“So Delicious: The Dance of God in the Body”

by Krysia Bereday Burnham

Editor’s Note: This article is from the September/October 2007 issue of Weavings.

Illustration by David Klein

On a winter’s afternoon some months ago, I was minding my own business, driving four girls to basketball practice. Lately my daughter and her friends had become curious specimens, with a glass divider grown up between us. When they were little, I might have tried to speak to these creatures, but by now I knew better. They are thirteen, and so much has changed for them as for me. After at least a year of sullen glares in response to my cheerful questioning, I developed a practice of meditative waiting — to listen to what girls like this really talk about, to watch this wild species in its natural habitat.

On this day there was little conversation because my daughter — blonde, athletic, and fresh with attitude — put on her favorite satellite radio station. Straining to be hip, I read the artist’s name on the XM Radio screen: Fergie. This hit song — “Fergalicious” — was evidently named after its creator, Fergie, and we’re not talking the Duchess of York here.

Immediately the steady beat of the song filled my minivan. Fergie, former child star and crystal meth addict turned pop diva, began her prophetic call for the young women of America to “listen up” to her “de-li-cious” message.

The girls fell into sync like well-trained backup singers. They sang along to as many words as they could, which went at rapid rap speed: Fergalicious definition make them boys go loco. The lines continued with Fergie’s explanation of how the boys desire her “treasure” but cannot have it.

When it came to the chorus, the girls broke out. Completely unselfconscious, in a state of unhampered joy, they sang about how irresistibly tasty Fergie is.

Although I couldn’t help swaying to the deep backbeat of the song despite its predictably repulsive message, it struck me how much the girls were enjoying this. They were somehow claiming, even celebrating, the credo of Fergie (aka Stacey Ferguson, pop idol of the moment). This credo in fact named the power of a young woman’s beauty, which in some way I applauded. Yet, judging by the lyrics, it was a beauty and sexuality that apparently had all the lasting value of a double cheeseburger.

I am indebted to “Fergalicious” because it really got me thinking: about how we in popular Western culture define and describe the female body, yes. But there is more. It’s one thing to tell our daughters that they are beautiful. Perhaps in a culture of rampant obesity and its strange bedfellows anorexia and bulimia, they need to hear of their intrinsic worth, indeed, in their own eyes as well as in God’s. Yet it is quite another thing, speaking of eating, to tell them that their “definition" — the muscles and bones that describe their physical form — are to be prized for being comestible.

That our culture — and our church — had long debased, distorted, and effectively destroyed the physical ideal described in 1 Corinthians 6:19, in which the body is referred to as a “temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God” (NRSV) was not new information. In the history of monotheistic religion, the Hebrews had their Numbers 5 in which a suspected adulteress was made to drink a nasty potion that would prove her misdeed, a kind of biblical precursor to RU-46, the morning-after pill. Since Eden, Eve as the mere afterthought of Adam, formed from the leftovers of his rib cage, has had a body saddled with nothing short of the collective guilt of the Fall. We cannot catalogue here the damage the Church Fathers contributed to this worldview — Augustine in particular raged against women in the church with a vehemence that oddly matched, or masked, the tenor of his earthly passion. The apostle Paul was no help either, suggesting women keep their sleeves long, their hair braided, their beauty hidden, and, at least in church, their mouths politely shut.

What impressed me was not how far we have slipped from some kind of Platonic ideal of the body as a vessel for the soul, but how Fergie’s prophetic voice seemed to suggest we have gone beyond having a body at all, that our bodies have become mere food: disposable, like everything else in our culture. Further, “Fergalicious” not only offers as a cream puff her body in general (in her video she comes out of a cake to chocolate-wrestle with two other women), but a specific part of her body, her sex, which the boys (after looking her over) “wanna eat.”

Is this more than a semi-pornographic peek up Fergie’s skirt, the 2007 version of Marilyn Monroe standing over the hot air vent in a full skirt? Is it a mere plug for free love, despite its obviously skewed message to young women? Or is Fergie walking some kind of funny fine line between drive — through love and a new brand of female self-affirmation?

For me, one question raised in the car that evening was this: if our young women, and men, are being formed in a Frankenstein’s laboratory of physical devaluation and impossibly high standards, what kind of role might the church play in this urgent paradox?

I would begin by pointing out the sheer passion in Fergie’s latest video (available widely on YouTube for the curious). In this three-minute dance extravaganza, what one experiences watching is not, in the end, the predictable parental recoiling at the sexiness of the proceedings. What I see, anyway, is something my daughter and her friends have clearly responded to: a strong woman declaring her buff body and shaking it with cocky confidence. Remarkably there is something artful here in this candy-covered, Technicolor fairy tale in which rhythmic, almost ecstatic body movement becomes a kind of worship.

How might we imagine Fergie in the sanctuary? In fact, it’s not as much of a stretch as it may seem, for it was into a church that the strung-out singer — high, anorexic, and delusional — once stumbled. Thinking she was being hunted by the Feds, she hid there, and in her desperate state, prayed to Something for relief. What she got, so the sources say, was spiritual food indeed: that “she was wasting her God given gifts and decided to stop using meth forever.”[1] Fergie soon entered rehab and went on to become a hip-hop success, rising like the duchess in her signature headdress, a sparkly tiara.

