The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

UUCS Sermons

During my youth there was a brief spell when I actually began enjoying church activities.  My congregation had called a charismatic couple – a man and wife – to be our youth directors.  They brought some uncharacteristic fun and excitement to our gatherings, and they knew how to reach out to young people and make us all feel included.   It was great.

            One day I went to church and noticed they were gone – just like that.  No one said a word about this.  It was as though they never existed.   It felt like a Southern Baptist version of a Stalinist purge wherein you just don’t mention those who have been taken away.  They just got airbrushed out of the picture, and life returned to its dreary normality. 

            It took a bit of sleuthing on my part, but sometime later I learned the facts behind their sudden disappearance.  It turns out these charismatic youth directors had crossed a line, broken a sacred rule--which is to say, they allowed us to dance.   Nothing risqué or provocative, nothing that would not have passed muster at any junior prom.  But they did allow us to dance, and this was taboo.  So they were sent into exile in the dark of the night, never to be seen or heard from again.  

            How did there come to be such a strong reaction to dancing among certain Christian groups?   What do you think Jesus [would] have had to say about this?   Personally,  I don’t think Jesus would have minded young people doing the two step and the Hully Gully (a dance). There is, in fact, strong evidence that Jesus liked people to have fun and to celebrate – after all, his critics called him “a glutton, winebibber and a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”   Long ago scholars noted that there were some very strong (and disconcerting) parallels between Jesus and the Greek god Dionysius, the god of revelry and ecstasy.   Today, Dionysius (aka Bacchus) is typically associated with debauchery, but his followers envisioned him as a liberating figure, just as did Jesus’ followers see him in that light.  Both of them were wandering charismatics who attracted devoted followings, especially among women and the poor.  Both challenged hierarchical cultures with visions of human community based upon egalitarianism.  And both embraced the joyous immediacy of life.  So how did a religion based upon the life and example of Jesus come to regard mere dance as such a morally toxic peril? 

            According to scholars of early Christianity, things certainly didn’t seem to start out that way.   No one knows exactly what the earliest Christian worship services were like, but most agree that they could be pretty raucous affairs, with a lot of moving and shaking going on.  One early Church father, Clement of Alexandria, instructed the faithful to “dance in a ring, together with the angels, around Him who is without beginning or end,” (probably referring to a ring dance around the altar).  He further advised Christians to “invoke the zest and delight of the spirit, raise our heads and our hands to heaven and move our feet just at the end of prayer – pedes excitamus – (that is, dance with joy!) 

            As Christianity became more widespread and established in the Roman Empire , it became more hierarchical and patriarchal.  And as the authorities began to survey the Christian scene they saw some things that did not meet with their approval.  For example, there was an ecstatic dance that Christian women were doing in church to celebrate the resurrection.  One leader, Basileios, the bishop of Caesarea , worried that the dance was resurrecting way too much sexual energy among the young men:  “With harlots’ songs they pollute the air and sully the degraded earth with their feet in shameful postures.”  

So, an effort was made to tone things down and make the dancing more sedate and “spiritual.”  Soon, however, wholesale condemnation of dancing in church was heard from high places.  John Chrysostrum, archbishop of Constantinople put it bluntly:  “For where there is a dance, there also is the Devil.” 

Yet a lot of the laity, and many of the lower level priests seemed to feel that where there is a dance, there is joy.   For about a thousand years the church hierarchy tried to stamp out this fire with their condemnations from on high, all to little avail. The people kept dancing in church well into the Middle Ages.  

