Sometimes you just gotta dance: Physical expressiveness in worship.

Jesus said to them: "Unbind him, and let him go."

To Dance or Not to Dance

A Manhattan-born Friends minister traveled to northwest Alaska and attended a series of services conducted by an old friend of his. The services were held at the Quaker meetinghouse and were well attended. After the message on the final evening of the week-long series, the song leader led the congregants in a song titled: "Dance Like David Danced." It was already past midnight and only about forty attenders remained. The Manhattan-born minister invited the group to form a circle around the room and dance the hora, "like David would have danced," he said. After all, when singing about dancing, dance! So they did. One by one, the worshipers filed through the church door to make their way back home. Exhausted but elated, an elderly Eskimo woman squeezed the minister's hand and said: "We haven't danced here like that since 1902!"

1902. That was the year Friends missionaries Robert and Carrie Samms returned home on their first furlough. From the time the Samms arrived in Kotzebue Sound north of the Arctic Circle in 1897, there have been Quakers among the Inuit (Eskimos). Within a decade, nearly 100 percent of those in the area had converted to some form of Christianity, the predominant form being the Religious Society of Friends. Several factors contributed to this, not the least of which was timing. Walrus and bowhead whale populations were being depleted by heavy hunting in the Sound and the caribou were nearly extinct. With the 1897 gold rush on the Kobuk River came new diseases, and epidemics hit the Inuit hard. They were experiencing a crisis of great magnitude and their traditional deities were unable to relieve their suffering. Even the local shamans were regularly ridiculed by an Inuit man named Uyaraq whom the Moravians had introduced to Christianity. (1)

However, it appears that along with education and the Christian gospel, the Samms were also staunchly committed to the conventional austerity of turn-of-the-century Quakerism. Like other missionaries working in the Arctic, they urged the indigenous to abandon their ancient burial customs; they attacked polygamy and promoted Christian marriage. In addition, one dare not cloud the Inner Light with tobacco smoke. Drinking and gambling were also verboten.

And dancing.

Drumming and dancing had been a regular practice for generations. Dancing could involve couples or a group, or it might be simply a moving of one's hands and body while standing in a given location. A favorite winter activity, dancing was an occasion for community gathering and even for poorer families to participate with the well-to-do. Dances were sometimes a form of mimicry, or a means to narrate a particular event; in this case dancing was not only an expression of emotion, or a rousing form of amusement. It was speech. (2)

"We haven't danced like that since...."

What happens to someone who must speak, but whose voice is silenced? And are all voices vocalized or vocalizable? Perhaps there is a language that can only be spoken with tongue silent, a language that moves and stretches, that touches and leaps. This language would at the same time be much more simple and more complex than the languages we form with our lips. Yet, as American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham once remarked, dance is stupendously simple and that is why it is so difficult for moderns to comprehend.

Speech in My Skin

Liturgy is much more than the words uttered in the Pater Noster, just as dance is much more than one choreographed step. It is much more simple than this; beneath the words and behind the sounds it is a kind of speech--verbal, yes, but also a non-verbal somatic speech. Therefore, it is more difficult to comprehend, since our evaluative attention is often misdirected. Friends have intuitively known and have affirmed since their mid-seventeenth century origins that worship is more than forms and words; indeed, if there is a cherished hallmark of Quaker religious self-identity, this is it. This conviction has given rise to some insightful reflections by Thomas Kelly, Caroline Stephens, and Douglas Steere, among others, on the experience of worship, spiritual growth, and the possibility of interfaith worship grounded in silence. Of course, the practice of silence in Christian worship is not limited to Friends. The liturgical manuals of United Methodists, Episcopalians, American Baptists, and Roman Catholics all i nclude directives for silence in key moments of the liturgy. Buddhists have practiced contemplative silence for over twenty-three centuries. This is not to say that there is uniformity in either the way in which silence is received/accepted or with how silence is appropriated/"used" by worshipers in these varied traditions. There is not.

Nevertheless, while most Christian groups employing silence in corporate worship integrate that silence into a rich collection of performative action that includes a full range of sensual stimulation and physical expressiveness, traditional Quaker worship does not. Although the traditional ritual pattern of a completely "unprogrammed" worship--expectant waiting in silence, no prepared sermon, no formal liturgy, vocal ministry prompted by spirit leading--is no longer Quakers' only form, a long history of informality and suppression of physicality in worship informs much present practice and understanding.

