“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” – Iraneus
Artistic expressions like dance, music, sculpture, all the visual arts and the like are great teachers, teaching us rich and varied lessons about God, His intentions in creation and His gift of creativity as it intersects the realm of human experience.
One of the great lessons that dance teaches us is the lesson of form and content. Dance regularly teaches that the way a thing is formed is as important as its content. Indeed, that the process of creation deeply influences content, that form and content are naturally interwoven in life.
The common, false dichotomizing of form and content in life leads to internal and external estrangement from others, self and even God – and can even be delivered in a highly ‘Christianized’ package. Some have rightly noticed this symptom when they’ve observed that Christianity looks like a bunch of rules – just hokey do’s and don’ts to follow. It’s simply ironic that the Christian church, claiming as it does to grow fully alive people in Christ, can so often ignore and suppress the power of the arts to release life.
Dance — in its synthesis of spirit and body — teaches us that form (the dancer and his/her intentional expressions) and the content (the meaning of the ‘message’ delivered through this form) are inextricably unified and interdependent. To separate a dancer from the meaning of a dance would be to do violence to the art form – and, ultimately, to destroy it.
False dichotomies abound in the Christian church as they do elsewhere. Peter Scazzero has observed that “God never asked us (as Christians) to die to the “good” parts of who we are…” (when Christ made the call to ‘die to self’). “…God never asked us to die to joy, art, music, beauty…” Instead, to die only to the wrong in us, like judgmentalism, arrogance, jealously, self-centeredness, control.
Yet, Christian culture so often seems to promote dying to that which we were born to live in and living in that which we were called to die to. Isn’t this one of the reasons why so many are leaving churches these days and so many surveys report such a negative image of Christians at large?
Learning the lessons that God-given creativity teaches takes us one step closer to a glorious result: being fully alive.
Maybe we should dance more?
For more information, contact PastorJimCPC@hughes.net or visit our website at www.centrepointe.org .