The stated concern of the hierarchy was that such dancing stirred up carnal desires, but there was another, more troubling issue that underlay their concern.  World religious scholars have observed that dancing was an ancient technique that people in virtually every culture had discovered was effective in achieving a state of ecstasy.  Church authorities weren’t comfortable with people reaching such spiritual heights all by themselves.   Imagine how the multi-national oil companies of the world would react if someone invented a small, cheap, easy to make solar energy cell (with simple, non-patented directions on how to make your own) that could meet all your energy needs.  Can you doubt that they would do everything in their power to seize control of this cheap, easy access to unlimited energy?   Similarly, the church authorities felt threatened when their monopoly on doling out the divine energy to the laity was bypassed by people who achieved ecstasy without priestly mediation.   Dancing threatened their monopoly over human access to the divine.   They reasoned that it would be better altogether if the lay folks remained more or less passive and motionless during worship.   As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her book Dancing in the Streets:  “Nothing is more threatening to a hierarchical religion than the possibility of ordinary laypeople’s finding their own way into the presence of the gods.” 

To be fair, it should also be noted that in some instances at least, the church banned dancing because of the destruction of property it caused.  Historical records indicate that those folks in what we used to call “The Dark Ages” knew how to rock and roll centuries before Elvis Presley arrived on the scene. 

It took about a thousand years for church authorities to figure out how to tame this unruly energy.  Finally, they compromised and banned dancing in churches but allowed it on religious holidays outside of the churches and cathedrals.  This led to the European custom of the carnival – a time of revelry outside the church, and dance thereby lost its sacred connections.   The communal joy and ecstasy once experienced in a sacred space was now exiled to secular settings – public festivities and carnivals. 

Unbeknownst to the European revelers, however, a great cloud of gloom was slowly coming over the horizon, a cloud that would effectively block out the light of joy and ecstasy for countless souls in the centuries to come.

This cloud of gloom was an unfortunate byproduct of the Protestant Reformation.  Certainly, there is much good to be said about this momentous event in religious history – as Unitarian Universalists we are, after all, spiritual children of the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation.  Yet, there were some unintended consequences in this evolution of the Christian tradition. 

If any single person could be credited with ushering in an era of gloom and doom into Western culture my vote would go to John Calvin.  Remember him?  He’s the Protestant reformer and theocratic ruler in Geneva Switzerland (years?) who had the Unitarian theologian Michael Servetus burned at the stake for denying the doctrine of the trinity.  Now Calvin is generally revered in theological circles for the power and scope of his systematic thinking, but anyone who studies him would have to admit Calvinist theology does not exactly put a smile on you face and a song in your heart.  Calvin is the one who championed the notion of predestination, the idea that before we are even born, God has already decided whether any one of us would be eternally saved or eternally damned.  

Now you would think that this theology would lead to moral laxity since whether you’re saved or damned isn’t up to you – it’s predetermined, so how you live doesn’t matter.  So why not give yourself over to all sorts of forbidden pleasures?  Yet paradoxically, Calvinist theology actually caused many people to struggle valiantly and often futilely, to convince themselves that they were among God’s elect – implicitly reasoning that if they were successful in the world and were paragons of moral virtue, then they must surely be among the elect, for they were Godly people.  It was an exhausting, psychologically debilitating, full time endeavor that did not allow for any fun. In fact pleasure – especially a physical pleasure such as dancing – was regarded as the devil’s snare.  Having pleasure in this world came to be regarded as a sign that eternal torment awaited you in the next.  So living a life of perpetually delayed gratification was seen as one of the keys to spiritual success. 

Consider this description of Calvinists in an 18^th Century medical handbook:  “many persons of (a Calvinist) turn of mind behave as if they thought it a crime to be cheerful.  They imagine the whole of religion consists in certain mortifications, or denying themselves the smallest indulgence, even of the most innocent amusements.  A perpetual gloom hangs over their countenances, while the deepest melancholy preys upon their minds.” 

Of course not everyone was a Calvinist, but the psychological perspective spilled over theological boundaries and came to permeate much of European culture.  As literary critic Lionel Trilling has noted: “Historians of 16^th and 17^th century European culture are in substantial agreement that during this era something like a mutation in human nature took place.”   The mutation was that people became much more intensely self conscious and hence disconnected from others – after all, if you’re gazing at your own navel fretting about your salvation you don’t notice much else.  Not only did people wonder how they stood with God, but also, in the privacy of their minds, they became more intensely concerned with how they stood in relation with others.  What did others think of them?  Did they meet with their approval?  How were they being judged?  