To be sure, silence is not an easily acquired discipline nor does it offer a clear and straightforward message, and it is for this reason that silence is in many ways an ideal practice and response to the ambiguity of our time. The increasingly popular non-partisan "moment of silence" may give one space to reflect on work that remains to be done or to satisfy a need to relax and gather one's thoughts. Benign. However, silence as a spiritual practice may be far more terrifying than comforting, exposing us to the cavernous echo of our earnestly offered prayers returning to us in our own voice; it may convince us more of the absence of God--even of God's indifference--than of God's presence. Silence may in fact be the language of the alone-in-the-world. (3)

I have elsewhere claimed that Quakers have a tendency toward "liturgical restrictivism." Fortunately, while on the whole still rather informal, "programmed" Quakers are generally open to a much wider range of expressiveness in worship than are their traditionalist counterparts who may be more theologically liberal, but who are considerably less liturgically imaginative. By "liturgical restrictivism" I mean that there are limits placed on the expressions permitted in traditional corporate worship. Speaking and non-speaking, standing when speaking, sitting when silent; some singing. Spirit-led spontaneity trumps intentional preparation. Again, there is much happening in the silent non-speaking, and it is not my intention to dismiss it as insignificant or to demean its simplicity. However, if we consider the full range of human expression, the variety of patterns of communication, physical fleshy speech as well as verbal speech, then traditional Quaker decorum in worship risks constraining the human spirit by si lencing the voice of the human body.

Sometimes you just gotta dance.

Certainly, there are Friends who dance! Some yearly meeting gatherings include folk dancing, and music, and Friends famously engage their bodies in humanitarian service (but, of course, in this essay I am thinking of "dance" in a broader, more metaphoric way). Seventeenth-century Quaker theologian Robert Barclay recounted the experience of worshipers who, in the power of God, wrestled to "overcome the evil in themselves." "Every individual will be strongly exercised as in a day of battle, and thereby trembling and a motion of body will be upon most, if not upon all, which, as the power of truth prevails, will from pangs and groans end with a sweet sound of thanksgiving and praise. And from this the name of Quakers, i.e., Tremblers, was first reproachfully cast upon us." (4)

Yet there is a troubling disconnect between mind/spirit and epidermis in much traditional unprogrammed worship, a disconnect that often results in a casual dismissal of the ritual practice of other traditions as "mere" or "dead." What Augustine called "visible words"--the sacraments--are ordinarily rejected as "unnecessary," frivolous, or, in some cases, "impediments to faith." (5) Barclay speaks of worship as "being gathered from all visibles." (6) Color and texture, celebration and ceremony are painted over with a dull gray. Friedrich von Hugel, a Catholic lay theologian, pointedly challenged Friends on what he saw as an unhealthy spiritualism that misattributed inspirations to direct spiritual revelation, that ignored its own dependency upon historical antecedents, and that reduced worship to a function of the brain alone. "This Puritan averseness to the physical, the sensuous, the dispersive, the 'natural' in all its degrees and kinds, develops and involves an objectively wider intolerance than do any of the historic, institutional creeds." (7)

Throughout his many writings, Hugel was singularly concerned about religion's fullness and attempted to acknowledge the complexity of concrete historical existence. He saw the worship and theology of Friends as seeking a minimum, the core essence of reality. This was "spirit"; after all, didn't Jesus acknowledge that his true worshipers would worship in spirit and in truth? William Penn captures this sentiment in his No Cross, No Crown: "religion fell from experience to tradition, and worship from power to form, from life to letter... [it became] a dull and insipid formality, made up of corporeal bowings and cringings, garments and furnitures, perfumes, voices, and music fitter for the reception of some earthly prince than the heavenly worship of the one true and immortal God, who is an eternal, invisible Spirit." (8)

However, I do not think there is anything truthful about reducing all of reality's substance into a single mental/spiritual point, particularly not in worship. On the contrary, we do not know and experience the world as a singular essence or as an abstract principle, but rather we know and experience in and through and with the world's multiplicity and physical manifestations. Likewise God. Hugel argues that in Christianity, as well as in its Jewish religious and Greek philosophical antecedents, there is "no search for a minimum, but there are various approximations to a maximum; no one abstraction, but various concretions; no braininess, but a large subconsciousness." (9) It was this incarnational point of view that enabled him to claim that we love God "in and through" objects and not apart from them. The adoration of God, the experience of worship, the practice of prayer, these are not truthful if they exclude the most significant dimensions of who we are as historical, fleshy, sensual creatures, who know, experience, and speak with our bodies as well as with our minds.

