Sunday
The Divine takes the lead in changing places. Maybe artists have easier access to this Mystery than many theologians.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Too often, art is considered decorative, and it is significantly more than that. Engaging with art means we have to slow down to allow a new experience to enter which perhaps cannot be accessed in another way.
—Lourdes Bernard
Tuesday
Art also carves pathways toward our inner isles of spirituality. When we decide to live in our heads only, we become isolated from the God who is closer than our next breath. The restoration of wonder is the beginning of the inward journey toward God.
—Barbara A. Holmes
Wednesday
Inspiration is in the air and settles on people without regard for their skin color, their social background, or their educational level. How many illiterate artists have emerged in [Brazil], in marginal communities, and were never noticed? Boasting is not the Spirit’s way.
—Leonardo Boff
Thursday
The thing is to allow ourselves to become a vessel for a work of art to come through and allow that work to guide our hands. Once we do, we are assenting to a sacred adventure. We are saying yes to the transcendent and embodied presence of the holy.
—Mirabai Starr
Friday
Great art and great myth try to evoke an epiphany in us. They want to give us an inherent and original sense of the holy. They make us want to kneel and kiss the ground.
—Richard Rohr
Week Sixteen Practice
Dancing as Spiritual Practice
In the latest issue of Oneing, CAC staff member and dancer Jenna Keiper writes of the healing wisdom of embodied movement:
My ancestors, the wild siblings of old oak forests and the ruddy wanderers of windy peaks, knew communal rhythmic movement. All our ancestral Indigenous communities—as far as we can possibly know—have danced in community rituals to cope with the terror and awe of human life. [1] Anthropologists the world over have found the practice of communal dance to be fascinating in its predictability. It’s so very … human. Humans have, all along, had the answers today’s scientists “discover” written in our communal rhythms. Perhaps it would be wise to listen.
Remember, electrons whisper as the music slows, remember. Together, our Bodies calm and soften. Many Bodies lead their Souls into positions on the floor. Curling and rocking, our breathing slows, together. Remember….
God in the earth. God in the trees. God in myself. God, embodied. She speaks through every Body, and so the invitation is extended to every Body: Gray hair, unlined faces, stiff joints, supple muscles. Tall and short and bigger-bodied. Slow, quick, pregnant, dying. Alone in your room or on the floor in community. If you have a Body that moves in any way, then movement is your birthright. And if your Body can no longer move, then we will find a way to move in energy with you. Welcome, fellow travelers. Where words fade, the Body speaks.
Mystery upon mystery.
References:
[1] See Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014), 331–332.
Jenna Keiper, “When Body Speaks: On Dance as Spiritual Practice,” Oneing 12, no. 1, Art and Spirituality (Spring 2024): 84–85, 86. Available in print and PDF download.
Image credit: Benjamin Yazza, Untitled (detail), New Mexico, 2023, photo, used with permission. Click here to enlarge image. What draws us when we gaze on an image? Here we see movement, flow, and artistry in natural wood.
