In many ways my native language has always been dance. I moved stories before I told them in words, heard music most clearly when it flowed through my body and out again into the waiting space. In secret my deepest prayers were danced before God.  Perhaps that is why I am drawn to those who, writing about religion, note that we are creatures with bodies. Christians have some trouble with this reality. Often, if they affirm their bodily state at all, it is to triumph over it, to deny its power, to dismiss its claims on us.  Rarely do they celebrate the body and own the sheer joy of abandoning oneself to the dance.
Twice in recent days I have come across references in my reading to the body-soul connection, instances in which the importance of bodily life is affirmed.  Diana Butler Bass, in Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith, describes worship that “enacts God’s dream for the world.” When we learn to look for it, she writes, by opening ourselves to sensing the awe and wonder of the dance, “we might glimpse the ripples of God.” Worship is much more than something we attend on Sunday morning; rather, it is a pilgrimage we make together, thereby joining in the dance. She quotes a theologian who speaks of God’s mystery, suggesting that it is experienced “in a climate of hospitality, of welcome, in which people are present to one another as the body-persons they are, as members of the body of Christ, comfortable with one another, gathered together with one another.”
Bass called to mind a poem by Wendell Berry, one I had read years ago, then lost for a time, but recovered in The Bible Workbench materials for November 4th: “The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union.” Through the mad farmer, the poet calls all who will hear to come away from “the union of work and debt, work and despair; from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed,” from the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation.” From all of it, “secede into care for one another, and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.” In this week of Thanksgiving, he calls us to “come into the life of the body, the one body granted to you in all the history of time.” Come into the body’s economy, “the daily work, and its replenishment at mealtimes and at night. Come into the body’s thanksgiving, when it knows and acknowledges itself a living soul.”
To all our readers, to all who seek to teach well, and all who are hungry to learn – – may you be at home in your body, come into its thanksgiving, love and acknowledge it as a living soul, as you celebrate the festival of Thanksgiving with family and friends this year.
