Helpers and Dancers
a sermon given by the Rev. Claire Phillips-Thoryn
on Sunday, September 30, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
Click here to listen to this sermon
First Reading: Selections from Jeremiah, 31:1-13
The Joyful Return of the
Exiles
At that time, says the Lord,
I will be the God of all the families of Israel,
and they
shall be my people.
Thus says the Lord:
The people who survived
the sword
found grace in the wilderness;
when Israel
sought for rest,
the Lord
appeared to him* from far away.*
I have loved you with an
everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
Again I will build you,
and you shall be built,
O virgin
Israel!
Again you shall take your
tambourines,
and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers.
For there shall be a day
when sentinels will call
in the hill country of Ephraim:
‘Come, let us
go up to Zion,
to the Lord our God.’
They shall come and sing
aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
Then shall the young women
rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning
into joy,
I will
comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.
Second Reading: “That
Lives in Us” by Rumi
If you put your hands on
this oar with me,
they will
never harm another, and they will come to find
they hold
everything you want.
If you put your hands on
this oar with me, they would no longer
lift anything
to your
mouth that
might wound your precious land –
that sacred
earth that is your body.
If you put your soul
against this oar with me,
the power
that made the universe will enter your sinew
from a source
not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm
that lives in
us.
Exuberant is existence,
time a husk.
When the moment cracks
open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad
with the blessings, like my words give.
Why lay yourself on the
torturer’s rack of the past and the future?
The mind that tries to
shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no
rest.
Be kind to yourself, dear
– to our innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch
you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that
all evolves us.
“Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.”
“Again you shall take your tambourines,
and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers.”
In the
book of Jeremiah, and in the words of the Islamic mystic Rumi,
God has a message. God wants us to be joyful. Yes, we have times of
grief and suffering. We have the capacity to mourn, to feel pain. Yet we
also have the capacity to rejoice, to celebrate, to feast, and to dance.
“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning,” says the
Psalm (30), and Jeremiah echoes that sentiment. God says to the prophet:
“The people who survived the sword
found grace in the
wilderness;
when Israel
sought for rest,
the Lord
appeared…from far away.
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have
continued my faithfulness to you.”
God is saying, “I know
that you endured war and the wilderness—but I was with you even in those times
of suffering, loving you with an everlasting love. Even when you lost
faith in me, I still had faith in you.” And God literally orders the people of
Israel to dance, to make merry, to celebrate. Last Sunday, we honored the
Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Four days after this
solemn occasion comes the Festival of Sukkoth, a holiday that is also called
“The Time of Our Rejoicing.” During this holiday Jewish tradition calls
for people to remember the blessing of being freed from Egypt, and God’s
benevolence in the desert. This holiday calls for good food, good
friends, and often music and dancing.
Sometimes, even
amidst the many blessings we are given, we don’t allow ourselves to feel that
joy, to celebrate, to dance. We think ah, but there is work yet to be
done! There are many whose lives are still in suffering! The world
is so far from perfect, and humanity has so much to learn. When is there
time to rejoice? Why does God think it is so important for us to rejoice?
In the beginning of
humankind, people spent much of their lives in joyous celebration and dance. Life
was a constant battle—and a constant celebration. In her new book Dancing in the Streets, A History of Collective Joy,
Barbara Ehrenreich takes up this study.
In ancient Africa, some researchers have suggested that a tribe’s ecstatic
religious dancing and drumming may have been used in part to scare away the
large predatory animals all around them. As the group danced and drummed,
joining together, they became one in ecstasy, in joy, in the dance. At
the same time, they may have appeared from a short distance as very large,
constantly moving being—frightening to any lion that might be near by. So in their celebration of life, the dancers
were actually ensuring they would live to the next day. Ehrenreich writes “when we speak of transcendent experience in terms of “feeling part of
something larger than ourselves,” it may be this ancient many-headed
pseudo-creature we unconsciously invoke.”
Later, in Greek and
Roman times, part of God’s nature was in the roles of Bacchus and Dionysus,
Gods of celebration, pleasure, and ecstasy. The English word enthusiasm comes
from a Greek root, which means to be “filled with, or possessed by, the
deity.” Early Christians, as well as Greeks and Romans, could be found in
their respective communities, dancing and singing and running and waving arms
in the air, as a primary way to worship the divine and create group
identity. Worship was noisy, and the Lord’s Supper often meant a big
meal, usually washed down with a lot of wine. As Christianity grew and grew,
early churches did not have pews or chairs. Everyone stood and milled about and
danced together. There were even designs on the floor to help people join the dancing.1 Very different from how we do
church today—I must admit that if some of you had gotten up and started doing
the Electric Slide during the doxology I would be taken aback!
Christian worship
for about the first thousand years was marked by festival and
celebration. In the 365 days in a year, over 200 days were special
festival days. My favorite to read about was the Feast of Fools, which
took place between Christmas and the New Year. In this holiday, priests
and deacons acted out an absurd mockery of the mass. They would wear
funny clothes; instead of incense they would burn smelly old shoes; they would
eat sausages at the pulpit; and they would sing dirty songs instead of speaking
Latin! In addition, a “King of the Fools” would be chosen, and the people
would throw buckets of water at them throughout this “noisy burlesque”
(90). As you might imagine, the bishops were not amused. By the 1200s,
the church higher-ups had started working hard to get festivities like this
limited in scope. One French law limited the Feast of Fools to only three
buckets of water. By the 1400s, most of these festivals were banned from church
buildings entirely. The dancing and celebration went outside, and
hundreds of people would gather and dance and dance and dance—in one city a
bridge even collapsed from the force of the happy feet.2 One scholar has called their dancing “ecstatic
dissent.” As time went on, the Church worked harder and harder to stop
this ecstatic dancing entirely.
