“The
Dancer, the Drummer, and the Divine”
Psalm 100
First Presbyterian
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
September 23, 2007
(I
am well aware that what follows does not constitute a sermon.
It was offered at worship on this day more as a reflection piece before
one of our members, Libby Nord, danced the crucifixion and then also the
resurrection, two interpretive pieces of liturgical dance.
It was part three of our series of September Sunday Celebrations in which
we have been lifting up the arts. Today’s
“celebration” was rhythm and dance…including a drummer who led us in
prayer by drumming, percussive xylophone, shakers, and dancing in the aisles to
African Psalms and other musical adventures!
Truly, this day was one of those “you had to be here” days, but, for
consistency, we are posting these reflections for our web members and visitors.
This, too, was true: “Surely the Lord was in this place.”)
It
is no secret, of course, that Cindy and I and the rest of the staff work closely
in preparing and shaping our worship, though it is just as true that none of us
knows exactly what will happen until it happens on Sunday morning.
We trust that God’s Spirit is in our midst as we craft and arrange and
that the same Spirit will be present at the time of our worship to confirm or
confound our plans, making of worship what it needs to be in the moment.
Having been away this past week,
hard at work and study on your behalf on the beach at the
So
let me say just these few things: what
we have been trying to do this month in our worship is to own up to the reality
that, as much as Presbyterians care about the life of the mind, as much as we
savor thinking and discussing, as much as we cherish rational discourse, as much
as we like to be in our heads, as much as we value “the Word” and thus also
“words,” if we are going to experience in our lives the beauty and
pathos and terror and joy of God and life, if we are going to experience
the divinization of our own lives…that is, to experience our own lives
as sacred and precious and as an integral part of the luminous web of creation
that accounts all life that way because God is all through it, all through us,
even as we ourselves are alive in God…then we need to employ all of our
senses…we need to use not only our minds but also our souls and our bodies.
So,
a few weeks ago, we were moved deeply by our celebration of music and song for,
sometimes, it is only music that can reach us.
Sometimes, the pain is so raw in us, the confusion so perplexing, the joy
so profound, that there are no words that can express or describe or help, but
only music. I cannot count the times
over the years that, having preached my heart out, people in the greeting line
after worship will say to me, “Wasn’t the music wonderful today?”
We understand in this congregation that music is not an accoutrement
to our worship, not an add-on or an adornment to the main event that in
Protestant worship often is considered to be the sermon, but that music is in
its own right a chalice containing the wine of the divine of which we are to
drink.
Last
week, with our celebration of the creative arts, we acknowledged that God is in
our right brain as much, and maybe more, if truth be told, as in our left brain.
The point of our worship is never simply to find out more about God.
The sanctuary is not a lecture hall.
The point of our worship is to discover more about ourselves, more within
ourselves, so that we may become more fully and truly human, which is God’s
great hope for our lives, and in that way, to experience God and divinity
in our own lives. The point of our
worship is not for us to become repositories of information about God, but to
join with God’s creative Spirit in the ongoing dance and danger and drama and
delight of creation that is still unfolding.
The creative arts help us to do that.
The future is not something “out there” toward which we are moving.
It is something we are creating a day at a time.
The creative arts, infused as they are with God’s creative Spirit,
become our collective conscience and consciousness along the way.
Today,
we are celebrating rhythm and dance. To
be honest, I long have considered the word “dance” to be one of the
scariest words in the English language.
Ask me to speak before thousands, and I will do my best.
Tell me to walk on hot coals, and I shall give it a try.
But do not ask me to dance. Please.
On those few occasions I have dared to do so, I have seen people pointing
at me and laughing.
But
I am beginning not to care. I have
been reading a book recently by a woman named Gabrielle Roth entitled Maps
to Ecstasy in which she makes the convincing case that freeing the body
leads inevitably to freeing the heart. So
many of us only tolerate our bodies…that is, if we do not have an outright
disgust for them. Often we see them
as our adversaries. I want to read a
little section of Roth’s book to you, where she says,
“The
first creative task is to free the body to experience the power of being…It is
first in that it is both where we must begin and what is most fundamental.
Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your
existence. It is your Bible, your
encyclopedia, your life story. Everything
that happens to you is stored and reflected in your body.
Your body knows; your body tells. The
relationship of your self to your body is indivisible, inescapable, unavoidable.
