Dreaming about a new seating area in our master bedroom...and maybe a wallpaper accent wall...

Update 01/08/2026: I've ordered the furniture in this design board. The thing I'm waiting on is the wallpaper, only because it is sure to be expensive and then I need to hire someone to install it. There's no way I'm pretending that I can do it myself. The one element that I'm unsure of is the accent pillow. On its own, I love this print, however, I remain uncertain if it will really complement the chair and, more broadly, the rest of the room. Maybe I will take more pictures of the broader room elements to reflect visually before deciding or hunting for another pattern. 

Ever since I read Karen Swallow Prior's biography on the life and work of Hannah More, I have longed to find a group of artistically-minded, research scholars to share work with and generate critical feedback of my writing and choreography. I sought a community interested in the good, true, and beautiful. I have finally run across just such a society of women and, as an added bonus, they invoke Hannah More and The Blue Stocking Society, an informal literary, social, and educational women's movement in the 18th century. As a writer of fiction, poetry, and theatre, Hannah More was a prolific writer and worker to promote education for children and even worked alongside William Wilberforce in the Abolition Movement. Full of small contributions, More became my inspiration to accumulate a life of meaning and purpose in art, an outcrop of my Christian faith, no matter the smallest of tasks. 

It is important not to elevate an artists' work above others' work. Ultimately, art has incredible power to feed the soul; a very important part of being human. But, is the calling of an artist somehow more spiritual or have a supernatural ethos above other callings? ​

​It’s always a pleasure for me to see new movers in new spaces. Such was the performance of Dimensions Variable, Gabrielle Lamb’s company, Pigeonwing Dance at the Moody Center For The Arts on October 9, 2025.  For just a quick commentary about the Q&A session following the performance. I tend to think Q&A’s are ripe with opportunity to see how the audience and artists connected throughout the performance. As always, this audience had thoughtful questions to ask. One audience member asking about the planning, choreography, and improvisation processed in the gallery space with Tishan Hsu’s exhibit of “Bio Morphe”. The questioner marveled at how the improvisational segments timed perfectly with the music. 
Dancers, in turn, marveled in response with delight at how serendipitous their movement production in real time seemed to respond to the movement and vice versa. While it is, indeed, one of the great delights of developing a dance piece inside improvisational scores, I would argue that it is not serendipitous. It is the nature of improvisation work; a result of the practice of improvisation and the lengthy efforts that dancers invest in training for sensitivity to movement, music, various environmental stimuli, and, most of all, internal response of their bodies for the work. I am not chastising these dancers for not realizing this, I’m simply noting this moment of epiphany and delight that they found these delicious moments within their project. Dance on, Lovelies, it was beautiful. 

"[There is an] idea that shame needs to be defeated by pride and self-love. When we're living in shame and embarrassment and when we try to turn that shame into a pride, either way, your still living under the slavery of what other people think of you, rather than in the true freedom that we have in Christ." 

However, at the time, I did not feel as if I had personally come to a complete resolution within my performance of the piece. I was uncertain if the choreography lacked some unresolved element or if this dissolution was a part of the performance process. I think one of the reasons the duet did not feel finished to me was because I did not reach the stage where I was reconciling my performance choices with the choreography. Sometimes that changes a few details of the choreography but usually it is more about underscoring the intent with performance choices. These choices solidify the concept within the piece. For me, if I have the chance to really delve into the performance process it feels more complete. It may have just  needed one more block in the build, one more piece in the puzzle. It is somewhat regretful to me that I was unable to get there and now it has been 6 years since that performance. I am not saying that it was not a good performance experience in many other ways. In fact, the cumulative ways in which the performance did feel satisfactory overrides this feeling of lack. But, nonetheless, it is something I still think about and wonder if there were a way to resurrect the work and continue exploring its themes. It may be ironic that the purported themes in the work actually came to fruition in real life. It was connection and disconnection, desire and failure through art, yet, in the wild. ~ RBJ

​One of the hardest aspects of grief is the collateral damage of a significant loss. In addition to the person who died, some people lose cursory relationships such as mutual friends of your loved one, couple friends that don’t know how to move on with only you and not your spouse, the widow of the parent you lost, or even whole groups of, what I call, “club friends”.  Acquaintances that you run into frequently simply because you have children in the same grade or always talk with before church, etc. Club friends often have no idea how to include you or check on you while you’re still sad. That’s normal, though shallow and, frankly, unhelpful in any real sense. These periphery losses can affect the way you grieve and whether the process is overall healthy. While this is simply a reflection of personal observations, it acknowledges the non-linear messiness of grief. This is not a way to stoke that embers of grief to keep it alive, as if to wallow in the pain and define oneself by sadness. It’s an acknowledgment; a virtual nod of authenticity, a lingering look, and a decided exhale before stepping on down the path, a warm glow of sunset on the back. 

