Advent Travels: What Dancing Looks and Feels Like

Sawicki says that whatever Christ is, it is contagious (Seeing the Lord 327). What does this mean?

When you say “whatever Christ is” you are tacitly saying you don’t know what Christ is.

But when you say “Christ is contagious” you are boldly claiming a deep understanding of the experience of Christ.

In a sense you are contradicting yourself. You are admitting to ignorance and experience about the same thing.

But in another sense, you are just being honest. Sawicki is saying, I don’t have all the answers but I can tell you that Christ is contagious. She’s like laying down a marker for the ones who come after, who are us.

Sawicki is suggesting that this is a journey completed in lifetimes, only one of which is ours and that this is not a crisis.

Last Fall I wrote a long essay called Christ is a Collective, by which I meant, Christ is relationship. Christ is where our subjectivity is brought to heel through a commitment to service, to loving the other.

That was a not-very-subtle homage to Helen Titchen Beeth, whose intelligence, open-mindedness and commitment to peace and healing through dialogue restore me to a deep, actionable and sustainble optimism.

But Sawicki lives and thinks in another domain. It’s a different challenge, a different invitation.

Christ is contagious. Writing prompt: Do you read that as a warning or a promise?

Because “contagious” is a funny word here, right? Most of us steer clear of contagions like mumps or the flu. “Contagion” means danger, vulnerability, undoing –

– Oh. Oh.

Because also, we like Christ. We want to be Christ. So we steer towards Christ. But Christ is also our dissolution, our end. Christ is the formal undoing of specialness in favor of holiness.

Notice how we are in the space of contradiction again, this time between “contagion” and “Christ.” A moment ago, the contradiction was between ignorance and experience. Now it’s in the words “contagion” and “Christ.”

Sawicki’s phrase – “whatever Christ is, Christ is contagious” both pulls us in and pushes us away. It invites us and rejects us.

In a sense, Sawicki is saying, you have to find out for yourself what Christ is (and, if you can, leave notes for those coming after).

That’s the part I was scared of – finding out for myself. I thought it meant being alone. I thought it was kin to climbing a gallows.

But it was more like when you’re scared to dance but choose to dance anyway. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience? You are watching the dancers, you are feeling the music but . . .

. . . it’s hard. I love dancing but I’m scared of dancing. A long long time ago a friend said to me, if you want to know what somebody is like in bed, watch them dance. I don’t know if he’s right or wrong but I can say that it made dancing feel like way higher stakes than was helpful.

Here, by the way, is what dancing looks and feels like to me on the inside. Also, this is pretty much the sum total of my moves. But the smile, right? And the way everyone consents to be drawn in . . .

Dancing is pretty contagious but not because it’s a secret (and sometimes not so secret, I guess) audition for sex partners. It’s contagious because it’s fun and communal. Even if I’m alone in my room dancing, somebody wrote the song to which I’m dancing, and somebody performed it. It’s in my head because we are in my head.

We are never alone when we dance, kind of like how we are never alone when we open up to Christ.

I began writing this post last night. I would start it, get about five paragraphs in and get blocked. We get blocked for lots of reasons writing but for me the block was I was straying from my thesis.

When you’re blocked that way, you go back to the beginning, retrace your steps and find out where you went awry, and begin again there. Rinse and repeat.

Right now there are twenty-seven paragraph below this one. I have been blocked a lot on this post. A lot. The stuff about dancing is unexpected – that’s all from this morning. I’d delete it and go back (Sawicki is not interested in my weird ideas and pathologies around dancing) but it reminds me of this post and this post, so I’m wondering if I’m onto something, albeit something I can’t see.

Can you? Because I’m out of time and can’t say.

In Advent – happier than I’ve been in a long time, deeply committed to a world in which that happiness can be shared, but still a little shaky at the margins – I find myself wondering if all of this is orders of magnitude simpler than I’ve been making it. I’m wondering if the journey ended a long time ago. I’m wondering if there isn’t even a journey. Do you know?

If you know, tell me. I’ve been dancing – I’ve been Christing – alone for a long time. I don’t want to do that anymore.

Twelve / Fourteen


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4 Comments

  1. The video made me cry. Florence has the perfect voice to evoke the feeling of the piece. After reading your essay and watching your video, I read the course and the themes picked up on what I projected onto your writing and the video. The main theme of separation and our attempt to destroy the love of God. The question I took away from reading your words was: Do I want to “trade in” my specialness for holiness? I could re-ask the same question in so many different ways, and maybe I will, but for now, I’ll leave it at that.

    Thank you for writing, for extending, and for the invitation to dance, even if awkwardly.💕

    1. Thanks, Kimberley. “Trade” is an interesting word in this context. I’m curious to see where you go with it. I mean, one way or the other, specialness has got to go – trade, sell, discard, whatever.

      I don’t know why I love that video so much – other than the dancing is basically how I dance – but there is a real tenderness and generosity in it, or maybe a real innocence. I love the joy and the way the joy sort of has to be – in the end at least – collective.

      Enjoy cathedraling 🙏🙏

      ~ Sean

  2. I’ve never hear of Sawicki until a few posts ago and couldn’t find her in a google search.

    When I read Whatever Christ is, it is contagious … I felt, I don’t know what Christ is, but can I recognise, know Christ by what Christ does, contagious … nothing immune, nothing outside, nothing apart, inseparable. It seems Christ is a way of seeing that makes everything appear as one thing … nothing immune.

    1. She is obscure – I found her in a footnote in Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity – and tracked down Seeing the Lord and got lucky finding a version that wasn’t many hundreds of dollars. Somebody read it to pieces before I got it, and I’ve only ruined it further. She just confirms some things that have been obvious to me for a year or so and which I’ve been scared of sharing. Yeah, Christ as a way of seeing, seeing as a way of understanding and enacting, some deep simplicity and clarity that arises out of our createdness and points back to it in a happy way. “contagious” also in terms of inevitable – once exposed, you aren’t allowed a choice. “I’d rather not have the flu, thanks anyway body.” But it doesn’t work that way. So Christ as an infection that gathers everything unto itself. “I want the Kingdom” – “you can’t handle the Kingdom.” And yet the Kingdom is here, forever arriving.

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