Louis-Marie Chauvet would agree: "Humans do not exist except as corporality whose concrete place is always their own bodies. Corporality is the body's very speech." (10) Chauvet's work is an effort to re-read the Christian tradition through a sacramental lens; such a reading necessarily emphasizes physicality and the role of fleshy speech in ways that are not as apparent in the often unbalanced emphasis upon "spiritual" worship. "Any word which seeks to be expressed in a kind of transparent purity is an illusion; no word escapes the necessity of a laborious inscription in a body, a history, a language, a system of signs, a discursive network. Such is the law. The law of mediation. The law of the body." (11)

One of the principal "laws of the body" is that we are composed of (and return to) the material of the earth. Because of this, these laws are the means whereby we are both rooted in the world, in historical existence, and enabled to overcome the dichotomy of subject-object differentiation. Interiority and exteriority are united in flesh; says Chauvet: "The body is the primordial place of every symbolic joining of the 'inside' and the 'outside.'" (12)

In fact, I would suggest that by viewing the body in this way, we may address the perennial dilemma of the mystics. Their quandary has always been ineffability, the inability to convey adequately with words their experience of the divine. The one who has stood in the presence of God often feels ill-equipped to describe the event. Dozens of these mystics have left written accounts of their experiences; these descriptions often more closely resemble a kind of poetry or allegory. If necessity is the mother of invention, then ineffability is the mother of metaphor. Theresa of Avila's interior castle, and the anonymous mystic's "cloud of unknowing," press language into new configurations in order to compensate for the failure of ordinary description. How much more could we increase the capacity for description and expression if we were to relinquish the need to speak with words? Perhaps the language necessary to express one's encounter with God is already present in our skin. "Without an articulate body, without facial movement which genuinely reflects states of mind, without a torso which responds to the self and relates to external events, people cannot participate in their world or in their own emotional lives." (13) Gesture and movement, breathing and embracing, stillness and rhythm, weeping and caressing, silence and dancing. These provide a means to speak honestly and fully in worship.

And more. The pottery wheel, the piano, the canvas, the workbench, and the architect's drawings may also be places we turn when the failure of our words requires us to search the language of our body. Our fingers and our eyes are capable of producing and exploring as much speech as our vocal cords and our lips. To restrict the language of a soaring spirit or a broken heart to the use or non-use of words alone, is to leave Lazarus bound in burial clothes...new life is so very close, if only it could be touched.

"Unbind him, and let him go."

No Friends meetinghouse will ever rival a Chartres, but in recent years some Quakers have begun examining more intentionally and more appreciatively those things frowned upon in their Puritan past, the arts. Of course there have always been those who explored the visual and performing arts, but not as an integral part of traditional corporate worship. William Penn, for example, dismissed amusements, recreation, and the arts as distractions from the pursuit of things spiritual. "These were never invented, but by that mind which had first lost the joy and ravishing delights of God's holy presence." (14) Yet, if a renewed interest in the bodily language of the arts is underway, can dancing -- the movements, gestures, and fleshy speech of full human expression--be far behind?

I would be naive to claim that the practice of liturgy qua liturgy necessarily preserves and informs an embodied vision. Chauvet repudiates those whose liturgical practice veils or encourages a "necrotic fascination" with the entombed body of Jesus; rather than being life-giving, this fascination turns away from life and moves toward death. Liturgy can ossify. It may become oppressive and disconnected from the life and faith of believing communities. It may be incoherent in our present context if it is not permitted to grow, mature, and speak honestly about ourselves and the world. Liturgy can be mistaken for magic. Liturgy can be misused as a means to communicate established structures of power and to ritually reinforce these structures in the minds and imaginations of a congregation and thus misuse the life-giving symbols of God. (15) In addition, there is a serious historical disconnect when liturgy is nothing more than flirtation with every passing trend, a contemporary "show-and-tell." If it is practice d simply as a means to impose a past vibrancy onto a template for the present, then Penn is right, it has become a form devoid of life. Death is in the air. However, liturgy's proximity to the movements of the body, to fleshy speech, to sensuality, does give it a marked advantage over purely mental or "spiritual" worship. Such worship places us before God by keeping us close to the fruits of creation that still glisten with grace and life.

