To a Dancing God: Notes of a Spiritual Traveler

by Sam Keen

A personal exploration of the problem of being human in the 20th century, in which the author analyzes key issues in education, philosophy, theology and psychology. In this framework he tells his own story, showing readers how the sacred is rediscovered through personal mythology.

Genres: Spirituality, Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Theology, Religion

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Sam Keen was an American author, professor, and philosopher who is best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, wonder, religion, and being a male in contemporary society. He co-produced Faces of the Enemy, an award-winning PBS documentary; was the subject of a Bill Moyers' television special in the early 1990s; and for 20 years served as a contributing editor at Psychology Today magazine. He was also featured in the 2003 documentary Flight from Death.
Keen completed his undergraduate studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and later completed graduate degrees at Harvard University and Princeton University.
Keen was married to Patricia de Jong, who was a former senior minister of First Congregational Church of Berkeley, United Church of Christ, in Berkeley, California.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't had a book make me think this hard in a long time. It is an easy book to jump around in, but prepare to spend some time in contemplation. I would read a few pages and then put it down to consider what I had just read. Thanks to Pastor Barry for the recommendation! (Although I'm not sure I got out of it what he had planned!)

[Christy J-Furem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing message and questions asked about how we can live, love, and worship in a more primal ecstatic way. This book gives you a lot to chew on in language that is dense and, at times, hard to understand (but inspiring!). An elementary knowledge of philosophy would definitely make it an easier read. I really enjoyed this book, but could only read small bits at a time due to brain-stretching.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of personal essays is very much written in the diction of the late 1960s but should not be dismissed or taken lightly because of that. Keen was searching for a faith or philosophy grounded in his experience that would also offer holistic integration (see?) of his life and connection to others. His insights, such as that we cannot live in the present moment without remembering our past and hoping for our future, are sharp and true.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A PROPOSAL FOR A ‘VISCERAL THEOLOGY’

Author Sam Keen wrote in his Preface to the 1990 edition of this 1970 book, “I am surprised as anyone to be celebrating the 20th birthday of ‘To a Dancing God.’ … I discovered that [the book] had touched a sweet spot in the modern psyche in the months immediately after its publication when I began to get letters from readers… It seems that by writing the first chapters of my spiritual autobiography before I had reached the unripe age of 40, and while I was still in turmoil, I inadvertently gave others permission to take the spiritual drama of their own lives seriously. By telling my story I placed religious authority back in the hands of the individual. My decision to trust my experience more than any dogma, church, guru, or authority encouraged others to do the same and began a movement that brought the notion of storytelling back into the center of theology where it belongs.” (Pg. xi)

He wrote in the Introduction to the original book, “Once up a time there was an unchanging God who was king over an orderly world in which change occurred to benevolently it was called progress. There was a place and a time for everything… There were authorities too… The newspaper told it like it was… And filling in all the cracks between constituted authorities were reason and common sense. Then something happened. Some say God died. This much we know: everything that was nailed down suddenly came loose. Chaos was king and the moral world looked like a furniture store after a hurricane… The consensus about morals disintegrated in pluralism. The credibility of revelation, and therefore… organized religion, was gradually eroded away… The authority of reason also became tarnished as it became clear that the university, no less than any other institution, shaped its conclusions to satisfy its desire… So what is there left to trust?... If authority has collapsed where is the individual to decide… Indeed, by what criteria is he to decide what an ‘authentic’ life-style is? It is at this point of crisis and quest that these essays begin.” (Pg. 1-2)

He says in the first chapter, “Although I hope that I will continue to grow toward a richer and more satisfying style of life, there is no future perfection I must achieve before I may accept myself. What I plan is an extension of what I desire. My projected future is primarily a concrete means of taking responsibility for continuing satisfaction, not a program for repaying debts or fulfilling obligations.” (Pg. 36)

He suggests, “Needless to say, the value of planning one’s death is not to ensure a coincidence between the plan and the event. How much correlation there is between the death we plan and the death we actually die remains an open question… The important feature of planning is that it is a way of becoming clear about the probable results of different styles of life, in order that a lucid choice may be made. We consider death that we might live with as much joy and integrity as possible.” (Pg. 80)

