Dance Fervor

To enter the ritual area, we had to pass under two giant stalks of wheat and walk through a long black-curtained tunnel. The passageway seemed designed to create the illusion of passing from one world to another, from our secular society to something more sacred; it was a birthing canal of sorts. I played along with it, until I noticed the guy walking next to us peering through the curtain to see where we were headed.

"I don't think you're supposed to peek," I whispered.

"I do a lot of things I'm not supposed to do," he replied, a bit defensively.

Pause.

"It's a control thing," he added.

That was when I realized the Techno Cosmic Mass would be, aside from a new form of church service, a place where people felt comfortable confessing their sins to strangers. It was only later that I realized if you don't tell your shortcomings to a stranger at TCM, you're not going to tell them to anyone. There was no room for sin at the Techno Cosmic Mass.

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The Christian religion is based on a simple premise: We are all sinners, every last one of us. It is only through the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, God's emissary on Earth, that we are saved and absolved from our sinful ways. It's a theology that, for a variety of reasons, some doctrinal, some societal, became a dominant world religion. The masses, many of whom had suffered through plagues and less-than-beneficent pagan gods, liked the idea of a merciful God who would sacrifice His only son for our salvation.

Matthew Fox has a different take on the sin/redemption theology. In his book, Original Blessing, he doesn't mince words: "Western civilization has preferred love of death to love of life to the very extent that its religious traditions have preferred redemption to creation, sin to ecstasy, and individual introspection to cosmic awareness and appreciation. Religion has failed people in the West as often as it has been silent about pleasure or about the cosmic creation, about the ongoing power of the flowing energy of the Creator, about original blessing."

The way out of this obsession with death is Via Positiva, which happens to be the first section of the Techno Cosmic Mass. Via Positiva, best I can determine, has multiple purposes. Chief among them is that we understand God's blessing radiates from all living things -- the trees, the grasses, the plants, the air, the critters -- a reality that Western people have failed to notice, since we're too busy reading our e-mail. The corollary here is we are all connected; on some subatomic level, we are all related, all of God's creations, human and animals and plants. The way to feel your connection with all of God's creation, according to Fox, is through dance. "All things are interrelated because all things are microcosms of a macrocosm," he wrote. "And it is all in motion, it is all en route, it is all moving, vibrant, dancing, and full of surprises."

It's not surprising, then, that the centerpiece of TCM's Via Positiva is dance. DJ Ronan Hallowell, who flew in from San Francisco to get our backfields in motion, set the tone with thickly rhythmic dance music, obviously designed for people who frequent rave clubs, not jazz bars. Some 500-plus congregants began manipulating their bodies, in whatever way the spirit moved them, around a large circular area that served as the ritual space for TCM. They danced inside the perimeter of 12 giant elevated video screens that surrounded them, and around a small gazebolike structure with 12 slide projectors placed on top, aimed at the video screens.

Anneliese, who's a deacon at her Presbyterian church, turned to me and shouted over the techno tunes: "I'm really not from a dancing religious tradition."

"Is that why they call you the Frozen Chosen?" I asked.

The notion of dance as prayer is not new, as Matthew suggested in our phone conversation. Almost all religions, at some point in their history, have employed a form of "ecstatic dancing." The goal of ecstatic movement is to transport dancers out of their regular modes of awareness, or as the etymology of the word "ecstasy" suggests, "to drive (one) out of one's senses." But is that really prayer? I asked a Catholic priest what his definition of prayer is, and he said it's "a relationship of the total person to God." Could dancing be considered prayer? Absolutely, he said.

Still, my main problem with TCM's form of prayer was its lack of structure, its lack of intellectual handles for my mind to grasp onto. Without the booming voice of a minister to guide me through the prayer, my body was a lost pilgrim, searching for meaning in a barrage of techno beats. I noticed I wasn't the only one. I spotted two older men sitting in the chairs that Fox had designated for "invalids" only. One was wearing a glow tube around his head like a sweatband; both were wearing glow tubes around the neck. They were large men, and despite their psychedelic sticks, they had a rough, masculine air about them. I explained to them who I was and why I was there. Then I asked why they weren't dancing. Jim said he was merely keeping his friend Robert company. Robert, 45, had recently injured his leg in an auto accident. Jim proceeded to tell me, in no small detail, about his spiritual path. I interrupted to inquire whether he felt like he was missing out on this form of dance/prayer.