In the marriage of flesh and spirit, divorce is impossible, but that
doesn’t mean that the marriage is necessarily happy or successful.”
“So
the body is where the dancing path to wholeness must begin.
Only when you truly inhabit your body can you begin the healing journey.
So many of us are not in our bodies, really at home and vibrantly present
there. Nor are we in touch with the
basic rhythms that constitute our bodily life.
We live outside ourselves – in our heads, our memories, our longings
– absentee landlords of our own estate…”
“One
incident in my search always sticks out for me.
I ran into a rabbi in a shopping mall.
We got to talking and I asked, ‘Do Jews hate their bodies as much as
Catholics do?” He started to laugh
in mock shock, but then gave me a more quizzical look.
It seemed I’d hit on something close to him.
He told me that he just had buried his father, who also had been a rabbi.
He’d asked his father on his deathbed, ‘What was the most important
thing in your life, father? The
Torah?’ And the old man had
answered, ‘My body.’ ‘I was
stunned,’ his son now told me. He
stared past me in awkward silence and finally said, ‘I always thought my body
was just a vehicle for my mind: feed it, clothe it, and send it to Harvard.”
Roth
is helping me to see that dancing is something everyone can do…she even
describes how very old people confined to wheelchairs can dance.
Roth was once a classical dancer until an injury ended that.
And that is when her life’s work began…helping people to see that
there is no right and wrong way to dance, that everyone can do it, that it can
be a form of meditation, a window to the soul, a doorway to divinity, an entry
into ecstasy. She has identified the
five basic rhythms of life – flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness –
and we do not have time really for me to say anything about them…but, just
this week, I ordered and received a couple of CDs of music she has put together
betokening the five rhythms and I am going to start dancing in the morning
before I come to work…first in the privacy of my home but sometime…well, you
know of our “aging and saging” group that we have here that has become very
popular? I think I am going to start
another one and call it “dancing and prancing”…because I really am coming
to believe that until we are at home in our bodies, we are not at
home…anywhere…not with ourselves, not with others, not with God.
I
love to be in the presence of someone, like Libby, who is so at home in her
body…because people like Libby are so free, so expressive…in all of my years
of preaching, all of my hundreds of words about the crucifixion never have come
as close to the truth and power of it as Libby’s dancing of it…none of my
words about resurrection have conveyed the joy as does Libby’s dancing of
it…
“Dance,
then, wherever you may be; I am the Lord of the Dance, said He, And I’ll lead
you all, wherever you may be, And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.”
And
then – drumming. There is a
drumming workshop we are offering after worship today to which I hope many of
you will go. Through the centuries,
drumming has been a way to gather us into mystery and into the mystical nature
of life and God, a means of celebrating the essential, primal beat of life that
courses through all of God’s creation, the whole universe, and that is
reflected in the beat of our own heart…that is reflected in every wave
crashing onto the shore…God in every beat, in every wave…each one a paean to
life that was before us and will be after us and in which we now get to
contribute our part. We are going to
allow the drumbeat to lead us into prayer today…prayer without spoken
words…just being aware of the beat and all that it calls forth in us…and we
shall simply offer that to God and to the world for its healing, for our
healing.
I
love our worship and its traditions…I love our Presbyterian tradition…and I
do, as do many of us do, live by and are thrilled by words…and rightfully
so…and we try to say by our words what we mean about God and our lives…but
there is more…I know there is more and you know there is more…that
transcends words…that yearns for experience and
participation…that invites us to give our whole selves…soul
and body as well as mind…toward loving God, toward loving ourselves, toward
loving the world.
I
used to think that the dancer, the drummer, and the divine always lived outside
of me, that they were inaccessible to me. But,
you know what? They all live in each
of us…and so I invite you this morning and for the rest of your lives more
deeply into the adventure of letting them – the dancer, the drummer, the
divine - to shine in us, through us…for the sake of this world we love.
Amen.
This
morning, Libby will proclaim through the artistic medium of dance, the central
claim of the story of our faith…that death is never God’s final word…life
is…and that love is stronger than death…and that to live in love is to live
in freedom and joy…and that love never ends.
DANCING
THE CRUCIFIXION
Go to Dark
DANCING
THE RESURRECTION
Deck Thyself, My Soul, with Gladness arr. Mark Limburg
©
Copyright 2007 First Presbyterian Church