Transformative Dance

Worship is complex and multidimensional. Among other things, it is a corporate practice of (re)membering, (re)enacting, (in)bodying; it is an honest naming of ourselves and our world before God, a celebration of life touched by the divine, and a participatory pedagogy. Good liturgy assists us by creating sensual space for the corporate enactment of faith. Liturgy, at its best, places us honestly before each other and before the face of God. To be honest about ourselves we must acknowledge the complexities and ambiguities of our human existence, and this acknowledgment is absorbed into and expressed through our words, gestures, silence, and movement. Since we do not live as disembodied words, voices who simply recount the operations of our minds, worship that is honest about ourselves must integrate word and action, sound and silence, touch and taste, light and beauty. The colors and sounds of creation belong to God; by offering them in worship we name ourselves as creatures, as stewards, even as alive.

Sometimes you just gotta dance.

Pamela Dickey Young has written that "in Christian worship, word and action have the potential to be not mere word and action, but enactment and embodiment charged with the presence of God. The story is told, but the story is also symbolized." (16) She is suggesting that the "story" is not only breathed into words, but that this story literally takes on a shape in its being symbolized. This shape, Young claims, is in its enactment and embodiment "charged with the presence of God." One cannot overlook the explicit incarnationalism in this statement. Indeed, the word and action of God, enacted and embodied (in the Christ), not only issues from God, but continues to be "charged" and animated by divine presence. And, as significantly, word and divine action are not first of all breathed into propositions and texts, but in worship these are breathed into flesh--the body of Christ (the living community of faith)--and this body is "charged with presence" as it enacts the story of faith.

When liturgy is understood as more than simply the words or "mere ritual" but as a corporate practice of (re)enactment, (in)bodying, and (re)membering the community's formative story, then some attention must be given to worship as a kind of performance. In English, "performance" connotes both doing and pretending. This dual meaning will trouble some with its apparent lack of integrity, its subtle duplicity. W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis have both noted that "pretending" or "acting at something" is not really hypocrisy, but a means whereby one either acknowledges honestly the acting nature of all humanity (Auden), or whereby overtime, one actually becomes what is being imitated (Lewis).

Tom Driver's work on ritual is helpful at this point: "A performance, being never purely mental nor entirely imaginary, is a material as well as a rational event. It takes place in an environment both physical and mental, both actual and imaginary, both immanent and transcendent. In performance the body that does is of no less importance than the mind that knows, for performance is the unity of doing and observing." (17) However, it is this double sense of performance that actually suggests an integration of various dimensions of our humanity. Instead of rejecting performance as inauthentic or dishonest, Driver suggests that performance is necessary to integration, and thus, to integrity. If we join this insight to Chauvet's, then the body itself is the locus for the "joining of the 'inside' and the 'outside'" and the performing body unites the doing and the observing. The performance itself begins the process of healing the divisions that give rise to alienation. To use Victor Turner's language, this is "tra nsformative performance," a performance that transforms through its ability to unmask contradictions in self and world, that challenges cultural pretensions, and that names arid aFfirms what society denies or suppresses. (18)

I would add to Driver's comments that acknowledging the performative quality of worship and liturgy helps us understand the importance of enacting the community's eschatological vision. "Practicing" or "pretending" the reign of God is no child's playground game. It is, in fact, the enactment and embodiment of that vision. This performance may well be one of the two most subversive acts the church can undertake. By assembling in the name of the Embodied One and "pretending," we have already begun to give birth to a new world.

A traditional Quaker critique of this view would focus on how the truly important location for the embodiment of such a vision is not in the liturgy, nor in a theological position, nor in a particular form of worship; rather, the enactment of such a vision must be foremost in the lives of the believing community as they confront the suffering, injustice, and need of the world. In response to such a critique I can only say "Amen." Reflection on the significance of the liturgy, as with other theological themes, is seductive and can cause us to disregard the concrete realities of communities and people, and avoid the challenges of commitment and social engagement. The other subversive act the church may undertake, of course, is to leave the assembly, go back home, go to work, go to school, go to the homeless shelter, go to the cafe, and continue the "performance" by doing and embodying what has been seen to be true in worship.

Conclusion

The Christian tradition is filled with images of bodily affirmation, although an ascetic impulse has often obscured this fact. Eucharistic "body and blood," baptism, bodily resurrection, naming ourselves "body of Christ." References to dying--such as in baptism and Eucharist--are inextricably related to new creation, being raised again to new life, a life that is not a prize for later, but a gift of grace that re-characterizes and re-narrates our life in this present time.

