Dance Fervor

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.

"I believe that NOS is well down the slippery slope towards that neo pagan idolatry of creation which we see everywhere in new Age Spirituality," he wrote the bishop. "They have not realised that there is a way of embracing the physical, the sexual, the ecological, which is thoroughly Christ-centered and orthodox. As such I believe dangerous times lie ahead for them. Indeed, I felt tremendous grief last night -- which I sensed at the time was the grief of the Holy Spirit."

Well before the sex scandal broke, however, Fox imported the Planetary Mass, informally referred to as the Rave Mass, to the United States for its debut at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the Gothic structure that's home to the Episcopal Diocese of California. Thirty-five Anglicans from Sheffield flew to the Bay Area to help stage the event on Halloween weekend 1994. An invitation-only crowd of 300 arrived for the Planetary Mass, including, according to one report, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia. It received a less than warm reception from a reporter for Episcopalians United.

"The Rave Mass I attended on Halloween weekend in San Francisco was the most oppressive spiritual experience I've known in more than 10 years as a religion writer," wrote Doug LeBlanc. "The Rave Mass was not oppressive because it expressed Christian truth in a new liturgical form, but because it supplanted Christianity with a careless brew of paganism, manipulative imagery and an environmentalist hysteria unmatched by any apocalyptic street preacher."

The cold response from the Episcopal reporter notwithstanding, the Planetary Mass soon became a regular event at Fox's university, adopting the name Techno Cosmic Mass along the way. TCM spread out from there, thanks to UCS divinity students such as Edina Preucel, who attended a Rave Mass in November 1997 in the Bay Area and less than a year later launched her own version in Boulder, Colorado. She has already hosted another TCM in Boulder and plans to stage four more next year.

Like Preucel, Houstonian Evan Daily also encountered TCM as a divinity student at UCS. It was last October. Preucel had just arrived back in Oakland following the debut of TCM in Boulder. She was, in the words of Daily, "literally raving" about it. After his own TCM experience just days later, Daily decided he would try to bring the ritual to Houston. He gave himself a year to do it.

Daily would need the time. As it turned out, the Techno Cosmic Mass was too radical for mainstream religion. Daily estimates that at least 15 area churches resisted the idea of the Techno Cosmic Mass, either by refusing to host it or by refusing to post its flyers on their bulletin boards. "People were really threatened," he said.

But Daily is fortunate. Unlike Preucel, who must raise money with her nonprofit company to stage the Boulder-area TCMs, Daily could afford to foot the bill himself. The son of a physician, Daily comes from money, but he has also done well for himself in the bull market. It has given him the time and resources to pursue the things that interest him: Aside from being a divinity student at UCS, he is also a licensed therapist. Daily says he decided to produce the Houston TCM, at a cost of more than $30,000, as a gift to the community, as a thanks for all the good fortune he and his family have received over the years.

Daily has even launched a nonprofit, Heartstorm Productions, with the idea of staging more Techno Cosmic Masses in Houston. If the debut of TCM is any indication, he may have a nascent congregation on his hands.

As a DJ laid down some fast and funky beats at the George R. Brown, the circle filled with a dazzling assortment of people. One sixtysomething man wiggled and shook until his business suit was drenched in sweat. A 30-year-old woman, in bare feet and sheer flowing fabrics, danced by herself in stylized ballerina poses. A young couple, two strangers until a minute ago, silently crossed paths and began mimicking each other's movement, like in some judo exercise. An overweight middle-aged woman in a Christmas sweater walked aimlessly through these ravers, claiming her best dancing days were already behind her. Then the music stopped, the recessional song was sung, and the ravers were sent on their way.