Religion needs to dance – freely

Mark Morford, a columnist for SF Gate, gets it just right in his "Does your religion dance? Behold, the most dangerous issue facing modern faith: it's inability to evolve, nakedly."

If you've never read Morford, his free-floating stream of consciousness writing style takes some getting used to. But what he says, and how he says it, sound just fine to me in this piece.

We as a culture just might be suffering a slow, painful death by spiritual stagnation, by ideological stasis, by cosmic rigor mortis. It has become painfully, lethally obvious in the age of George W. Bush and authoritarian groupthink that our major religious systems and foundations don't know how to move. They don't learn, adjust, evolve, see things anew. They don't know how to dance. And what's more, this little problem might just be the death of us all.

I hadn't done much dancing until February of last year. That's when my wife and I started taking Argentine Tango lessons.

Since, the Tango/Dance category of my other blog has filled up with quite a few dance-related posts. We've also tried American Tango, Nightclub 2-Step, Waltz, and a dash of Cha-Cha-Cha.

It probably isn't a coincidence that the more churchless I've become, the more I've been attracted to moving freely on a dance floor.

"Freely" is the key word. I've practiced martial arts for about fifteen years. Traditional katas, or forms, are akin to rigid religions: you don't mess with how they're performed.

So I was familiar with moving on a hardwood floor long before I started dancing. But there's a big difference between moving to somebody else's preconceived beat, and your own creative expression.

This is what Morford is calling for: flexible spontaneity in religion and spirituality.

It is through the creative impulse, through imagination and our deep need for mystery, that the gods can truly dance, remain fresh, stay alive and vital and interesting. It is only through our ability to reinvent them and honor them in new and miraculous ways that humanity will keep afloat and vibrant. The gods are, after all, our creation. Why not let our creation tango?

Here's a take on dancing Argentine Tango improvisationally. It's difficult, something I can only aspire to. (Argentine Tango is called the "Ph.D. of social dances" for that reason.) The authors say:

A much greater mastery of tango and more improvisational freedom is found in the ability to break off patterns and switch to others without hesitation. The highest degree of improvisational freedom is found in choosing individual steps without regard to any pre-determined patterns.

Sounds like good advice for dancing with the divine also.

That said, I enjoyed Morford's mention of the "profane masculine" – as contrasted with the "divine feminine." Like him, I'm more a devotee of the former.

Comments

[william]

“It has become painfully, lethally obvious in the age of George W. Bush and authoritarian groupthink that our major religious systems and foundations don't know how to move. They don't learn, adjust, evolve, see things anew. They don't know how to dance. And what's more, this little problem might just be the death of us all.”

Very well stated. It just may be in the cards for Americans to experience fascism to fully learn to dance. What looks bad may actually be good and what looks good may actually be bad. Learn, adjust, evolve, see things anew from my point of view this is soul evolution defined.

As the decline of wealth engulfs America this will have a profound affect on our government and religious institutions. People in America are ready for spiritual experiences and what they get at these new soulless corporations is greed is good and what they get at their places of worship is sermons based on dogma and fear and sin and judgment and guilt. Guilt interesting enough is a major ego trip. Many people tithe to have heaps of guilt put upon them.

Just today at my energy tai chi class people were dancing around the room and loving it. Then we all stood in a circle and laughed at one another. People pay good money to do this. Emmanuel’s book one ends the book by stating “lets dance”. Emmanuel’s book is the first place I read the words “perfectly imperfect” over 16 years ago.

It amazes me that this very day for the first time at my tai chi class people were dancing around the room in a free style dance and this very night Brian posts on his blog about lets dance. There appears to be more to this universe than meets the eye.