Dancing in the Temple

The body as a temple is such a common theme in Hinduism that my Nepali friends consider it hackneyed. Yet for us Puritan descendants, we have a hard time considering our bodies as anything other than that which tempts us with sin. Recently, in a book on Celtic spirituality, I ran across the same concept--and no one who has ever heard Celtic Women sing "Ave Maria" could doubt their piousness. This is part of the male dominance of the early Western Christian faith. Feminine energy has always been associated with the earth, and our bodies, as part of the earth, were discounted as a source of the spiritual enlightenment. Sex was demonized, and the body was made to be mud. Only in small ways did the dance of God remain in our consciousness:

"I danced in the morning when the world was begun. I danced on the moon, the stars, and the sun...." That song echoes through our culture, as "Lord of the Dance." It expresses our longing for the feminine power of the Earth Mother, and the ancient celebration of our God.

Yet, in the Bible, there is the description of the statue that starts at the head made of pure gold, and by the feet is mixed with mud. This has been seen with the arrogance of racial purity to mean that the races would become mixed, which is also happening. However, I see where it means the returning to spirituality the energy of the feminine. Western Christianity early removed the feminine aspect of God out of Jesus and embedded it in the Marys--Mary, the Mother of God, and Mary Magadalene, the former prostitute saved by her love of Jesus, Mary the obedient listener at the knee of Jesus, and Martha, the housekeeper. The female power distanced, split, and diminished, even demonized. Women taking care of their bodies are portrayed as "manly" as evidenced by my least favorite commercial of the season where some arrogant male drill sergeant type is running these women in the cold and has men on snowmobiles blowing more cold at them. Similarly, a local hospital offers "Boot Camp for Women." All giving the message that if we are to be successful in this society we have to give up our feminine "weakness" and become "tougher." Where I grew up, we have a word for this kind of logic--and it comes out the ani of male cattle!

Women are longing for their own form of exercise--and we have it. It, too, has been taken over by men and made into a way to keep women "in their place" or to sexualize them. It is called dance. But the hunger for it can be seen in the popularity of "Dancing With the Stars." As we watch these women come into their power as they grow through the show, we identify with them. Those who are too sexual tend not to win as we American women retain our Puritan values in spite of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. Greer threw out the sacredness of everything, not able to distinguish between the sacred feminine and the blasphemy of modern society's treatment of women. The ancient Celts had a much more balanced approach to marriage and sexuality. There were varying degrees of unions--for a year to the soul mate marriage that created a bind through many reincarnations. Another concept thrown out in the early Western church.

The strongest image of femininity of recent time is the character of Judzea Dax in "Deep Space Nine"--who having the Dax symbiont carrying memories of past lives as a woman and as a man, was strong enough to stand up to her potential Klingon mother-in-law, join Klingon warriors in a revenge plot, and still comfortable enough in her femaleness to have the arrogant male doctor salivating on nearly every episode. Judzea carries the strength of the Eastern female faces of God, with the class of the Western Mary--and has climbed off the pedestal completely. They killed her off. She was so strong that the Western writers could not imagine her as a mother or an elderly woman--way too scary. That is how insecure our society is with our earth power, man and woman. We are playing again with the character in Ziva David on NCIS, although now Judzea is two women, Abby and Ziva, less threatening that way. Note that Worf is also two men--Tony and McGee. And the captain is a more complex character than either Picard or Sisko, though there is some of both of them in him. The setting is slightly closer to our real life. We are slowly coming to the acceptance of a woman who is powerful in her own feminine right.

We women need to stand up and reclaim dance for ourselves, and give the men their dance as well. The route to this is folk dancing. Discover your roots with dancing, open your hearts to dancing, and awaken the feminine aspects of God with dancing.