As these traditions
were kicked out of church life into the secular world, they lost some of their
deeper meaning. Ehrenreich writes that “something was
lost in the transition from ecstatic ritual to secularized
festivities—something we might call … transcendent insight.”3 You
might wonder if there really is deeper meaning in something as ridiculous
sounding as the Feast of Fools, in dancing and being silly together. But
there is something authentic and holy about bringing that part of human nature
to God. Anne Lamott has an essay about helping out in
a dance class for developmentally disabled adults, and she writes:
“It's incredibly touching when anyone seems so hopeless, yet finds
a few inches of light to stand in, and makes it all work as well as they can.
All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving,
feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet
and keep going.4
Collective joy, the
fun and freedom found in that lurching, laughing, swaying dance of life, was
being taken out of the religious equation.
“Again you shall take your tambourines,
and go forth in the dance of
the merrymakers.”
“Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.”
The real turning
point against collective joy was not just Catholic repression; it was in large
part the birth of Protestantism and capitalism. Calvinists, especially,
were bent on repressing the “sin” of having fun. The scholar Max Weber wrote
that “the most urgent task of Calvinism was the destruction of spontaneous,
impulsive enjoyment”; they made it “a crime to be cheerful.”5 Festival days were cut until few holidays remained from the original
hundreds. Even the pleasure of sports was stifled. Manchester,
England banned the “unlawfulle exercise of playing
with a footbale in ye streets.”6 In Puritan New England,
“sports were never legal, with the law banning even ‘unnecessary and
unseasonable walking’ on the Lord’s Day.”7
As new forms of industry demanded that people work long hours and many
consecutive days, there simply wasn’t as much time to spend in celebration of
God’s world. In late 17th century England an economist put forth an
estimate: “each holiday cost the nation 50,000 pounds, largely in lost labor
time.” The bottom line for the elite bosses was that festivity lost money
instead of making it, therefore it had no redeeming
quality.8
In New England,
founded with the ideals of religious freedom, some still viewed spiritual
ecstasy with contempt. Many Puritans wanted to connect to God personally
and passionately with movement, singing, and rejoicing. Anglicans
labeled, this religious desire, “Puritan enthusiasm.”9 As you recall
enthusiasm originally meant to be “filled with the divine”; but now it
described unacceptable public behavior. Along the way the Puritans lost
their sense of enthusiasm and became just as dour as the rest. Missionaries
of the 17 and 1800s managed to spread their cheerlessness to the rest of the
world. In one South African community, in their language, “it was said of
someone who converts to Christianity, ‘he has given up dancing.’”10
“Again you shall take your tambourines,
and go forth in the dance of
the merrymakers.”
“Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.”
Western thought and
sensibility continued to grow, and we find ourselves today left with the Freudian
assumption that any “loss of the self” must be a bad thing. The idea of
losing one’s individuality in the rush of joyful communal experience is seen as
regressive. And so it may seem we are left in a state of terminal
earnestness. Too ashamed to take joy in the many blessings life has given
us; too worried to have fun; too busy to even try.
God said to the prophet:
Again you shall take your tambourines,
and go forth in the dance of
the merrymakers.
The poet said:
Be kind to yourself, dear – to our innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.
How can we answer God’s
call? And how can we truly embrace joy, the joyful connection with God
and God’s creation, as our heritage, a blessing of the heart and spirit that
cannot be refused?
Be kind to yourself, dear – to our innocent follies.
Yes, there is suffering in
the world. But we can only be of use when we have the spiritual and
emotional energy to do the work that is needed. God did not ask you to be
misery’s company. Be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to feel joy when it
enters your heart. Feeling joy is more than taking care of yourself. It is taking care of your relationship with
God. For God has loved you with an everlasting love; we celebrate that love
with joy.
In the
essay I mentioned before by Anne Lamott, she is
helping her two friends, Karen and Neshama, lead a special-ed dance class
for developmentally disabled adults. At first she doesn’t want to join in
the dancing because she doesn’t think she is a good dancer. But she is
won over when the dancing starts with wiggly stretches. She says, “In
wiggling, all people shine.” After a while, it becomes time for the
Electric Slide. Lamott writes, as they scoop
and turn and tap, that “the magnificence of the dance is in their faces.”
Finally, the class is nearing a close. Lamott writes:
After the solos, ensembles of four or five did the Electric Slide
together. I joined in with one batch. I was great; everyone said so. And then
it was time to go. People shook our hands and thanked us. [One woman] gave me a
hug with her head pressed into my waist. Neshama and
I left feeling elated and surprisingly tired. It had been only an hour, but it
was an immersion. It goes deeper than you think. When Karen and I were hiking a
few days later, she told me that after class, one of the people had exclaimed,
"I liked those old ladies! They were helpers, and they danced." These
are the words I would want on my gravestone: That I was a helper, and that I danced.11
May such words be true of
all of us.
Now is the time of our
rejoicing.
Again let us take our
tambourines,
and go forth
in the dance of the merrymakers.
May we find in this community
a place to laugh, to rejoice, to fall down, and to get up again.
May we be kind to ourselves.
May we recognize the
blessings of God’s creation and give thanks.
May we be helpers; and may
we dance.
Amen.
____________________
1. Ehrenreich 83
2. Ehrenreich 85
3. Ehrenreich 99
4. Lamott, Dancing
with the Disabled
5. Ehrenreich 144
6. Ehrenreich 99
7. Ehrenreich 229
8. Ehrenreich 101
9. Samuel Joeckel, Quodlibet Online Journal of Christian
Theology and Philosophy, http://www.quodlibet.net/joeckel-evil.shtml
10. Ehrenreich 160
11. Lamott, Dancing
with the Disabled