I HOPE YOU DANCE
by Mary-Ella Holst
August 12, 2001
I know that a sermon is supposed to begin lightly, with a joke perhaps, designed to draw you in, to engage you. Once engaged we get down to the serious stuff, to the deeper meanings of life. Well, I am going to try to invert that process. I am going to lay it right out, this serious stuff, and then riff a bit with anecdote and lore. My subject this morning is the mind-body split. Here's the serious stuff in five sentences:
Our culture with its history of patriarchy and hierarchy has valued the mind, or intellect, as serious, worthy, and important while dismissing the body as incidental to the progress of civilization, human good, and personal fulfillment. Western religion has played a significant role in devaluing the body, especially in its attitudes about sexuality and gender. It began with Eve, evil, vile Eve, and has not ended. Paradoxically, a state of great religious value is grace. Grace inevitably is defined as those times, often fleeting, when all aspects of our being are functioning as one; grace also is a word we also associate with the body.
So here we are in August thinking of our bodies in relation to how we look (or maybe used to look) in bathing suit. Meanwhile, the lyrics to "I Hope You Dance," a country and western song performed by Lee Ann Womack, have been printed and packaged as a book with a CD. This book has appeared on the New York Times best-seller list during most of the summer in the "Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous" category. The song has hit a nerve in our culture.
The key phrase in the song is: "If you ever have the choice/to sit it out or dance/I hope you dance." I agree with this simple instruction but choosing to dance is not quite as simple as it sounds. Whether as fact or as metaphor, dancing is a word carrying significant moral and social freight.
We are not speaking here about watching someone else dance, no critical intellectualizations of the meaning of ballet or modern dance performances by others. We are speaking of standing up, stepping out onto the floor and giving our bodies over to the music and without much thinking at all, trusting to the music... and dancing. The control of our behavior shifts from the head to the body.
We all have personal stories to tell about our experiences with dancing. When I was a young girl, just about to be a teen-ager, I lived in an extended family that included my grandmother. One afternoon just the two of us were at home and we were listening to the radio and I began to dance. My grand mother watched for a while and then said, "Mary-Ella, you dance with everything but your feet."
But my grandmother didn't say I wasn't dancing.
Many of us enjoyed or endured dancing lessons when we were young. These lessons fell into two categories: As youngsters we might have had lessons in performance dances like ballet or tap dancing. As we grew older we may have been introduced to "social" dancing, that is, (dread and anxiety), dancing with a partner of the OPPOSITE sex. The sexes traditionally have responded in different ways to this experience: Girls with obsessive concern about their appearance and boys with a terse "ick". Of course, there were always those who seemed to step out on the floor with confidence and seemed to know exactly what to do. They were generally in the minority; the rest of us were pretty uptight about it all, our social fears transmitted directly to our bodies. Even so, there were moments when, perhaps, we seemed to be dancing and hope was intertwined with the music.
Just as each of us has a personal history in relation to dancing so do cultures and religion.
Dance, especially, "folk-dancing" carries messages and values from one generation to the next. There is something irrevocably haunting about some folk dances. I think in particular of Morris dancing, the ancient remnant of a culture that pre-dates the spread of Christianity through the British Isles. Or the dances of the Scotsmen with their bag-pipes skirling out of the mists of geography and time. And what are we to make of the repressed and subversive Irish jig with its description as "body of ice; feet of fire". When 19th century slave owners, fearful of messages of rebellion and uprisings, banned the use of drums among the slaves, tap dancing emerged. Now, think of the Charleston, Swing, the Jitterbug, and Rock and Roll. Each has in its time proved a sure way to separate one from one's parents and to make a statement about independence and the control of one's own body and behavior...
Christianity has not been especially welcoming to dance using words like "primitive" and "pagan". Religion can codify dance and call it pageantry. Pageantry is perhaps the most strictly controlled and tradition-bound form of dance. In a reaction to pageantry that was equally associated with monarchy, many protestant sects ban both pageantry and social dancing altogether. Of particular interest to us, as Americans and, as we sit here in this sanctuary, are the Puritans.
We, especially on our Unitarian side, are the direct religious descendants of the Puritans, a fact that often startles those new to our liberal faith. In fact, our Puritan ancestors bequeathed us the two current traits of which we are especially proud, our intellectualism and our focus on congregational governance. However along with Harvard College and the town meeting, there are other qualities and traits about our puritan heritage that have simmered along just under the surface, occasionally boiling up in exasperation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously described Unitarianism as "corpse-cold" and went on to develop transcendentalism, a philosophy that looks more to our total being as grounded in intellect and nature. It was damned and feared by traditionalists as a radical concept, with the twin dangers of rationalism and a return to paganism. Doesn't Christian dogma, after all, speak of dominion over nature? And who in this Emersonian construct will dominate over nature? Even more radically, no one. Rather, the ground shifts to one's own nature integrated and welcomed into our understanding of ourselves as human beings. This is not, as you can see by reading the papers or watching the news, a 19th century issue but a on-going religious and political battle. Control of nature, including who shall control our bodies is a personal and political issue today as ever.
