It has seemed to me that there is a major disjoint between theory and practice. One might understand everything, but not be able to apply the theory to life. I have that a lot, but never in the reverse—until I tried to write this paper. Dance and worship is the first thing in experience where I can not understand the theory but I love the practice. I am at the point in my understanding where I am surrounded by new thoughts and new concepts but it is hard for me to match them up with my experience of this phenomena called “dance” and experience called “worship”. However, I am determined to write as much as I know and make clear, mostly for myself, what I have yet to understand.
I know that both dance and worship are fundamental to life. The first is fundamental because without movement we are dead. Dance is embodied life. Worship is fundamental to life because there is not a moment where we cease to worship. The only way to participate with the infinite, who is beyond all, is to meet Him through finite means, that is through symbols, which serve as a sacrament.

The Word, in which the spirit is reveals must be embodied, writes Robert Jenson; must have “some visible reality…we must be able to see and touch what we are to apprehend.

Worship is responding to the meaning behind these symbols. Image and language are two main systems of communication. The best example of the nature and power of meaning behind symbol is when Helen Keller discovers the link between word and reality.
Art is another symbol system but one which deals with image. Cynthia states that “words communicate our experiences and ideas, but images form them.” I thought about this a lot, and while I have not come to a conclusion as whether to embrace it or not, it is a profound idea to be looked into. There is an entire symbol system in image and art. There is the Infinite to be perceived behind it which communicates on a different level than verbal communication. It also calls for a different response than verbal. Art, including dance, is not means to deepening verbal communication, but stands by itself without needing any words to aide its articulation.

…the work of art is itself a Word (logos), an embodiment. ..It may function sacramentally… to the degree that it makes visible even a small glimmer of the other—the unseeable and yet sensed, the unknowable and yet longed for: the mystery.

Dance shares in this communication. It is a dialogue of movement whose meaning has not been entirely boxed in like language. It is unique from other forms of communication for obvious reasons of it being body, movement and relation to music and rhythm. This is where I am having a problem linking the practice to the theory. I do not know what the nature of movement is, but I feel it when I dance. And I know others feel it when they watch me. Dance celebrates the body and expresses what is unseen through it. Other art forms can “embody” ideas by giving them shape, colour or sound. But dance is the art form which is done by the human body itself, and is entirely caught in the moment.
Because of this unique quality to dance it is obvious that the benefits of worshiping God through movement would be different than other forms of symbol and image. It would allow both the dancer and the viewer to participate and therefore respond in worship, with a fuller experience—one which embraces the reality of being an embodied soul.