​The dance opened with a quiet exploration of gestural language. My hands circle an imaginary cup and I raise it slowly toward my lips. Imagining the liquid slipping down my throat, a warmth spreads as I trace a crown with my thumbs around my skull and reach upward to pour the liquid in “S” pathways to the floor. I gather it into my belly and then dissolve the image outward from my center, my body rising into a walk. I place my hands as if on a table – the communion table – and slide them along the surface in one direction and again to the other. I can imagine the strength of the wood and the texture of the grain. Slowly the table dissolves as my body melts, giving way to a posture of prostration, forehead on the floor, arms extended in crucifixion fashion from my sides. My heart waxes worshipful. 
​

​I spent multiple years embodying Amy McIntosh’s Eucharistia, a dance piece reflective of the eucharist. Dancers emulate the consumption of the bread and wine symbolizing Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. This became one of the first dances that I performed in which I realized that dance had the ability to deepen my knowledge of God – from the beams of the cross, to the visceral expression of sin growing like a cancer that needed to be expelled, to the action and textures associated with the bread and wine as body and blood. Unlike other forms of art, dance and movement have the power to capture the corporeal imagination. However, the dance performance is fluid, always evolving, and ephemeral like very few forms of art. Such a canvas – the body – allows me as a dancer to physically embrace spiritual formation in a felt way. It is kinesthetic information, perhaps necessary for a more integrated approach to knowing God. 

​We have a problem, however; people often live estranged from their bodies. It can be strongly argued to be the result of absorbing the secular concept of the body/person split. Secularism claims that there is a divide between human bodies and human persons. Nancy Pearcey explains this in depth in her book, Love Thy Body, by outlining how secular thought historically came to regard the body as existing in the lower realm of scientific and empirical fact and personhood existing in the upper realm of knowing through experience. She calls this the fact/value split or body/person split.[2] Viewing human beings in this fragmented way can lead us to disavow the body from being biologically intrinsic to the person. When we uncouple ourselves from our bodies it can have detrimental effects on how we live our lives. Losing touch with our bodies in relation to who we are can fragment our understanding of faith and our quest to thrive as creations of a Holy God. 
 
Paul M. Gould connects this fragmenting with Miroslav Volf’s concepts of passive and active nihilism. Volf argues that nihilism, which declares that all values are meaningless and unknowable, can be expressed in two modes. Passive nihilism denies the world, causing us to miss all the ordinary moments of pleasure and joy as we pursue meaning in the face of the void. Meanwhile, active nihilism guts the world of objective meaning by treating it as a blank canvas, upon which we declare our values when and how we want as ‘free spirits’ who daily write our own destiny. He draws a picture of Western Christians living in the valley between these modes of nihilism in a disenchanted space. As if split between realities of the mundane and the transcendent, we have no idea how to refashion them back together. “Our innate longing for meaning compels us toward a transcendent, while our longing for pleasure draws us to the mundane. Many of us languish in the valley between the transcendent and the mundane, too distracted and lethargic to commit one way or the other.”[3] Delegating our bodies to our earthly jobs, separated from our spiritual lives, can cut us off from all the information that the facts and experiences of our bodies give us. But in Christianity, there is a unity between the two. It has the potential to deepen the divide between the Sunday fellowship body and the weekday work body. If we are to approach our spiritual formation holistically, in what ways might we make space for the body to know God’s truths revealed? Perhaps we can take a few cues from the dance art form.

