On dancing to that which you don't understand

Worship leaders at Emmaus. July 2014.

Ministry is filled with these moments of wondering how you got there – like, not in a million years, when I was in school or whatever, would I have conceived of standing in this place doing this thing.

So I found myself standing in a pulpit in Emmaus on Sunday morning getting my groove on - my beat dropped, so to speak.

When ‘us whites’ were training for the ministry we went through some of the embarrassing, egotistical nonsense that most people go through when they are forced to engage with something that they are not wishing to engage with. In this instance it was singing in an African language; we would all gather for morning worship and some person would strike up a Zulu/Xhosa/Sotho hymn or chorus and all the vernacular-speaking Africans would stand and begin to sway and groove and bend down and stand up and wiggle arms and point to the sky and then to the ground and then back to the sky and continued with what, to the untrained English ear, sounded like a drone; always somebody would be banging a hymnbook. Always there were loads of smiles and, if the song ran long enough, a lot of sweating.

You have to understand, this was a strange thing for us; most of us had not witnessed movement and song like this since our youth, when we formed a train and wove through the tables to Kylie’s ‘Do the Locomotion’ after a particularly rowdy wedding reception - this however, was the middle of the day, and these people were sober. (Not unlike Pentecost, come to think of it.)

Well, when English is your language (and the global lingua franca) and you don’t understand a word of what is going on, that just will not do. So some of us stood, still as statues, hands in pockets (if we stood at all) - a gentle, but not so subtle protest against this Godforsaken, unintelligible noise that presented itself as an assault against the senses.

You know, just as Jesus would have us do.

But then a strange thing began to happen: when I stopped protesting against the horrendous injustice of worship that was not in my style and in a language that I did not understand, (although the twenty three years under my belt in this country would suggest I had been afforded the time to learn) when I stopped all that, I kind of enjoyed what I was hearing and feeling.

There is something strange about this awkwardly big Irish body of mine: it loves a beat. I cannot be around a beat without at least one of my feet presenting itself as eager to be included in the rhythm. A foot starts bouncing, then the bottom half of the leg, then the upper half, then the hips then the torso – with a really good beat, the only part of my body I have control of is my head. Well, as much as I have control of this disproportionately large head of mine - and that's tenuous at best.

 

So on Sunday, while in the pulpit, my beat drops. The choir begins to sing Nkosi Yam. It starts gently enough, it always does, but then someone in the choir gets their groove on and begins to move forward, tiptoeing a little (you see, we’re only beginning to get our groove on). The choir then joins the move. Before you know it everyone is in on the act, moving forward to this central point and then out – waves of movement ebbing and flowing. Those who aren’t up front are thrusting hips backwards and forwards in the cheap seats.

And I’m in the pulpit, jiving. I think I look okay but I have seen video footage of myself dancing and so I know better.

But it stops me not at all.

Now this is the thing: I don’t understand a word of the song; they could be harmonising about the power of a particular washing detergent for all I know; I could be dancing along to a political anthem of a party not of my choosing and I’m doing it with glee on my face. (Like the time I was going nuts at a club in my early twenties to an awesome new song only to finally realise that I was the only guy getting ‘jiggy with it’ on a dance-floor full of women, and then realising the words to the song were, ‘It’s raining men’.)

But I’m trusting my church and its leaders.

What I have found is this: in worship, you don’t always have to know what is being said. You don’t always have to engage on a cognitive level. There is a scene in the movie While You Were Sleeping. The family are all enjoying Mass at Christmas. The old lady, Elsie, looking nonplussed and a little irritated, looks at the priest up front and remarks, ‘I like Mass better in Latin. It's nicer when you don't know what they're saying.’

Touché.

So I danced Sunday away and normally when repetition makes me want to lose the will to live I find myself thinking, ‘Yes I know, we’ve sung the chorus to Nkosi Yam forty seven times – and I haven’t got the words right yet - but let’s continue! We’re in touching distance of fifty!’

It’s bizarre to think of my attitude now compared to then. When I first worshipped in a traditionally black African church I watched these guys bending down, tiptoeing forward, and sometimes casting walking sticks to the heavens – a mass worship movement just a few wellingtons short of a full-on gumboot dance. I would look around incredulously, laughing to myself and thinking, ‘This is insane! Anybody else not noticing how ridiculous this looks?!’

Now I stand in the pulpit wishing the beat-bag was mine and longing for a whistle to blow. Bouncing around up and down and every now and then, by God’s good grace, actually matching the rhythmic swell of all the other worshippers around me.

You haven’t truly worshipped in this country until you have learned to love much of what you may never fully understand. For there is one thing this beautiful country will offer you over and over and over again and that is countless opportunities to simply let go.