Attending a conference on religion in Japan, Joseph Campbell overheard another American delegate, a social philosopher from New York, say to a Shinto priest, "We've been now to a great many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines. But I don't get your ideology. I don't get your theology."
The Japanese priest paused as though in deep thought, and then slowly shook his head. "I think we don't have ideology," he said. "We don't have theology. We dance."
So, today, shall we dance?
The question for many of us is all well and good if we're alone in our living room boogying YMCA with the Village People full blast.
But here's the deal: Putting on my dancing shoes is not about impressing anyone or trying to win some reality show called, "so (middle-aged-white-guy) you think you can dance."
I just finished three days in Anaheim, California at the
Religious Education Congress with 40,000 of my closest friends. In my talks, I invited everyone to
the dance. And told them a story that happened a few years ago at
our Vashon Island Strawberry Festival Dance. For a weekend each July, main street is closed. Big Band standards (from our own Portage Fil-Harmonic) permeate the air. The street is chock-full, old and young, inelegant and fluid, children and children at heart. The dancing unencumbered, unabashed and joyful. Everyone celebrating this day. Celebrating this life, as a half-moon smiled down from the southern sky. When the rock 'n rollers took the stage, my son charges to the front of the pack, becoming an exuberant explosion of arms and legs and neck and chest and feet and hands and fingers! I have no idea what he calls it, but like King David, he danced with all his might!
As people began to point at this "out of the ordinary display," I was acutely aware of the knee-jerk need to "protect" my son from embarrassment or from the blow of public opinion. I saw him as someone who needed to be rescued or spared. Thankfully, I didn't give in to that knee-jerk. Because what I really felt... was pride. Delighted that he still had it within him to live wholehearted and unabashed and unashamed. I needed to bask in it, knowing that the world will do it's best to squeeze that out of him, and each of us sooner or later.
"Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?" Eugene O'Neill
Watching my son reminded me of a Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760) story. The founder of the Chassidic movement, the Rabbi was asked: "Why is it that Chassidim burst into song and dance at the slightest provocation? Is this the behavior of a healthy, sane individual?"
The Baal Shem Tov responded with a story: Once, a musician came to town--a musician of great but unknown talent. He stood on a street corner and began to play. Those who stopped to listen could not tear themselves away, and soon a large crowd stood enthralled by the glorious music whose equal they had never heard. Before long they were moving to its rhythm, and the entire street was transformed into a dancing mass of humanity.
A deaf man walking by wondered: Has the world gone mad? Why are the townspeople jumping up and down, waving their arms and turning in
circles in middle of the street?
"Chassidim," concluded the Baal Shem Tov, "are moved by the melody that issues forth from every creature in God's creation. If this makes them appear mad to those with less sensitive ears, should they therefore cease to dance?"
Today, it's not that we "choose" to dance, so much as we "choose" to give up being afraid. We give up being afraid by responding to this melody--or love of the the Beloved, the voice of GRACE--that tells us we are more than our labels. Our dance is the interplay with that voice. Because we are enough, our hearts are alive.
Former Trappist George Fowler writes, "I have come to realize that a mother lode of strength lies waiting in all of us, unmined gold yearning to gleam in the sunlight."
How does it begin? What allow us to put on our dancing shoes?
This is not easy because our instinct requires instructions.
I teach writing. And the first lesson is the most difficult: Write. Write, without editing, censoring, rewriting or revising. Simply write.
In one of my sessions this past weekend a young woman confessed, "I wondered when you were going to move on from the laughter and move on to the more important stuff." I wanted to tell her, "That was the important stuff." Because that's just it isn't it? Our dance--a wholehearted interplay with life--happens when we give up our need to quench the spirit.
When we laugh from the gut.
When we see with our heart.
When we taste with our imagination.
When we touch this moment with our delight.
One Saturday, a mother asked her young son to polish her Sunday shoes. When he finished, she handed him fifty cents for a job well done.
Sunday morning, slipping on her shoes, she felt a block. Reaching in, she removed a wadded paper. Inside the paper she found fifty cents. On the paper, in her son's lettering, "Dear mom, here is your money. I done it for love." Our dance comes from that place. We have no one to impress and nothing to prove.
Which means I did not listen to my limitations. The limitations of --
Fear or Impatience or Insecurity or Pain or Loss
Or, in the words of Kitty Lunn, dance teacher from a wheel chair, "The dancer inside me doesn't know or care that I fell down the stairs and have
a spinal cord injury. She just wants to keep on dancing."
While working as a family physicians in a Native American hospital in
the Southwest, Carl Hammerschlag was introduced to a patient named Santiago, a Pueblo priest and clan chief, who asked him where he had learned how to heal. Hammerschlag responded almost by rote, rattling off his medical education, internship, and certification. The old man replied, "Do you know how to dance?"
To humor Santiago, Hammerschlag shuffled his feet at the priest's bedside.
Despite his condition, Santiago got up and demonstrated the proper steps. "You must be able to dance if you are to heal people," he admonished the young doctor. "I can teach you my steps, but you will have to hear your own music."
We dance for laughter,
we dance for tears,
we dance for madness,
we dance for fears,
we dance for hopes,
we dance for screams,
we are the dancers,
we create the dreams.
(Recommendation: For inspiration, watch War Dance, a documentary about war refugees in Uganda, who demonstrate the necessity of dancing even amidst the most trying circumstances. The story follows children from the Acholi tribe, now war orphans representing the Patongo Primary School in a national music competition, where the children hope to compete and celebrate the power of music and dance to heal our deepest, emotional wounds. --shineglobal -- Craig Detweiler) 
