The Salt of the Universe

Excerpted from The Salt of the Universe, Praise, Songs and Improvisations, by Amy Leach, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission from the publishers.

PREFACE

I don't know how it works on other planets, but on Earth, the necessary is always turning into the superfluous. Our necessary skill of talking has evolved into superfluities like sonnets and scatting and doowopping and operettas. Sleep turns into dreaming, walking turns into tangoing, pogoing, limboing, funk. Recently I saw people who seemed to have given up walking altogether, who appeared to only dance. I played the piano for a ballroom dance and was as bewitched as I would be if the pile of laundry in my basement were to get up and start dancing, the black pants with golden bees on them pirouetting, the blue snowflake socks fox-trotting around the basement floor, the beige trench coat swaying with its arms wrapped around the frilly pink and green peasant dress. Playing for a ballroom dance feels like trying not to watch the laundry dancing. If I looked up from my chord charts, I got flipped like a boat and had no clue which measure we were on in "La Isla Bonita."

Imagine the laundry being possessed—but, of course, it is possessed, when we wear it, and to observe a ballroom dance is precisely to see the laundry dancing, shiny bronze dresses sashaying with pressed white shirts, etc. I've seen funeral clothes bouncing around: I prepared somber piano music for the memorial service but when I arrived they asked for boogie-woogie. I've seen onesies bobbing, jammies twirling, waving their arms in the air, even if the music was just "Twinkle Twinkle," not the song with the most diggable beat—we're not talking Tito Puente.

The amusement of dancing, as conducted at the present day, is a school of depravity, a fearful curse to society. If all in our great cities who were yearly ruined by this means could be brought together, what histories of wrecked lives would be revealed!

So declared Ellen G. White, the founding prophet of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the church in which I grew up. To follow her commandments, to prevent the wrecking and ruining of lives, Adventist schools historically held grand marches instead of dances, with boys and girls marching around a field in opposite directions and nobody going off on tangents, nobody busting a move, and I imagine being able to accompany those events no problem. I imagine being able to keep my eyes off the regulation skirts and pants, marching around in regulation circles, but maybe not off the trees across the field, blowing in a frenzy, nor off the clouds skittering across the sky.

Jesus told a parable where it's not dancing but non-dancing that's the problem. There are children singing and playing the flute and nobody is responding, and the children complain: 

We played the flute for you, 

and you did not dance; 

we sang a dirge, 

and you did not mourn.

How grim not to dance when children play the flute. How mean not to cry when they sing a sad song. Sometimes there is nothing so hard as a heart. Judging from this story, Jesus understood that there is a difference between a song and a song—there are crying songs and dancing songs. And judging from the wine he conjured at that one fine wedding, the fine wine that shocked everyone after the plonk they'd been drinking, he also understood there is a difference between a grape and a grape. Just as there is a difference between a song and a song and a grape and a grape, so is there a difference between a fish and a fish, a fiddler and a fiddler, a soul and a soul, and wouldn't it be weird if every soul told the same story, recited the same script, sang the same song, marched around the same regulated circuit?

William James celebrated variation between souls. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James lets the mystic souls, the healthy-minded souls, and the melancholy souls all speak for themselves. He quotes, at length, Walt Whitman, Martin Luther, Leo Tolstoy, “a patient in a French asylum,” a Muslim gentleman, a Nova Scotian evangelist, and "an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York," among many other idiosyncratic souls as they recount their own religious experience.

Now in this book, I will let my soul speak for itself. You may have heard of the “unchurched,” but I am the “overchurched”: I figure I've heard about 5,000 sermons in my life, and now after all that sitting and listening, I have something to say too. I wish to speak from my own soul, my own gizzard, my own experience, and to tell how experience danced me out of the regulated march of fundamentalism.

To borrow the words of an old hymn: this is my story, this is my song.

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To learn more about this author, her work and life journey, join an Awakin Call with Amy Leach this Saturday, November 22nd, 2025. More details and RSVP info here.