Embodied Faith

Photo: Andrew Lin

Swing Dance Meditations Part 5: I was robbed

of an embodied faith when I obsessed over God in the realm of thoughts and ideas, over such a long time of my life. I learned and knew of what to believe, what to say, and how to make what I believe and say consistent to the teachings of the church, of all the little tricks of the mind that convinced myself of my own consistency. I did not live in my body. I wrecked my body on long commutes and sleep deprivation thinking that suffering will make me attain the greatest good. But when I tasted the teachings of Jesus channeled through movement and touch, tension and compression, and saw the thoughts and dispositions of my friends through the conduct of their dance, each of them unique and personal, I realise that I had deprived myself of the awareness of God's love in my own body: I did not know what it felt like in my body when I extended orthodoxy into orthopraxis, because I had not taught myself to feel, but convinced myself that feeling things were sinful.

I thank Jesus for not having stayed an abstract figure, but came to Earth as an embodied being. Humanity has a gnostic instinct that naturally elevated the mind and damned the body to Hell. By living among us he sticks a massive middle finger to our errors. He condensed the 613 Mitzvot of the Torah, implementable through blind faith, into the two axiomatic statements

1. Love God

2. Love your neighbour,

the "what" and the "how" of reciprocating his Love. Whereas the "what" involves the Creator God which is necessarily intangible and ineffable as in all of the other Abrahamic traditions, the "how" concretises it into action that allows the Love to bleed out from worship into our daily lives. Most importantly, as Jesus is incarnate and can represent the object in (1) and (2) simultaneously, these two axioms can even be thought of as a single axiom of the Incarnation.

Because of this, I do not shy away from feeling the sense of touch. I do not see the devil in the gleam in my partner's eye, because when Jesus comes to earth, he baptises our body, our senses and our pleasures. He baptises our blood and guts. He baptises the humble feeding trough where they set him down. He baptises the raggedy shepherds of Bayt Sahur; he baptises the dumb beasts of the manger in Bethlehem. May no one come and tell you that these precious things which he baptised can ever be unclean.

Baraat

Jai Mohan's baraat

My colleague Pritish and his elder brother Jai Mohan were married in quick succession, with Aryama and Krati as the respective brides. The family threw a party at the foot of Panchet Hill which lasted about 4-5 days. Because of this arrangement, the entourage from Singapore witnessed each public component of the wedding twice over. Now, overall, the Hindu wedding is a gruelling affair, lasting many days, often extending into the night. Pritish's cousins reported only sleeping two or three hours during the nights. It turned out that the time of the main rituals, involving wedding vows (7 vows from the groom, 5 from the bride), was decided by astronomical measurements, could only be fixed on short notice, and could land in the wee hours in the morning (which happened for Jai Mohan and Krati). 

The wedding vows were preceded by dinner and the processions, first by the groom, then by the bride. The groom's procession was called the baraat and involved a live brass band and vigorous dancing. Pritish's and Jai Mohan's cousins were the stars of the dance floor. Of course, I joined them...

And then afterwards they said I danced so well that I might as well be an Indian myself, and one of them offered to file paperwork for me to become an Indian citizen, and I became afraid, because I had committed to join them also for reception in Dhanbad without my other colleagues, and they looked as if they might eat me alive, when I got there. Fortunately, no one propositioned me for a dance during the after-party, nor made me marry anyone, which put my anxieties at rest.

Swing Dance Meditation: Part 4

Pritish's cousin Mansi reflected to us afterwards that there was an older guy who joined the baraat dance who couldn't dance that well (i.e. he could not do the moves quickly enough). The group slowed down to half-beat pace to match him, which made him feel included. When Mansi saw it go down, she deduced that I had gone through training. She was very thorough.

When Pritish's relatives recounted the moves which I pulled off, I couldn't recall most of it. I did remember copying some of their moves. When the dance-off happened, like with Archit or Vaiibhav, what I did was mooching moves off of my partner, spicing it up a little in some way, and throw it back at him. I hadn't trained for this — this was Bollywood dancing, heavy on upper-body movements, while Lindy Hop is more about footwork — but the way this was done felt like when I was dancing with coach Marsha Folkoff: very improvisational, very communicative and very freeform, not restricted to a particular system of dance.

People come to the dance floor with different mentalities, and their mentalities ineffably influence the way they dance. Broadly, there are people who say "I know all the moves and dance them well" and there are people who say "I want to be happy and to make other people happy". This latter category are people of my tribe, and I will seek them out and learn from them.