly, and we trust the other person to do the same. Also, during any given English dance, we move quickly from person to person, a good model for life’s complex social relationships. In most dances, each person dances with his or her partner, with another couple, and with the entire group in creating various floor patterns. What makes for good dancing—and good spiritual life—is when these various connections and patterns are clicking well, when these quick and changing combinations are in sync with one another.

For example, the many different relationships available in “Fandango,” our next dance, will go by quickly. One cycle of this dance lasts about one minute and the dancers will go through six cycles. In any given cycle, the couple starting out on my right is the lead couple.

The floor patterns created by the lead couple are particularly intriguing. The lead couple starts with gentle communications through hand and eye contact, going away from and coming back together several times and moving down the line. As if to say, let’s not forget about our friends, all six dancers join hands in a vigorous circle around to the left and then back to the right. The lead couple returns to its original place, but immediately separates again, moving into second place through some curly-cue body movements and sexy eye contact. From in the middle of the line, each lead dancer then goes out to a neighbor dancer and back to the partner several times, just as in life we go out and come back home. Then the lead couple weaves around their neighbors and finally persuades their neighbors to join in the weaving. Finally, the lead dancers move to the end of the line—my left side—as a new couple assumes the lead and the dance and music begins again.

For me, social dance like Fandango is indeed spiritual—one of several regular spiritual practices in my life. An evening of social dancing provides a measure of myself and my relationship with others. It sometimes involves risk: do I really want to dance with a particular partner, what will the dance be like if I do? Anne Morrow Lindbergh is right: dancing asks for openness, not fear; dancing lets love in. If the dance is good, one need not ask if one is loved in return. It may be the same choreography we repeat each time we do the dance, but no two realizations are the same, even with the same group of dancers. Each danced event is unique, just as each life event is unique.

Dancing is enjoyable, but is not only entertainment. During the days immediately following 9-11, I had to dance. I had to affirm that I was still whole and that connections to others in the world still existed. I needed the hope and renewal of dance.

The New Year is a time of promises and resolutions. Sometimes those resolutions are to keep doing what we are already doing, but often they involve taking on new activities, and especially new care of our bodies—to exercise more, to eat or drink less, to loose extra holiday pounds. For some of us, dancing may be the resolution that puts us in better relationship with our ourselves and our surroundings during the coming year.

Any of us can be an artist. Any of us can dance, actually and metaphorically.

Any of us can explore different ways of growing spiritually, of experiencing the divine in ourselves and in the universe. May each of us know that place of dance in which we dispel fear and live in love.

My friends, I hope that we have the honor of dancing with each other in the coming year.

Deviating from our usual worship tradition, we will not have a spoken prayer after the sermon today. Instead, we will experience “Fandango,” some of us as dancers, some as observers. Let the dance be our prayer, at the end of which we will take a few seconds of silence before our final hymn.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2001, Barbara Coeyman.  All rights reserved.