Fergie in church, dancing. Isn’t there a passion, a beauty, a confidence in that incongruous image, to which we might cling in our art-starved worship life? Might it not be right to dance, as Miriam danced — unhampered, exuberant, a tangible response of gratitude? Much to Michal’s chagrin, did not David dance in his ancient underclothes as an instinctive reaction to God’s blessing in 2 Samuel 6:14? As the New Revised Standard Version tells us, “David danced before the LORD with all his might.” Why does our spiritual life so rarely celebrate this living temple we have been given? What might a delight in our particular — and corporate — shape look like?

I think a starting point can be found in an art form I have long loved: dance. While not exactly a trained professional, I studied both ballet and modern technique in the days when I had hopes of a career in theatre. Today I am a closet dancer waiting to come out. For me, dance provides one means of articulating physical joy in the gift of life. Yet in its purest form that joy transcends the confines of the body, connecting to a source of movement much greater than our own.

By herself, Fergie’s claim to tastiness is possibly encouraging to our society’s youth but, frankly, hardly more than navel gazing. Certainly there is a heady passion, even pop artistry, in her clever video. The joy Fergie radiates in her instrument — a joy clearly hard-won, given her story — is a joy I myself know intimately when I dance. Yet that delight, I find, is best expressed when it is relational — not just to another dancer but to God. When I dance to sacred music as part of a regular spiritual practice, I inhabit a moment of ecstasy otherwise unknown in the business of the day. I long for such a body connectedness in worship, which, alas, in most traditions to which I’ve been exposed, is restrained, overly verbal, and — a bit like Fergie — too often turned in upon itself.

Yet there is hope. I have seen dance in worship as a way of expressing joy and gratitude in a new language. During a Christmas Eve worship service at the Roxbury Presbyterian Church in Boston a few years back, the church celebrated its vast building renovation: a glorious comeback. Of the entire, vibrant occasion, one element has stayed firmly with me: a dance of gratitude. A young woman in a red leotard and skirt that fell in liquid rivulets around her lower body danced to an African-American spiritual, “Now Behold the Lamb.” Her body expressed its uncensored surprise at God’s total love even in our relative states of disintegration. There was something self-flagellating in her repeated crouch pose, there was shame in her ritually bent head, but as the lyrics sung of the sacrifice done even for us, the parity between her suffering, and Christ’s, was unmistakable, and caused many of us to weep.

Can those of us whose bodies have been mishandled, or ignored, get up and dance in the sanctuary? Not easily. Can a tactile soul like me introduce a hug fest into my next adult education hour? Not without thoughtful preparation. Yet if we don’t even begin to ask the questions — why are we as a culture continuing to alternately poison our bodies with too much sustenance or not enough? — we, the people of God, are in effect accomplices in a lethal, if slow, murder: the real and tragic destruction of our bodies. Each of us, whether fit or flabby, predictably or differently abled, fitting into some norm or busting it up, has the God-given mandate to wake up to the vessel that we have been given, as in Esther, “for just such a time as this” (Esther 4:14, NRSV) Your vessel, and mine, has a distinctive shape, created in the image of God. It is time to take our finger and trace the form of that shape with courage and perhaps with tears.

Yet we cannot make these tracings alone. Fergie’s declaration that she is good enough to eat (although repulsive to some) is not enough even in its cool context. Her private gyrations on a bed of bonbons suggest that although every man on earth hungers for her, she is all she really needs. Trouble is, it’s lonely in the cake.

I am not sure what Fergie knows of the Bible, but there is a place in the Song of Solomon that takes issue with her chill proclamation as self-anointed goddess. From its first line, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (Song of Solomon 1:2, NRSV), the female lover steps out of the cake of self-congratulation and into the fray of physical connectedness. “I am black and beautiful” (Song 1:5), she says, naming and claiming her difference having spent time in the sun-drenched vineyards, a metaphor perhaps for her fertile ground. She is no untouchable pop icon, but a seeker of love in movement toward her desire: “I sought him whom my soul loves” (Song 1:3) — upon her little bed and deep into the danger of the streets. Although she does not always find or keep him, when the planets align and the lovers meet, it is thus she is recognized: “How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful!” (Song 4:1). What would it look like to have the girl in the cake be seen for her true self? What would it look like for any of us to be so considered for merely being who we are?

It is in such union, not separation, where we might realize that the temple is there for a purpose: to house the divine breath that animates it. But just as in heaven there are many mansions, so here on earth do the temples form in community. We worship God in heart, soul, mind, and also strength, the last of which describes our physical form. It is through this form that we are more like one another than not. In fact, ninety-nine percent of our DNA is the same each to each, with only the remaining one percent determining our individual, distinct features. No matter what state of disintegration or despair, each one of us can find consolation if our temple doors open to “the other.” Studies have shown that a major cause of mental illness is a patient’s sense of loneliness, of being disconnected. Our spiritual latticework — from prayer life to holy friendships to the balm of corporate worship — must remain intact if we are to keep our temple standing.

If I can consider your deliciousness, and you mine, perhaps we might at last reflect one iota of God’s adoration for us. When I have lost the measure of my own temple, perhaps if I put my hand on your shoulder, I might find my way in the dark, tracing the outline of yours.

1. See http://tyrashow.warnerbros.com/show_recaps/show_recap_mon61.html.