Drama... and Dance.

Suffering, Joy, and Liturgy

Just after 7 a.m. this past Monday, waiting for the medical transport, not knowing what the day would hold, not knowing what the future would hold.

“Brother, take one. Anything you like.”

I dabbed the left wireless earbud with alcohol and tossed it over; Paul, receptive, caught it. He chose a selection from Beninese musician Angelique Kidjo’s album of covers of the Talking Heads (our tastes run to the eclectic, to belabor the obvious):

Lost my shape
Trying to act casual
Can’t stop
I might end up in the hospital...

Paul grinned. The unexpected, devilishly chosen lyric made me wince, but neither of us missed a beat of the jubilant African rhythms.

I knew in advance the hours of waiting, of pacing, of confinement in spaces in which I’d rather not be. Would Paul come out of this nauseated, as we were warned? Bruised, bleeding, in pain? Feverish, disoriented, debilitated? Would there be complications – or yet another bombshell, the surgeon finding more than had previously been revealed on the MRI?—precipitating for Sacred Beauty, our small Association of the Faithful, a “rapid, unplanned disassembly,” as they say in aeronautics? Yet we had this moment and no little nervous energy to burn. And we were going to dance.

The Covid from which we had just recovered, although it set me on fire with pain, never diminished my energy, except for one really bad day. Nor did it once reach my lower respiratory system, nor cause me to get a single suboptimal oximeter reading. So all through my quarantine and recovery, I danced. I could neither eat nor sleep, but I could disco, and so I did, prodigiously. No, really – and, yes, I lost weight.

I was permitted to sit with Paul in the time after he was prepped for the operation, hooked up to IVs and monitors, but before the team came to take him away to the OR. We sang, in harmony and under our breath, bits and pieces of anything we could think of to sing – much as we had worked on some philosophy in the ER this past summer, with Paul lying on a gurney, awaiting staples and scans after a particularly gruesome scalp injury which had caused blood loss beyond what I would have known was even possible. We sang because we had disposal over this time, and this is what we do.

Finally, the doctor drew back the curtain and walked in, with a look somewhere between puzzlement and disdain. No cause for concern; you don’t worry much about the bedside manner of a reputed rockstar of investigative radiology, one of the few surgeons in the state who could do this delicate work on the vanguard of the science at all. The team – nay, a veritable be-scrubbed throng – came in; I scurried out, carefully noting the time.

It was a few tense and lonely hours to come, overrunning the expected duration of the surgery by a fair bit. The chapel was the least adorned and dreariest room of the entire sprawling campus, windowless with heavy dark paneling, pews and carpets in a uniform dingy brown. Mass was cancelled, without explanation. Later we would hear from the doctor himself that Paul’s operation, while successful, had been among the most difficult he’d performed in years.

The next morning I woke up on the couch outside Paul’s room, not especially enthusiastic to face the day. But once it was established that things were all right, I figured that preserving the normalcy of routine was a good course. Back in my own living room, I grabbed the earbuds and programmed some utter nonsense on Spotify. I was in full swing when I noticed the digital display on a kitchen appliance: 10:44. We had come so incredibly far in twenty-four hours to the minute.

I had felt every single hour, minute by minute, as interminable. Now, astonished with gratitude, I knew for certain that connection to dance is its own spiritual gift. I had known it too, well into the night, this past Feast of the Holy Family, at a party at the lay Benedictine community co-founded by my late mentor. We, the musicians, remained in the salon after the party broke up; drumming and dancing, such as I had never experienced before, broke out with wild joy.

Late in the evening, a young active-duty Marine back for a family visit returned. We had noticed how he had disappeared mid-party; he explained that he had impulsively flagged a guest who was a cleric, gone up to the chapel directly above our heads, and made his first sacramental confession since childhood. Returning with tale of his singular victory, he joined the dance, as the energy – and joy – pitched up all the more.[1]

To dance is to be carried aloft on the sheer joy of being. L’Osservatore Romano wrote of the Holy Father’s preaching on the Second Book of Samuel in January of 2014:

“King David,” Pope Francis said, “offered sacrifice in honor of God; he prayed. Then his prayer became exultant ... it became the prayer of praise and of joy, and he began to dance. The Bible says: ‘David danced before the Lord with all his might’,” and he rejoiced greatly as he offered praise to the Lord. “That,” Pope Francis said, “was truly the prayer of praise.”