Emerson, on a metaphoric level, was calling for a little more dancing, a more graceful experience of mind and body.
And, how have we at All Souls responded? A recent survey by Sojourner's Magazine that focused on the Arts and Religion reports that the average worship service is 70 minutes long and includes 24 minutes of music. If one includes the prelude and postlude, All Souls seems to be right on target. But wait! 30% of the respondents are in congregations where dance performances took place in the worship service during the year as well. Are we still Puritans or what?
What is the history of dance at All Souls?
Many years ago, before Forrest was called to this pulpit, Walter Kring was our senior, and usually sole, minister. Walter, a nationally recognized potter, was friendly to and supportive of the arts in many ways. When Walter Klauss arrived as Musical Director, he was very much encouraged by Dr. Kring to expand the music program and thus, what grew to be Musica Viva was initiated. One time that I can recall, it was decided to incorporate dance into the Sunday morning worship service. Now, we are speaking of a time when there was a gentleman in the congregation, a graduate of Princeton's famous Class of 1917, who still wore a detachable-starched shirt collar each Sunday morning. This also was a time when some members of the congregation could remember our ushers wearing morning coats as they accompanied you to your seat.
So it is spring! It is the Easter season, perhaps in 1977, and dance is to be included in our Sunday morning worship. A rising, young contemporary dance performance group is engaged. The congregation is seated. The organ plays. The troupe carrying great white silk flags begins it entry down the center aisle. And then the star enters. He is carried in by supporting dancers, high above our heads, his arms outstretched, and -- he is wearing only a Christ-like loin cloth about the size of that starched white collar. But wait, this story is not complete until you know that the star of this pageant also had half of his body painted blue.
Our dance history in the sanctuary has been somewhat halted since. There is the pageantry of Christmas in our annual church school pageant and for a number of years, we did some lay-led services on Good Friday that included the choreography and performance of a very talented dancer, Linda St. Ambrogio. Can we be dancers?
Throughout next year we will be celebrating the 25th Anniversary o four Minister of Music, Walter Klauss's arrival at All Souls. In preparation for this celebration I have been interviewing Wally and I would like to share one of the stories he tells with you.
In 1984 Wally began a series of concerts in Zimbabwe. While appearing there he stayed with his brother Rudi and his family. The air trip had not been easy for Wally. Like many organists, he can experience problems in the small of his back. Playing the organ requires very rapid movements not only of the arms and hands but also of the legs and feet, During the course of playing, both legs may be without the support of the pedals for grounding. When this occurs, the lower back is a fulcrum balancing the entire weight of the body. This pressure can occur many times in the playing of a single, complex work. Over a lifetime, it may take its toll. So the twenty hours in an airplane seat had been difficult requiring rest and chiropractic assistance to ease the pain. His regimen leading up to the concert had been practice, treatment and bed rest. This had not gone without notice in the Rudi Klauss household.
At the time, Rudi's family had a housekeeper, Catherine, a Zimbabwean national, who became increasingly agitated as the concert approached. Finally, she could contain her concern no longer and blurted out, "Mr. Klauss has to give a concert! How is going to be able to dance?"
Of course, Catherine was correct. There is no better description of Walter Klauss at the organ than, "He dances." In a real sense his art relies upon his ability to transmit his knowledge and training to his hands and feet without being conscious that he is doing so.
Why were the Puritans then, and the puritanical impulse that remains today throughout our culture, so opposed to dance? What is wrong with the joy of dancing at a wedding reception or gliding around the floor in an aura of romantic impulse? Shouldn't we all be dancing as often and as gracefully as we can?
Dance, of course, is often a metaphor for any activity that involves the body and movement.
"If you ever have the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance" could be applied to almost any situation in our lives: voting, taking an adventurous trip, volunteering with one of our outreach programs, accepting a new job offer, and, perhaps most upsetting to religious conservatives, acting on our sexual natures.
When we make a choice we exhibit out values. During the next year, Adult Education will be offering, Our Whole Lives, the Unitarian Universalist Association's new curriculum about adult sexuality. Mark Loustau, a member of the Young Adults, and I will be leading these sessions. Neither the tone nor the content of the curriculum could be described as "Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous" rather we will focus on relationships, communication, and values.
The one statement, more than any other that originally drew me to the Unitarian Universalist faith was made by Waldemar Argow in a sermon I heard him preach, probably 45 years ago. He said, "Don't tell me what you believe. Show me what you do and I will tell you what you believe."
What we do exhibits our values both to others and, if we are self-reflective, to our selves. We can not by intellect alone think our way to personal, social, or political progress. Nor can we sit life out and expect to happen onto grace. We need to venture out onto the dance floor. But what we seek must be a reflection of our values. To be graceful, to be grace-filled, there must be a congruity between what we claim to believe and how we behave. Otherwise, we are inevitably unsure, awkward. Grace is not there every day nor every time we make a move, but when it does occur, we feel its presence. If we can recognize the incongruities, heal the rift between our intellect and our bodies, our nature, we will discover behavior that is filled with both a graceful ease and a renewed power and joy in being alive... Everyday each of us has a choice, I hope you dance.