Dancing on Behalf of Peace

“What is she doing?” My 5-year-old grandson William’s voice echoed throughout the large meeting space at my 31-year-old son Kenneth’s memorial service.

Hearing that voice and the question I imagined many other people asking themselves, I stopped what I was doing. I went over to him, where he was seated with his parents in the front row. “I’m dancing on behalf of Uncle Ken,” I said. “Would you like to dance with me?”

Without hesitation, he buried his head in his mother’s pregnant lap and shook his head vigorously.

William’s 5-year-old brother, Ethan, stood up, took my extended hand, and joined me. We danced together in a circular pattern in the open space. I lifted him, and we twirled around together. My breath quickened, and my heart filled with joy. I was transported back to when my youngest son, Ken, was 5 years old. In these moments of my greatest sorrow, tears reminded me of the tremendous joy Ken’s life had brought to mine.

Dancing and grieving share a similar status in Western culture. They are both to be avoided to maintain one’s composure. That evening, I thanked Ethan for dancing with me, and then William wanted to explain why he had rejected my offer. “I don’t dance,” he said firmly. “I play golf!”

Many people won’t or refuse to dance, yet Alice Walker maintains the “hard times call for furious dancing!” Those of us willing to dance need to dance for those who won’t or can’t. The popular notion of dance is an energetic celebration of positive moments in life, like weddings, birthdays, and graduations. Less well-known is that dance can also be an act of mourning, a full-bodied communal expression of life’s challenges and ways to grapple with them. It is a dual strength of dance that can help us navigate all our milestone events, which are often a mixture of joy and grief, laughter and tears.

In these challenging times, it is worth asking what dancing and movement can do for us grieving losses and hungering for peace. War and conflicts force people to leave their homes and all they’ve worked for. If they stay, a good night’s sleep is impossible due to the noise and danger from attacks. If they leave and become refugees, then they face new threats of housing and food.

So, if we are to dance for peace, let’s start with a simple gesture, the body’s language for what we sometimes don’t have words for.

Let’s start by making a fist and raising it in the air. That gesture expresses our determination to recognize the injustices of war and our willingness to stand against them. Seeing others raise hands lets us know we are in solidarity against injustice. Being a peacemaker means knowing peace cannot be maintained without justice.

But we must let go of the fist and shake it out; dance can help us do that. That fist may have become planted in various parts of our bodies, constricting our breath, creating pain, and interrupting our rest. Holding on to atrocities and our reactions to them keep them alive in the world. We must let go, but as Soyinka Rahim reminds us, we must do it with love, which takes dance.

We need rituals for peace because they will change us individually and collectively. Let me offer a story. In the mid-1980s, a man from Germany visited India and was introduced to a simple ritual: a universal peace greeting from the Gaudi Foundation. The words begin, “I offer you peace.”

The gestures that went along with it used universal sign language, not the sign language we are familiar with that expresses words in the English language. Through members of my InterPlay Community, this peace greeting got to me. I began using it to start and finish classes I taught at the university and staff meetings we held at our behavioral health care clinic in Fort Worth, TX. The prayer goes like this:

“I offer you peace,

I offer you friendship,

I offer you love,

I hear your needs,

I see your beauty,

I acknowledge your feelings,

My wisdom comes from a higher source,

I salute that source in you,

Let us work and play together.”

Of course, the prayer is accompanied by a gesture that symbolizes each wishful thought.

In 1988, Vivian Casselberry, a Dallas journalist, formed an organization known as Peacemakers. Vivian and others were organizing the First International Women’s Peace Conference. One of the organizers called and asked that I share this universal peace greeting with them. I did that, and each morning of the week-long conference, a different delegation of women from one of the 57 countries represented led the conference community of 2,000 women in reciting the words of the peace greeting in their native language. We spent a lot of time that week running back and forth to the copy room at the conference center, making copies of the peace greeting for the women to take back to their countries.

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Barely a year later, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall, which had stood since 1961, came down. Of course, we can’t know that the peace ritual had anything to do with that. But I can say that in 1988, though we focused quite a bit on it in our discussions, nobody thought there was much chance of that wall being removed.

It isn’t easy to know what will help bring peace to Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Haiti. We don’t want to be naïve to think that our good thoughts alone can do this, but for most of us, there is a profound sorrow and grief as we watch news reports and talk to family or friends located in those war-torn areas. Along with any practical support we can provide, dancing on behalf of peace can help bring some sense of ease to our lives and goodwill to others.