He states, “By locating the holy in the spiritual depths rather than the heights… the form an imagery, not the substance, of the religious consciousness is changed. If the promises that redeem us spring from mundane soil rather than from an authorized covenant with God, history is, nevertheless, experiences as the story of promise and fulfillment. Human existence is still sanctified by sacrifice, and we may appropriately face the mysterious givenness of life and personality with gratitude and reverence.” (Pg. 104)

He continues, “If God is gone from the sky, he must be found in the earth. Theology must concern itself … with the principles, powers, and persons which are presently operative to make and keep human life luminous and sacred. Whether such a subterranean theology will allow us to weather the crisis in spiritual identity through which we are passing is still unknown. For those who no longer find in the stories and myths of orthodox religion the power to inform life with creative meaning, it may, at least, point to a locality and a method which may be useful in discovering a sacred dimension of life. And, perhaps, if each of us learns to tell his own story, even if we remain ignorant of the name of God or the form of religions, it will be sufficient.” (Pg. 104-105)

He asserts, “If we lose the self we lose the other; if we lose the body we lose the world. Thus the danger of not loving one’s body. Love of both neighbor and cosmos rests upon love of self. But even more, the sacred rests upon the carnal.” (Pg. 150)

He observes, “In a given age it may be politics, or art, or psychology, or education in which the most lucid testimony to the sacred is to be found. It is the continual task of the theologian to distinguish between the sacred, whether used in politics (In God We Trust) or in religion (You MUST believe in the Lord Jesus Christ to be saved), may actually function to demean human life.” (Pg. 157)

He concludes, “If the church fails to develop a visceral theology and fails to help modern man rediscover and reverence his flesh and his feelings, it will neglect a source of common grace as well as the seed from which compassion grows. It will thereby turn its back on the incarnation of the sacred in our history, in our flesh.” (Pg. 160)

This book will be of interest to a wide variety of people.

[Richard Worden]

What a pleasure to read this book found in a used book store. The book was published in 1970 and is now out of print. The material (ideas, ideas, and more ideas) are as relevant today as when I first read the book almost 50 years ago.

[Jane Hallett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a copyright from 1970. I had not naively, looking at the title, realized it to be theological in its nature. I’m glad I read it, & I ordered two other Sam Keen books in the process. I’m also glad that Sam Keen still seems to be going strong in his mid 90’s.
It was not an easy read for me. Keen is highly educated. It took a while for me to immerse into his style of expression. I have found this before with books on philosophy or novels with heavy vernacular. It takes a while to sink into the style.
Even so, I needed to really focus and concentrate as I read his discourse. There are numerous dates references that were over my head and I was often too lazy to Google. However, that being said, I found the read worthwhile, & unlike most of my read books I will keep, shelf, and reread this book.

He was, and probably still is, a pretty radical theologian. I’d say he was probably way in front of his time. As he states himself he comes at you from the side in his notions. These thoughts cover on theology relating to humanity, and all those human things like love, sex, compassion, empathy for the physical wellbeing of others, accepting responsibility for our own wellbeing, and more.
A good book on how to live well. Thumbs up.

[JD Waggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've now read this twice, actually, and I think it says something about the book that not a whole lot of it sticks in my mind. I don't know why; Keen's voice is well-developed, if wander-y (he admits right out that this is a collection of essays over time, so there is not real narrative connection between pieces other than his centrality of experience and thought). There are some lovely pieces for thought. But I just...I never connected to this text.

