“It unites the whole audience when you have 100 people singing along on the dancefloor. It becomes divine: a love epidemic.”

- DJ/producer Nicky Siano

We Can be Dancing
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A good friend of mine recently asked what it's like to experience divine lures. As it happens, about the time he asked the question, I found myself with my wife Kathy at a party where people of all ages, races, abilities and religions (yes) were dancing to "You Should Be Dancing" by the Bee Gees. They were having so much fun together in the dancing that it was contagious. Those of us watching felt their energy and felt it collectively. We couldn't help but sing along, tap our feet, laugh with the dancers. We were dancing, too, even as we didn't leave our seats. 

But there was, for Kathy and me, also an inwardly felt urge to go onto the dance floor and join the dancing, even as (speaking for myself) I am a little nervous about these things. We did so, and it was such fun. I am happy to say there are no videos of it.

My point is that the lure to enjoy life with others in loving ways is one way that many people experience the divine lure in human life. It is not the only way; we also experience it as a desire for solitude, service, serenity, and wonder. Still it is one way; and it seems to me that the world would be a much better place if more of us felt and responded to this lure.

The urge itself can be understood as an initial aim arising from the situation and heaven. The two are always together: the moment and the calling. The calling is always a calling for this moment, this situation. It comes from God and the world and pulls us from within our own hearts as our own innermost-desire for vitality.

The iconic song by the Bee Gees offers a way to reflect upon how, from a process perspective, we might be dancing for the sake of a better world, where all are free to express themselves and take delight in the joys of others, without the trappings of self-congratulation, greed, prejudice, or pride. The Bee Gees are right. We should be dancing.

- Jay McDaniel

You Should be Dancing:​
​A Process Approach

1. Recognizing the Urge to Dance: You recognize the urge to dance is an initial aim from God.

2. Dancing for Whom: You know that initial aims are not simply about morality. They are also about joy and play, silence and listening, wisdom and wonder. But sometimes we must feel them with a sense of obligation because they help us become better citizens of the planet. For our sakes, for the world’s sake, and for God’s sake, we "should" be dancing.

3. Dancing in Everyday Life: You know it's fun to dance with others: other people to be sure. But you are comfortable with dancing alone. You often find yourself dancing around the house, even without music. You know that music is important to dancing, but not essential. Rhythmic movement is dancing, too.

4. Inclusivity of Dance: You know that people of all ages can dance. They can dance as infants as they learn to move their legs and arms, and they can dance on their deathbeds as they hold hands with others. They can dance in wheelchairs, too: no problem at all.

5. Learning and Exploring Dance: You enjoy exploring different dance styles and learning new moves; or at least watching people who learn new styles.

6. Energy and Satisfaction in Dance: You feel a surge of energy and happiness when you dance: an emergence of what the philosopher Whitehead calls “satisfaction” in the moment.

7. Dancing in Bodily Communication: You believe communication between people can occur in bodily ways and that sometimes bodily movements are much more communicative than words.

8. Dancing as Kindness and Connection: You believe that people can "feel the feelings" of others and that dance is a way this can happen. Dancing is a way that what Whitehead calls “hybrid physical prehensions” occur. You know that dancing on a dance floor is a wonderful way of dancing, but that there are many more: even the flick of an eyebrow is a kind of dancing. And almost all thinking, with its rhythmic underpinnings and quiet musicality, is a kind of dancing. Kindness is one of the most precious forms of dancing.

9. Dancing and Thought: You think that even thinking is a form of dancing, a kind of movement with rhythms. You believe that sometimes the rhythm of thinking is as important as its putative content; the content is in the rhythm. That’s why you like poetry. You think that being perfectly still, as in certain forms of Buddhist meditation and Christian prayer, is a kind of dancing, too.

10. Dance in Society: You feel that the world would be a whole lot better if there were more dancers than soldiers.

11. Bodily and Mental Experience: You believe in what Whitehead calls “the withness of the body.” You think that every moment of experience has a physical pole and a mental pole, and that the mental pole begins with the physical.

12. Cosmic Perspective on Dance: You believe that the universe is composed of events, not things; of moments of energy, not static entities, of rhythmic patterns, not isolated substances. You have a sense that bass rhythms reveal something deep, something cosmic, the “energy pulsations” of which the entire universe is composed.

13. The Universe as a Dance: You grow weary of the trite metaphor that the universe is a dance, when there is so much sorrow and violence in the world, but that, deep down, it's still true that the universe is a kind of dancing, and that each actual entity, in its desire for satisfaction, is a celebration of life.

14. Dancing in Empty and Outer Space: You feel pretty sure that there's a lot of dancing in empty space and also in outer space.

15. Dancing in Other Dimensions: You realize that our universe is a multiverse with many dimensions. In other dimensions, there may be living ancestors, spirits, angels, and devils. They are dancing, too. The fact that even devils are dancing shows that dancing needs goodness, compassion, and kindness in order to realize its own potential.

16. Unity of the Universe: You believe that the unity of the universe is an unfolding life, itself in process, that includes all the acts of dancing in the universe, such that it is a living whole. It is what process theologians call God. It is dancing, too.

17. Divine Dancing: You realize that many people will want to speak of this divine dancing in terms of the subject-predicate mode of expression, seeing it as a "dancer" who somehow "undergoes" or "embodies" the dancing. But you worry that this way of speaking too easily turns the cosmic dancing into a "thing" or a focal object in the imagination. You prefer to speak of it as the Dancing.

18. Small Acts of Dancing: You see small acts of dancing in human life as ways of participating in the divine Dancing, but also don't think it's necessary to always say this. It's fine to let the dancing be dancing.