Vessel of Joy 14 comments

By Sara Zarr

Sometimes, creation declares the glory of God with a mountain moonrise, or a wild, churning sea. Birdsong sailing above an otherwise quiet plain. The crystal shine of new snow.

Sometimes, it happens in Zumba class.

I like to dance. In my childhood, I took classes with my sister at a children’s ballet theater. She was the elegant one, with a good turnout and natural grace. I, on the other hand, enjoyed candy. I had a thick waist and short hair and had to be ordered to bathe, and secretly wanted to be a boy.

I don’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure I hated the classes themselves, the routine and discipline of practicing positions and extensions and turns. What I loved were the performances, when we’d get to move more freely and tell a story with dance, express narrative and emotion with our bodies. My crowning achievement was playing Peter in Peter and the Wolf, the perfect role for a tomboy.

The costume made me blissfully happy—jeans cut off below the knee, a rope belt, and a checkered shirt. I wished I could wear that every day, along with the fake freckles the makeup lady dotted onto my cheeks with eye pencil. Mostly what I remember is standing in the back of the studio, filled with parents on folding metal chairs, listening for the sprightly strings of Prokofiev. When I heard them, I began my choreographed skip-with-jaunty-arms down the left side of the theater.

I liked the audience, yes, but I loved the way the movements I did with my body felt perfect in tandem with the music. They matched. My body was no longer an awkward, chubby thing that made Evelyn Wenger, the ancient owner of the school and former principal dancer, frown. It was a storyteller.

It was, to use a phrase that almost makes me laugh with embarrassment, a vessel of joy.

My time at the ballet theater ended shortly thereafter, for various reasons. Within a few years, there were school dances, but I suspect most of us who have suffered through one would hesitate to describe our adolescent bodies as “vessels of joy.”

In college, I took a modern dance class, but seeing my then very fat body in the mirrors got me down, and I withdrew and got an incomplete.

That was the end of public dancing for me until a couple of years ago when, looking to make exercise less boring, I tried out Jazzercise. At first, I felt extremely self-conscious, aware of curious onlookers on the other side of the glass of the gym’s cardio room. I wanted to do it right. I didn’t want to look stupid. I especially didn’t want to whoop or whoo-hoo with the other ladies in the class, thus embracing my womanpower.

I did, however, want to be in my body and feel it, feel connected to it, and I knew that dance or dance-like movement does that for me. So I hung in there and learned the routines and soon I could do them with a degree of confidence that made the whole endeavor more fun. I had my favorite numbers, ones that made me almost forget about potential spectators and how my upper arm flab looked when I got happy.

One Wednesday night, such a number came on during class: Timbaland and Miley Cyrus singing, “We Belong to the Music.” I liked the moves, I liked the song. Together they gave me that Peter and the Wolf feeling of being unified and right, in a way I never feel when I’m in my head, writing or thinking, unbodily.

While I danced/worked my quads, I realized my eyes were damp. My heart was full. I was present and alive and my body could express that. There have been other similar moments:

At a recent Erasure concert, I felt more corporate joy among the dancing crowd than I’ve ever felt at church.

On the last night of the Glen Workshop last summer in Santa Fe, a lot of us danced and danced into the night and even though the entire week had been made of deep connections with myself and with others, I thought, exactly then: This is heaven.

I went to my first Zumba class the other day and in a routine supposedly of West African origin (though the Shakira song accompanying it makes me wonder), we lifted our arms high to the left and then to the right, while dipping our bodies low, our heads turned upward as it to gaze at God and say: “Look at us down here, dancing!”

When I witnessed Maggie Kast, at Glen East, dance an Anne Sexton letter, I wanted to hold onto what I was seeing and burn it into my consciousness somehow so I could go home and try it myself.

The human body is exquisite. It declares the glory of God, and is His very image.

Yet sometimes we’re shamed or feel shame for having the one that we have, or even for having a body at all. Sometimes our bodies feel like the enemy. Often the situation is a lot less “vessel of joy” and a lot more “ouch my back.”

Bodies, our world, are displayed and used and disconnected from their souls in a million ways every day. I hope and assume that part of our future redemption will be a perfect reconnection of soul and body.

Meanwhile, when I witness other people dancing, it seems to me that disconnection is in the process of being healed. And when I’m dancing, I feel in a way that my body is being brought home.