Audiences and artists alike absorb ideas, true or false, by comparing the witness of art to our embodied lives. When we see persons of different skin tones dancing together, our biases and affirmations are revealed. When we see tenderness, it recalls memories or longings to have those experiences for ourselves. Yet, the converse is also true. When we see bodies in dysfunctional relationships or performing perverse actions, we connect to some sliver of divine longing for healthy relationships, and we know that what ought to be has been disrupted. Calling this ‘person knowledge’, Sara B. Savage defines this as the ways in which we can know the truth in our person in relation to other persons.[6] ‘Person knowledge’ includes individuals, communities, and, ultimately, Christ. She points out that person knowledge is not personal knowledge (perspective or knowledge of self). Nor is it to replace intellectual knowledge; rather, it enriches our understanding for a fuller acknowledgment of truth. Dance is one way to see, feel, and know through the body on our way to a more complete understanding of a Creator God. 
 
Dance can open us up to the kinesthetic delight of the body and its design, as well as encourage our own personal embodied expressions in prayer and worship. I would extend that to our ‘everyday movings-about’ as well. We can attendto the warmth of the sun as we sit with a loved one on a park bench. We can feel longing when we witness our child’s focused extended arms reach up to us as they emphatically express a desire to be picked up and held. These physical experiences of emotions and of aesthetics have spiritual applications. We can delight in the beauty of the warmth of the sun God made and we can translate our child’s efforts to be held into a posture with which to approach our Father God. The human drive to create and appreciate beauty is connected to our relationship as creatures to a Creator God. It is a divine dialogue and one primarily experienced through our bodies for understanding His truth in totality. 
 
Toward the end of Eucharistia, we revisited the gestures that explored the textures of the cross and brought them into our bellies. Each dancer took rotation in canon to part their clasped hands from their center, opening into an upward prone position, willing the space to also open with the opening of our chests born to God. At this moment, I experienced a revelation. It felt like the veil that separated the outer temple from the Holy of Holies was parting and I was walking forward into the impact of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. I worked to express that tonal change in my body of what it might have felt like when God’s light and plan were revealed in the renting of the veil.
​

​This is not to say that dance is a formula for understanding biblical precepts or stories; nevertheless, kinesthetic information can expand our understanding and experience in our lives with God. You don’t have to take a dance class or be an artist to develop this aesthetic awareness in the body. Yet, taking the body and its physical experiences for granted can cut off a facet of biblical understanding unnecessarily. Physical experiences are not re-interpretations of what scripture claims about God’s story; rather, they are symbols and visceral ways of knowing through kinesthetic dance language that enrich our potential spiritual formation. 
​

When Dry Bones Dance
​

​Our bodies are designed for movement. We were designed to spiral into the outside world from our mother’s womb with a divine choreography to take our first breath.[7] And so are our souls (towards God in a personal, relational exchange). We were made with the capacity for communicating with God. Dance can give us back access to our bodies, that we might worship as whole beings. If we don’t mend the body/person split and restore a holistic approach to our spiritual lives, particularly regarding our bodies, Christians are in danger of missing out on a facet of the biblical message when we fail to embody its truth in word and deed. Dance can be an effective kinesthetic tool for awakening us to see the transcendent felt meaning in the mundane and approach the world as watchful and waking pilgrims.[8]    
 
Scripture is full of examples of bodily felt meaning. John the Baptist leapt in utero when Mary approached Elizabeth pregnant with the Messiah (Lk 1:44). Ezekiel enacted prophetic performance art on behalf of God (Eze 4). Jesus died bodily, was buried, then was raised in that same body; He ate bodily, and He still bears the nail scars in His hands. Bodies are important for knowing the truth, deepening our understanding of God. It was one such moment of bodily importance in Luke 7:13 that captivates our attention as Jesus comes upon a funeral procession. This is a choreographed dance of lamentation as a widow, likely on the verge of destitution, is mourning the death of her only son. Happening upon this grief-stricken scene, Jesus sees the woman and is moved to empathy for her. He brings her son back to life and returns him to his mother.[9] It is this place of felt response that tills the ground of understanding to know Jesus more fully and deeply. 
 
