When dancing leads to sex and bodies lead to God

Something happens when the beat kicks in. It’s hard to describe, but you can find it in your body if you pay attention. At least that’s the way it works for me. The problem though, if there is one, is that the beat doesn’t always find its way out. When I hear the music, the rhythm pulsates in that curious space that seems to exist somewhere between my body and my soul. It is within and it is without. And it is neither.

Once, when I was 12 years old, my body gave in and I let myself loose to the sound of Thunderstruck by AC/DC at the end of a school disco. But I think that might have been the last time I really ever danced like that. 

When I was 18 I prepared to attend my final College school ball. I went to the only tailor I knew in Morrinsville for a tuxedo fitting; a nerve-wracking experience for a self-conscious young man. Maybe it didn’t help that, having re-measured the length of my limbs three-times over, he loudly exclaimed “In all my time I have never fitted anybody with such short arms and legs in comparison with the length of his torso!” Thanks, old mate.

So there I was, donned in my uniquely tailored tuxedo, and when it came time for the final dance of the night - the one where everybody picked up a partner for some kind of slow swaying number - I watched passively as the entire room paired off. A big part of me wanted nothing more than to walk nonchalantly up to one my friends and ask her for a dance, but the part of me that won out was the one that would rather stand on the edge of the hall alone while my entire senior year danced without me, than face the awkwardness of my own body moving in sync with someone else.

I have never really felt comfortable about dancing since then, although that’s not to say that I don’t want to. When I hear the music start, some part of me still wants to dance, but my body finds a way to keep a lid on the bottle. To bury the rhythm in my chest. To push down hard enough on my internal vivacity until the time has passed and the moment of exuberance has faded.

I used to think it was self-consciousness. Or insecurity. Or shyness. Or pride. Or any number of reasons why this was to do with the way I felt exposed in front of others. But although I’m sure these things play a part, I’ve discovered they’re a minor player in a larger story. And it has to do with my body.

Because what I’ve found is that even when I’m at home alone, with the music turned up and no-one to see or hear me, I still can’t dance. This has much less to do with other people than I thought. And it has much more to do with me and my relationship with my body. There is something about feeling my own body move that makes me deeply uncomfortable, and there is little that makes me more aware of my own body than dancing.

Now for some of you, this is not a problem you will ever experience. You’re the ones who enter the dance floor with a swagger, or just with sheer enthusiasm. You’re the ones I watch with awe, as the music takes hold and everything swirls in sheer madness.

But I get trapped in my body.

And I think it has something to do with spirituality. At least for me it does. On one level, just moving our bodies is a deeply spiritual act. Real spirituality is embodied, while theoretical and ethereal spirituality have the same problem, finding their meaning in dislocation from our bodies. 

Authentic and meaningful spiritualities find a way to connect with our material selves, but I had developed a spirituality that didn’t leave room for my body, that didn’t value my body, that didn’t help me to feel at home in my body. That didn’t teach me what it was to feel my own body move and recognise that the S/spirit was alive in that moment.

In the Christian tradition, Paul, one of the prominent early thinkers, talked about living by the spirit and not by the flesh, and many Christians have taken this to mean that the body doesn’t matter. Or worse, reinforced by Plato, they read it to say that the body is corrupt and evil. The fact that Paul didn’t mean that at all seemed to escape me for much of my life, and apparently a lot of the church too. 

In some traditions, the body is seen as something to punish. And in many conservative churches dancing was seen - until quite recently - as the highway to hell, or to sex at least. Which aren’t the same thing although in much of the church they may as well be. 

Perhaps it is no surprise that in my 20’s I discovered over-eating as a way to reinforce the disconnect with my own physicality. 

So I am on a journey to re-find my own body. I have to recover it from myself, and from my tradition.  For what I am discovering is that the body, even within the Christian texts that I was brought up on, is no bad thing. The body is the locus of any spirituality that matters. The ancient Hebrew word for spirit is ruach, which can be translated as spirit, or as breath. 

The breath which moves in our bodies. Which moves our bodies. Which is moved by our bodies. 

And although the ancient world was filled with ornate and elaborate temples to divine powers, early Christian texts suggest that it is the body that is most fully capable of being a temple to the divine presence. 

Of course dancing is not the only indicator we have a problem here. That is how it manifests for me, but for others it will look entirely different. Maybe it is through the edit function on our Instagram posts, via which we alter our bodies to appear more acceptable. Maybe it is through the commodification of our bodies (and the bodies of others), in which our physicality becomes a brand to be bought and sold. Maybe it is through our pursuit of rationality at the expense of desire. Or maybe it is through the pursuit of desire at the expense of our wholeness. 

But I wonder - if we find our bodies again, then we might rediscover a sense of sacredness to all of the reality we inhabit. We might realise that we’re connected to the earth in such profound ways that it would be impossible to treat the planet like a dumpster fire. We might realise that if our bodies are profoundly spiritual, then so is the body of the earth we come from, the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. And if my body is spiritual, then so is the body of my enemy. 

Maybe finding our bodies again, leads us back to one another and the earth. Maybe dancing leads to peace.

Maybe this week I will turn the music up when no-one is home and see what happens. Maybe I’ll discover that my foot will tap, and my leg will bounce and my arms will move and my head will nod and then I’ll awkwardly bite my bottom lip and step from side-to-side like I’m 12 years old. I might throw in a badly timed clap. But I think I’ll try to move - and see what happens. 

It might be nothing of course, but the smirk on my face as I type this tells me that at the very least it’ll be entertaining.