Worship through Movement

Guest

By Ruthie Buescher, Communications Coordinator for Grace Northridge Anglican Church

Photo Credit: Wendi Poole

Participants are sitting crossed-legged, some kneeling. A few are lying down on their backs or sides. One is standing, swaying a bit from side to side. Silence reigns, broken only by the occasional deep breath or cleared throat.

This is a movement and prayer workshop, developed using ancient prayer practices paired with theater techniques. The emphasis is on being present with the others in the room, being aware of oneself and, most of all, being quiet and open to the presence of the Holy Spirit. Using the principles of the Desert Mothers and Fathers, who believed that prayer was a holistic posture of the heart, the people in this workshop are seeking to retrain their bodies and minds to view prayer not just as an intellectual exercise but as a way of meeting God through the bodies he gave them.

As a theater practitioner, the impetus for these prayer workshops came about through years of experiencing the healing quality of being in a rehearsal room with like-minded theater-makers. Humans have very few opportunities to be in a space where they are invited to be quiet, where physical touch feels safe and where they are able to look each other in the eye. For the most part, our churches are no exception. But what if they were? What happens when churches make a real effort to honor the way God created us: as relational, embodied beings who are designed to breathe, laugh, cry and live together?

In many ways, our ancestors in the faith understood these things more deeply than we do, which is why there are many practices of contemplative prayer (and sacred theater) to look to from the past. Drawing on these sources and combining them with my own theater training has yielded the creation of workshops in which churchgoers have an opportunity to practice the same holistic life of prayer that contemplatives and Christians throughout the centuries have pursued.

Practically, the workshops take on a simple format. Through exercises such as walking, breathing and stretching muscles, participants are invited to acknowledge their physical selves and take the time to listen to what their observations can reveal to them about what is going on in their heads and hearts. They are then invited to spend a large amount of time in centering or contemplative prayer, focusing not on reaching out to God with their thoughts but on quietly waiting for him to speak. This is often the most difficult work, because it goes against our natural impulse to constantly do—something we have been trained, both in and outside of the Church, to expect of ourselves.

Through the course of the workshop, participants are also invited to connect with the others in the room, whether through discussion, responding to Scripture through simple frozen images or even just standing shoulder to shoulder next to someone else. In all these exercises, the throughline is silence, and that is also a difficult thing, because silence calls us to come face-to-face not just with the other humans in the room but with ourselves.

Without distraction, without doing, we are vulnerable. And yet it is here, in the quiet, that God speaks, and what he has to say is often more wonderful than we can imagine. As the great theologian and contemplative Henri Nouwen wrote, “It is not easy to enter into the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: ‘You are my Beloved Child, on you my favor rests.’ Still, if we dare to embrace our solitude and befriend our silence, we will come to know that voice.” (1)