Will Bassing - Beauty in dance

In The Sacred and Profane Beauty Van Der Leeuw discusses religious dance in regards to unity of beauty and religion.  In class we watched a couple videos of African tribes engaging in ritualistic dance.  In one they were hopping up and down rhythmically with their eyes closed and chanting, in the other they were stamping the ground and pacing back and forth.  I believe that in the first video, the religious experience was at a sublime level.  The individuals participating in the chant were in such unison and were so engaged in the ritual, that they looked like they were not mentally in the same world as us.  I have experienced a similar feeling in church.  At my church, there is a ceremony held the night before the mass, and the eucharist is presented and there is rhythmic Latin praying.  There is no music, just a solemn prayer that we start at the same time and repeat, and people are free to leave whenever they want.  During this ceremony, after repeating the prayer two or three times, I almost forget that I am even saying it.  It is sort of like an out of body experience in which I stop thinking about the words and they just flow out and I am not even in the church anymore, I am just weightless and experiencing the ceremony.  This has happened several times and I don’t believe that I am experiencing God, but I do think that I am interacting with something.  It is difficult to explain, obviously.  But I do look back and think of those moments as being beautiful.