Way back in my childhood hometown’s quest to understand God and the religions of the world, the only real question that needed an answer from the Almighty was: Can Baptist dance? Obvious answer was…some can and some can’t! Of course, they spent their youth groups figuring out just how dancing would lead down that slippery slope to sloppier sins that would give God hissy fits.
Dancers turn up in the strangest places in scripture. In Jeremiah’s prophetic vision of Israel’s return and restoration: Then shall the maidens rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy. Remember Miriam and the other ladies with tambourines dancing to praise the parting of the sea. David dancing without too much where-with-all before the ark of the covenant. For his birthday, Herod’s niece danced before him, and John the Baptist lost his head – literally. Condemnation of dancing – dirty or otherwise – is conspicuously absent in holy writ.
Quite to the contrary, words come rolling out of scriptures that hit us right between the ears and down through the heart and straight to our feet almost demanding a dance: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit… hold fast to what is good. When we let these words become the meditations of our hearts, we just might feel the urge to Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.
All cultures of the earth have found the dance as a way of being in touch with a holiness beyond us and yet within us. For two summers at Camp Kickapoo, I was the Choctaw tribal dancer for Order of the Arrow ceremonies, wearing pretty much what David wasn’t wearing when he danced that day. Those First American dances transcended the Mississippi mud on which I was dancing to the beat of a different drummer and led me into a form of mysticism beyond my Calvinistic upbringing.
Whirling dervishes perform a dance called the Sema, a religious dance performed to express emotion and achieve the wisdom and love of God. It originated in Turkey, in the in the mystical version of Islam known as Sufism. Here is a way of praying with abandon. Letting the holy lead you in sacred movement, like liturgical dance that became the rage in some Protestant churches in the 1970’s?
Don’t forget those words in Ecclesiastes: A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance. If we are not careful, dancing will lead us into all sorts of temptations, like laughing out loud for Christ’s sake! This might be a good place to just use our common sense. William James warned us that Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.