My own tradition, the Religious Society of Friends, has much to contribute in conversations about worship, sacraments, and the human experience of God, particularly in view of our traditional emphasis upon the spiritual reality lying beneath the appearance of forms. At the same time, over the past 350 years a strong attachment has developed to a largely exclusive ritual form of worship that has resulted in "liturgical restrictivism." (19) Likewise, an essentially unchallenged interpretation of the non-necessity of physical expressiveness in worship has prevented Friends from hearing the desire of the human heart to create, to celebrate, to move, to "dance like David danced," in the context of our corporate worship.

Unbind Lazarus and let him go!

Over coffee not long ago, a friend of mine expressed reservation over the swelling number of Quakers in East Africa. Like many Christian denominations, Quakers' most significant growth and greatest numerical density is now non-North American. At present, more Quakers live in Kenya than in the rest of the world combined. My friend was worried about whether these new converts were exhibiting proper "Quaker distinctives" ("theology," business process, and a Quakerly propriety in the practice of worship).

"Kenyan Quakers are so, so..." the concerned Friend paused to find the correct word, "...African!"

Indeed; thank God.

Even now there is a generational struggle in some of these Friends meetings, a struggle over inculturation. Must Quakers be reserved seventeenth-century Englishmen? Must all be neo-Platonist? Catholics too wrestle with the question of how Roman the Mass must be in order to remain the Mass. Can it be Japanese or Cuban or Nigerian? Some older and established leaders in Kenya want to practice Quaker worship "like the missionaries taught us."

Yet a number of Kenyan youth want to dance.

And why not? God's Spirit moving over the waters brought forth color and sound and texture and movement. Before the first couple uttered a word, in their simple existence as embodied creatures God declared them very good. These divine movements in creation resulted in life. In the experience of new creation, God's Spirit is moving still.

Sometimes you just gotta dance.

Notes

(1.) Ernest S. Burch, Jr., "The Inupiat and the Christianization of Arctic Alaska," Etudes/Inuit/Studies 18 (1994): 81-108.

(2.) See Norman A. Chance, The Inupiat and Arctic Alaska: An Ethnography of Development (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990). The standard work recounting the Quaker presence in Alaska is Arthur O. Roberts, Tomorrow is Growing Old: Stories of the Quakers in Alaska (Newburg, Ore.: Barclay Press, 1978).

(3.) I have addressed the question of silence's ambiguity in "Ritual Management of Presence and Absence: the Liturgical Significance of Silence," Quaker Religious Thought 28 (January 1998): 31-42, and of silence's appropriateness in response to tragedy in "The Silence of Holy Saturday," Friends Journal 48 (March 2002): 12-13.

(4.) Robert Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, XI, [section]8. First published in 1675.

(5.) Augustine, Treatise on the Gospel of John, LXXX, 3.

(6.) Barclay, Apology, XI, [section]8.

(7.) Friedrich von Hugel, Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, second series (London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1926), 85. For more on this theme see my "Historically Ungrateful? Friedrich von Hugel's Critique of the Quakers," Friends Quarterly 31 (October 1998): 165-74.

(8.) William Penn, No Cross, No Crown (York, England: William Sessions, Ltd., 1981), 26-27 (11.9). This title was first published in 1682.

(9.) Hugel, Essays and Addresses, 86.

(10.) Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: a Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 146. The emphasis is in the original. Chauvet has co-edited a fine collection of essays related to our theme: Louis-Marie Chauvet and Francois Kabasele Lumbala, Liturgy and the Body Concilium (London: SCM Press, 1995).

(11.) Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 151.

(12.) Ibid., 147. The emphasis is in the original.

(13.) Jamake Highwater, Dance: Rituals of Experience, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 35.

(14.) Penn, No Cross, No Crown, 236-37 (XV.7).

(15.) See Pamela Dickey Young, Re-Creating the Church: Communities of Eros (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2000), 113-15.

(16.) Young, Re-Creating the Church, 109.

(17.) Tom F. Driver, Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 81. The emphasis is mine.

(18.) Driver, Liberating Rites, 190; Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986), 157.

(19.) It should be noted that a "programmed" pastoral expression of Friends has existed for over 150 years and represents the largest number of Friends in North America if not the world.

David L. Johns is Assistant Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Religion. He is an editorial advisor to Quaker Religious Thought and is completing a new book: Mysticism and Ethics in the Theology of Friedrich von Hugel.