This could be for a few reasons: one, Keen is a philosopher by training and trade, and I am most certainly not. I hated having to take philosophy for my degrees and that is not at all a thing that I willingly embrace for long periods of time, so it was unlikely that I was really going to appreciate the way Keen looks at faith and life and community simply because I'm bored stiff by the lens through which he sees it. Two is weirder; although I am chronologically young-ish (a few years past the quarter-life crisis), I never have a problem connecting with older generations and their cultural markers. Here, however, I did; Keen writes from the place after the declaration that God is dead, noting the shift from Western society being predominantly faith-based to being predominantly secular, raging in the shadow of the Vietnam War. This was published in 1970--and I have no idea how to understand his angst about that. I was born way after that shift and have never lived in any other kind of culture, so I really couldn't get on his level for how much the new existential uncertainty was changing things for him. I just didn't understand, and I think that made a lot of his writing totally inaccessible for me. And three, Keen is writing from the stronghold of a Freudian worldview, and while I appreciate the impact Freud had on modern psychology, there is no way I buy into some of the applications that Keen has. Again, time difference that I felt very strongly.

Not to say that there weren't things that resonated. I really appreciated his essay on education and what it would look like to create courses not to learn facts but to learn life--and death, and physicality, and love, and Really Big Ideas like that. I would love to take some of the classes he suggests, fake though they may be.

Let me put some of the quotes that really struck me here:
"A psychoanalysis of chatter would suggest that our over-verbalization is an effort to avoid something which is fearful--silence. But why should silence be so threatening? Words are a way of structuring, manipulating, and controlling; thus, when they are absent the specter of loss of control arises. If we cannot name it we cannot control it. Naming gives us power. Hence silence is impotence, the surrender of control. Control is power and power is safety." (44)

"Consider, for instance, our carelessness of the body in the educational process. Minds, not bodies, are taught in the classroom." (46)

"If our bodies are hollow shells to be painted and decorated it is because we have never cared enough to educate the sensitive core; we have not undertaken to resurrect the body from deadness." (47)

"How do you take the world into yourself?...[G]ive full attention to your style of eating for one week and try drawing parallels to the way in which you read, listen, think, understand, and relate to persons." (50)

"As Arthur Darby Nock, the Harvard historian of religions, was fond of saying, 'Primitive religion is not believed. It is danced.'" (51)

"When they learn to express feelings and differences without equivocation, to insist upon the right to independent psychic space, to state grievances, to demand respect, fighting may become a way of loving combat. Honest fighting between friends deepens love. It is not anger but resentment, not confrontation but simmering hostility that is the enemy of love." (64-65)

"As in dealing with fantasy, the first step in education for storytelling is granting permission. Each of us has a story, but few have had audiences before whom it was appropriate to share intimate and meaningful history." (72)

"In the Judeo-Christian tradition the drama which provides the structural meaning for human existence takes place on the stage of history rather than in the eternal cycle of nature...each moment is unique, even though it fits into the development of the plot." (90-91)

"I am so many, yet I may only be one. I mourn for all the selves I kill when I decide to be a single person. Decision is a cutting off, castration. I travel one path only by neglecting many." (119)

"Man is given fire, freedom, and power by God...The Christian God is for hot blood, fire, new life, the resurrection of the body. Unfortunately most churches remain gnostic in their attitudes toward the body and the natural world." (126)

"For most of my life it had been my custom to begin the day by carefully assuming the burden of my ancient fears and inadequacies, and by planning the tasks which must be performed. I clothed myself with estrangement each morning as automatically as I dressed my body. Until recently, I have not been willing to drop this dreadful burden. Freedom was too threatening...And now it is happening. I allow myself to be happy....Grace is being willing to be your whole self." (137)

"Obligation arises out of feeling, the categorical imperative out of compassion (contrary to Kant). Men with any feeling for the inviolability of their own bodies would not tolerate the violation of other men's bodies. There can be no such thing as a compassionate 'body count' to establish the losses of the enemy." (153)

[Orestis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The mix of essays, poetry and dramatisation would have caught my attention even if the content hadn't hit close to home. It requires detailed knowledge of philosophical and theological ideas at times, yet it's still great at showing the universal quality of human experience and thought.

[M Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I could remember what induced me to add this book to my list. Whatever I read about it, it wasn't so. It's pretty indicative of the book's effect on me that now, two months after I read it, all I can remember is thinking, "Wow, I bet this book was important in the 70s but now it seems like self-indulgent claptrap." Sic transit gloria mundi.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good things in this. After all we are all suffering from an identity crisis, and a dancing God would be a start.