So it came to me yesterday at Quaker Meeting for Worship something that I’ve been spinning around in my head for awhile: the tension between our desire for community and for individuality. I realized the many places that manifests for me, particularly in my spiritual practice and my dancing.
Pews vs Meditating Alone
I was raised Catholic, so steeped in one of the most structured and formal of the organized religions that I know. I didn’t think about it much until my teen years, when I became exposed to other spiritual practices and ways of connecting with God, particular Evangelical Christianity.
In college, I rejected Catholicism as mostly bullshit. It seemed to me that the people sitting in the pews were just reciting a script that they had been given without any real reflection or personal commitment. The songs they sang together felt lifeless and without meaning. The sermons the priests offered had no connection to my own experience or needs.
I went through a lot of different spiritual practices over the decades, from various flavors of Christianity, a couple of cults, and readings about other religions and approaches to knowing God. Through it all, I knew that I had a hunger for some kind of community and connection to others, but also wanted to be able to chart my own spiritual path and not feel stifled or put in a box.
And then I landed on Quakerism. That faith practice offers me the right balance of community connectedness that I yearned for, but also honored individual spiritual paths or “leadings” as Quakers call it. They had shared values, but not a prescriptive dogma or holy book.
At the same time, I’ve made my peace with Catholicism and other more ritualized approaches to spirituality. It was a funeral for a family member that opened my eyes to the role of ritual. I realized during the Catholic Mass that all the prescripted actions, recitations, and songs were a comfort to the bereaved, a way of giving meaning to their loss, and a way of connecting them to others. Even as they were hurting, this was an action that they could do that gave them strength. So I couldn’t call that just bullshit.
Zumba vs Grooving Alone
Dancing has been a similar journey for me. Throughout my life, I have wanted to find a way of moving to music that was solely my own. But I also wanted to find a community to move with in unison.
I have been through so many dance styles seeking the one that was the right fit: jazz, tap, popping, breaking, lindy hop, house, waacking, and now rhythm skating. From all of these experiences, my own idiosyncratic way of moving to music has emerged.
For much of my life, I poo-pooed more prescripted forms of movement like line dances and gym dance classes. For me, these felt like I was just doing someone else’s moves and not finding my own expression within the music. I thought Zumba was not dancing. That the Macarena was for people who didn’t know how to dance. That people who only studied “hip-hop” in a dance studio were missing the point.
I’ve started to realize what line dances and other prescriptive movement does for people — it allows an easy entry into dancing that doesn’t require years of training or skill. It allows lots of people (old, young, fit or fat) to move together rhythmically, to forget their cares for a moment, to dance to a song that they love.
Humans have always had circle dances, line dances, and other sets of movement that they did together to celebrate. It’s part of our DNA. So I can’t call that bullshit.
So I am working to check my snobbiness at the door when I see a bunch of folks do the electric slide at a work party. I’ll put my drink down and jump into the line.