A consequence of this is that people became more anxious, more depressed.  Carnivals and common festivities, condemned by the Protestants, nearly withered away.  The dancing died down.  The Puritan John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress, a jolly fellow in his youth, noted that although it was hard to give up dancing – “I was a full year before I could quite leave it” – he finally met his spiritual goal – a life devoid of pleasure and fun. 

In fairness, it should be noted that Calvinist theology had some powerful allies in dismantling the festive carnival traditions in Europe .  Over time European rulers had found that at the carnivals, where citizens had free reign to mock rulers and show their true feelings, threatened the established order.  Thousands of laws were passed outlawing or limiting such festivities.  A resident of Buckinghamshire in England described the change that occurred:  “While formerly the common presented a lively and pleasing aspect, dotted with parties of cheerful lookers-on, it was now left lonely and empty of loungers.” 

Such developments did turn out to have certain economic benefits.  After all, as economic bean counters of the time warned - a day lost in festivities was a day of lost productivity.  The sociologist Max Weber was the first to note that Protestantism, especially the Calvinist version, provided a real boost to capitalist activity.   Whereas in medieval times folks created festivities as an escape from work, after the Protestant Reformation people became anxious to prove to themselves that they were among the elect by being successful in the world, and they embraced work as an escape from the internal terrors they had created.   

Driven by the impulse to work and achieve, European civilization rose to dominate the world for centuries.  Imperialists went out to conquer, colonize and exploit other lands, and in their wake went the missionaries to spread their gospel of gloom to “heathens” in uncivilized lands.   Whatever continent or far flung land the Christian missionaries went to they were morally repulsed to find people dancing.  They could only regard this as devil worship or sexually promiscuous behavior or primitive hysteria.   Little did they suspect that centuries earlier Christians, too, had danced to achieve a collective ecstasy.   Now, with their vision distorted by their theology, such communal joy could only be regarded as a perilous sin. 

The missionaries worked very hard to stamp out native rituals and practices and met with considerable success.  Among the natives in Africa someone who had converted to Christianity was described as “he who has given up dancing.”  No one will ever be able to calculate the momentous psychic damage done to native peoples who thus had their cultures destroyed by such well intentioned but ignorant missionaries.  

To the native peoples of the world these Christian missionaries seemed like a very strange breed of human.  A Tahitian commentator described missionaries on his sunny native island as “a dour and cheerless breed who dressed in black, never laughed, never made a joke or understood anyone else’s, never enjoyed what they condemned as unseemly levity, and never let themselves forget for a moment the awful burden of the sins of the world.” 

Now the more I have pondered that last observation the more uneasy I get.  At various times and places, I think others have probably seen me in a similar light – wearing somber countenances on sunny isles in this beautiful world, forsaking simple pleasure, taking myself too seriously, weighed down by my burdensome notions about life.  Although I consciously may reject the idea that it’s a sin to dance, to have fun, to know joy – this is a deeply rooted sentiment in our culture.  So, too, is the notion that continual striving, hard work, constant labor, is necessary to survive and thrive.  Such ideas are unconsciously, unwittingly internalized by so many.   It is spiritually oppressive.

All of this calls to mind a dream I once had – years ago.  In the dream a tabla is playing (a drum played in India ) an amazingly complex and compelling rhythm that only the most skilled musician could ever attempt to play.  And in this dream, I am drawn by this irresistible rhythm to begin dancing – dancing with complete grace and boundless joy.  It was a cosmic dance, and I took this dream as a revelation that there is an imperishable joy and love at the heart of reality.  It was a sacred dream.  And I knew then and now that although I may forget and deny him, there is an inner dancer within me who calls me to join in the general dance of life.  In fact, every one of us has this inner dancer who seeks to join in this dance.  

Today, I’d like the great Christian mystic Thomas Merton who spoke of this general dance to have the final words:

“The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But is does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not.       

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.”