My Contribution to a Beautiful Essay on Dance

Nice write up of a universal repute.

Here is my contribution  purely from a personal experience  .

Dance is necessary in our contemporary culture because

1) It is a great source of unification, integration and communality, but if not handled and experienced properly, the experience could be ephemeral or even degenerating.

2) Dance brings joy,  it is somehow an heavenly foretaste, it is synonymous to a song which calls God a God of the dance because life itself is a dance. Nature dances, creativity dances, and as written by Father Peter, if you don't dance, you are dead. Even the whole creation synchronizes and shakes to a particular rhythm.

3) Permit me to compare dance with love. I have come to cherish Eros the base of love, not only as it is understood in our contemporary society, but also as a passion for beauty, for nature, for creation, and i believe this is of necessity a beginning to the proper understanding of the nature of love and as a consequence of God. Those who have experienced agape much have known a lot about Eros.  it is like the many miracles of Christ which is a call to something higher, a higher state, a greater truth. Dance stays at the median position, it can lift up a soul to the sky  and can thrust a soul to the pit. As we live in an essentially materialistic culture in which it is far easier to succumb to gravity we must watch the way we dance. I share my own experience:

4) I watch carefully in the midst of those I would dance, if my dance is capable of cheering people up, attracting people in order to remove their pretenses, foster communality, I dance. If it in a relatively 'enlightened' space, those who have already grown truthfully out from the physical dance into the internal spiritual dance, i simply watch how i dance. But if it is in an already degraded environment, and i observe that my dance would be of utmost incapability of true affection but something that would further the degradation, or something that could even push me beneath,then i don't dance at all. These are just to say; i dance with sense. Like Eros, dance is often necessary, but also dangerous.

5)As asserted in the essay, without good music, there is no dance. I ponder and ask myself where  my passion for music has brought me. When i was a young man, i frown at dull and slow music,i preferred so much the hype type popularly known as 'alujo'. Now growth has journeyed me from a greater focus of the rhythm of the beat to that of the message of the beat. Beat is still necessary for in music, but i have traversed from 'alujo' to 'agidigbo', so has my sense of how, when and where i dance.

The Blessed Virgin and The Secular Age

We live in an entirely secularized world. The Christian world, armed with the power of faith in Christ was able to conquer the lie of the Gentiles manifested through various polytheist and hedonistic practices. But in our days , pagan practices has made an aggressive comeback. As Luigi Guissani puts it: what we have in our age is not a bad Christianity -that would have been nothing- but an unchristian, dechristianized world.

Christianity through many trials was able to christianize the pagan days, and now, albeit subtle , Christian feasts are being paganized once more.

In the dichotomy between church and state, let it be clear that the Church (which is the bulwark of truth) has got her new year, just as the Moslems have got their new year (Hijrah). I do not consider it a coincidence that the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God was set on the 1st of Jan which is the beginning of the general secular year. Thus, as children of God, it is imperative to consecrate ourselves under the mantle of our mother to lead us through the year if Christianity is to reclaim what it has lost to secularity. Mary is the terrestrial paradise, the true world through which God decided to come into our ephemeral world; this valley of tears in which humanity has been banished . So, as we still have got to journey on,let us consecrate ourselves to the bright Morning Star which is Mary to lead us forth through the year that we experience. It is in the nothingness of Mary that we shall transverse the nothiness of this age if we are to arrive into the somethiness, the truth of God. It is through this Ark of the Covenant that we shall travel safely and engage the secularity of our age without being harmed, for she is like a Tower of David that protects her children. When we journey this widely publicized new year with Mary, we shall see more and more about what the actual truth is about the beginning of the year and we shall thread each day of the year far safer and more blessed into the true year of The Lord .Happy solemnity of Mary the Mother of God and Happy new year to us who are as yet in this world but not part of the world.