Dance Fervor

Fox's critics point out that his theology tiptoes around the dark side, the shadow, the negative aspects of religion and human nature. The more generous of his detractors believe Fox's theology is merely an over-reaction to the abuses of the Catholic Church, which he experienced firsthand and read about during his historical studies. They believe he has swung the pendulum too far the other way, to a theology that ignores sin and embraces an overly optimistic worldview. As one Catholic priest put it, "There has never in the history of the world been a successful society built on the idea, 'Let's all get along.' " Like it or not, people do commit acts they regret. Christianity serves up Christ to forgive those sins. Fox serves up Via Negativa, the second stage of TCM.

With Via Negativa, Fox walks a very thin tightrope. On one hand, he accuses Christians of loving death, but on the other, he claims they embrace too much light as well. "The religion of Positivism is almost all light. And the sentimental hymns that ignore the dark or reduce it anthropomorphically to human sin and therefore to salvation contribute to the excessive lighting of the world," Fox writes in Original Blessing. "What price have we paid as a people for all this light? We have become afraid of the dark. Afraid of no light. Of silence, therefore. Of image-lessness. We whore for more -- more images, more light, more profits, more goodies."

The solution, says Fox, is to let silence be silence, let pain be pain and let nothingness be nothingness. This is the Via Negativa.

At TCM, Via Negativa took the form of images and music and silence. As Gwendolyn Mallett sang a mournful version of the traditional spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," projectors flashed images of urban decay, a homeless man, a dead baby, a soldier with a machine gun, a starving black child, a jail cell and, pointedly, religious icons. As we sat on the floor, we were urged to "enter into the darkness of [ourselves]" and "give a sound to give the pain a name." Russill Paul, a respected unitarist and chanter who has performed for the Dalai Lama, began uttering wordless vocalizations, faintly Middle Eastern and loaded with heavy emotion. A man next to us was crying openly.

Later in the TCM service, I approached the man who had been weeping, hoping to understand the source of his grief, particularly a grief so public. Were the images affecting him? The music? Or was it, as I assumed, something much more personal and deep? I interrupted him as he was waiting for the communion bread during the third stage of TCM, Via Creativa (the sacrament, incidentally, has been modified to reflect a "universal" body, not Christ's), and asked him about his experience during Via Negativa.

You look like you were greatly affected by the ritual, I said.

"I'm cursed to be a panentheist," Vic said cryptically. (I later learned that Fox has created a new word, "panentheist," which he defines as "God is in everything, and everything is in God.")

Cursed?, I wondered.

"Every curse is a blessing, and every blessing a curse. Fox teaches that," Vic replied.

But I still wanted to know what had moved him, so I asked again.

Vic looked me up and down and said, "You're young. When you're middle-aged like me, you'll understand."

Then Vic gave me his card and suggested that I call him when he returned to Dallas. He said he could tell me more about Matthew Fox. He really wanted to tell me more about Matthew Fox. He seemed to be making assumptions about my spiritual life, or lack of one.

I was feeling a little Negativa myself now.

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Strangely enough, the Techno Cosmic Mass does not have its roots in the New Age mecca of California, where Fox is the president of the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland. TCM actually came from a far more unlikely source: Sheffield, England. A group of progressive Anglicans, young congregants who grew up in the town's techno scene in the early and mid-'80s, started a group called the Nine O'Clock Service to combine their passion for dance and religion. They found a sympathetic home at St. Thomas, Crookes, where in the late '80s NOS started hosting Planetary Masses, the forerunner of the TCM, every Sunday at 9 p.m. It quickly grew in popularity.

By 1993 NOS left St. Thomas, although the reasons are still debated in Anglican circles. Some say NOS simply became too big for the church; others say NOS became "too big for its boots." Whatever the reason, NOS and the Planetary Masses moved to the basement of a sports complex in the middle of Sheffield. It's telling that a year earlier NOS had made a different kind of shift, a theological one: It began to embrace the theology of Matthew Fox.

This theological shift would prove to be a lightning rod of controversy when in 1995 one of the main forces behind NOS, an Anglican priest, was accused of sexual misconduct with a congregant. The British press, long known for its love of scandal, immediately branded NOS, with its sensuous music and movements and its idealism, a cult. Even some in the Anglican church, which had given its seal of approval to NOS and the Planetary Masses, were beginning to question the Fox connection.

Mark Stibbe, in an article that appeared in The Church Times, said he wrote a letter to the bishop after attending a Planetary Mass in the months before the sex scandal. His letter, he wrote in the article, was a response to his increasing concern about the theology of the event.