Gould writes, “In the Christian Story, there is unity between [meaning and pleasure], offering the possibility of wholeness.” The kind of people we choose to become begins with our perceptions of God and the world he made.[10]These perceptions are aesthetic, kinesthetic, visceral, and emotional. They are the dance of our lives. This is not a case for elevating lived experience and feelings above other forms of knowledge and growth; rather, embodied living balances all the ways of knowing that feed into our lives as embodied human beings. Sometimes we may not “feel” conviction if we’ve inadvertently lacerated our conscience due to our persistent sin nature. Our reason can balance our feelings, guided by Scripture, so that our understanding comes into discipline when our will is in subtle or overt rebellion. A holistic approach seeks unified truth - truth that sutures the upper and lower stories of body and person together.[11] Truth restored will call forth the truth of reason and the truth of personal experience to fully approach God. This is the transformational power that Scripture promises us. 2 Corinthians 4:5-7 (RSV) tells us, “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in
​the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” 
 
We are not meant to travel alone; the Holy Spirit and the Church are our companions in our efforts. Recalling my performance experience in the gestural material of Eucharistia informed my experience of the eucharist with the Church. Recalling the feeling of taking in the Holy of Holies as I passed the rent veil allows me to have my imagination baptized by the Holy Spiritas I bring my full self into deeper worship in the corporate Body on Sabbath. Evelyn Underhill elegantly describes this divine exchange when she writes: 

​As Underhill explains, an embodied approach brings my total self, my unified attention of mind, body, and will, to abide before God in all my interactions with Him and His Word.
 
God gives us, in Himself, a vision for the intersection of embodied movement and faith in Ezekiel’s famous vision of an entire army of dry and worthless bones coming to life again in Ezekiel 37:1-14. Though Israel and Judah had lost hope and were scattered through conquest, God choreographed a prophetic miracle to demonstrate to His people that He would redeem them. In this vision, a valley is laid waste with dry, dead human bones. God commands Ezekiel to speak to the bones and demand they reassemble. Ezekiel then hears the bones rattle and watches as the tendons sew them in order, the flesh and sinew wrap around them, and skin swathes them into human bodies once again. As if this wasn’t incredible enough, God tells Ezekiel to prophesy once again, this time to breathe life into these inanimate bodies. And behold, a living army! Verse 14 states, “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.” Through this vision, God demonstrated that not only would He restore His people physically as one nation to their homeland again, but He would also ultimately bring spiritual restoration through the sacrifice of Jesus and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Hearkening back to the creation story of Adam and Eve, God put action to His promise in divine, symbolic performance. 
​

His creation responds with movement and art: 
​

It's Your breath in our lungs
So we pour out our praise to You only
And all the earth will shout Your praise
Our hearts will cry, these bones will sing
Great are You, Lord[14]

​This is aesthetic language: we pour out praise, the earth shouts, our hearts cry. I imagine that Creator God dances over the void, at the brink of creative orchestration. He has made me a new creation and raised me from my sin with Christ. I respond to these visceral images: my bones will sing. I will dance.

[1] Wendell Berry, “How to Be a Poet,” Poetry Foundation, accessed July 31, 2023, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41087/how-to-be-a-poet.
[2] Nancy R. Pearcey, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality (Ada, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2018), 13-14.
[3] Paul M. Gould, Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World (Grand Rapids: Zonderman, 2019), 175.
[4] Sara B. Savage, “Through Dance: Fully Human, Fully Alive” in Beholding The Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts, ed. Jeremy Begbie (Baker Academic, 2001), 65.
[5] Sandra Cerny Minton & Rima Faber, Thinking With The Dancing Brain: Embodying Neuroscience (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2016), 63.
[6] Sara B. Savage, “Through Dance: Fully Human, Fully Alive” in Beholding The Glory, 64.
7] Your baby in the Birth Canal, Mount Sinai Health System, accessed July 31, 2023, https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/special-topic/your-baby-in-the-birth-canal. 
[8] Terry Glaspey, Discovering God Through the Arts: How We Can Grow Closer to God by Appreciating Beauty and Creativity(Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2021), 31.
[9] Sandra Cerny Minton & Rima Faber, Thinking with The Dancing Brain: Embodying Neuroscience, 63.
[10] Paul M. Gould, Cultural Apologetics, 175.
[11] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2005).
[12] Paul M. Gould, Cultural Apologetics, 177.
[13] Evelyn Underhill, Worship (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1936), as quoted in too deep for words, 133.
[14] Genius.com, “All sons & daughters – great are you lord lyrics,” accessed May 15 2023, https://genius.com/All-sons-and-daughters-great-are-you-lord-lyrics.