David, girt with the linen ephod, a priestly garment, invites consideration of dance vis á vis liturgy. There is, of course, something uniquely typological going on here. David had been released from the spiritual darkness with which he had been afflicted upon witnessing the smiting of Uzzah. Deeply chastened, yet casting off the fear and antagonism which had gripped his relationship with God, the king became ecstatic in this enacted, supralinguistic “psalmody” of gesture, risen up from desolation:

How I would lead the rejoicing crowd
into the house of God,
amid cries of gladness and thanksgiving,
the throng wild with joy.

Perhaps this episode, en route to Jerusalem, presages the Resurrection in some way.

Hebrew has eight verbs pertaining to dance. In Scripture, as in much of the ancient world, dancing was a thing mostly associated with women; to men were reserved the arts of war. David saw fit, in the sober inebriation that motivated him – the higher order of rationality which serves the Logos, which disinhibits the ego yet heightens moral rectitude – to flaunt that taboo. It is the lame leaping up (bearing in mind that sorrow and anxiety – not to mention self-conscious preoccupation – can leave one far more disabled than causes merely physical) which manifests the presence of the Messiah.

In the mid-seventies, the Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship issued an article “to be considered ‘an authoritative point of reference for every discussion on the matter,’” wherein it is relayed, quite surprisingly, that

In favor of dance in the liturgy, an argument could be drawn from the passage of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, in which are given the norms for adaptation of the liturgy to the character and the traditions of the various peoples:
“In matters which do not affect the faith or the well-being of an entire community, the Church does not wish, even in the Liturgy, to impose a rigid uniformity; on the contrary, she respects and fosters the genius and talents of various races and people. Whatever in their way of life is not indissolubly bound up with superstition and error, she looks upon with benevolence and if possible keeps it intact, and sometimes even admits it into the Liturgy provided it accords with the genuine and authentic liturgical spirit.”

But for the Western church, there is to be no such allowance[2]. What is a dancin’ fool, such as I am, to make of this, especially given that the same document reminds us how, “when the Angelic Doctor wished to represent paradise, he represented it as a dance executed by angels and saints”? Indeed, perichoresis, the theological verb used to indicate the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity, means “to dance around.”

The liturgy is, principally, a feast, but it is a feast of ascesis. As we praise the hidden Eucharistic substance, omne delectamentum in se habentem, “we are invited,” as we find in Laudato si’, “to embrace the world on a different plane”; nature is taken up to mediate supernatural, not natural, life. Yet this does not mean that natural life, in its rightful order, should be stifled. There is too little room in this world of ours for expressions of joy, too little room for the kind of dancing which should rightfully flow from our apophatic contact with heaven.

Dancing, like any part of material feasting, carries an integral spontaneity which resists the ritualization of liturgy. Yet as Ratzinger wrote, “free scope must be left for the Christian’s unprogrammed creativity.” In the time of St. Paul, the darkness of human appetition mocked and defiled the liturgy it exteriorly sought to express: For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk – and indeed, we no longer take the daily bread of our bodily nourishment in the context of the liturgy. Yet this obviously casts no aspersion on communal and familial meals, whose joy and fraternity should be a natural consequence and verification of our worship. And to be sure, not all music (nor all music with pious lyrics, nor even all prayerful music) is suitable for liturgy – but singing around the campfire, in the concert hall, or even in the shower is not thereby interdicted. As Hilaire Belloc’s four-line verse, much – even especially – quoted by conservative Catholics, runs:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!

Yet is this liberality to extend to dance as well? For all the balance and wisdom of the 1975 article (entitled, by the way, “The Religious Dance, an Expression of Spiritual Joy”), some (though not all) in the trad wing of the church are not only incensed about the very idea of liturgical dance, but censorious about dance itself – and this with some supposed reference to chastity. Indeed, the devil is prowling like a roaring lion, but to read certain online religious sources, one would come to believe that meaningless, utterly impersonal, specifically heterosexual encounter is a barely repressed universal preoccupation, lending to judgment and instruction far more prurient and (if I may say so) unchaste for its unabating innuendo and covetous spirit than any forthright dissolute living could ever be. As Ratzinger lamented our human condition, so pitiable on the surface, morality and immorality seem to hem us in equally. Michal, jealous for propriety, languishes in her barrenness.

In the Eucharist, “creation is projected towards divinization, towards the holy wedding feast,” as cited in Laudato si’. Having touched upon this trajectory, the blessed jubilation overflowing into the lives into which we are sent cannot, at a certain point, be caged. The festal marriage banquet of the Lamb is our common destiny.

An interesting philosophical point in the 1975 article is the claim that dance is a synthesis of the measured arts and the spatial arts. I would go even further: Rhythm structures time. In internalizing rhythm to the degree that it literally moves one, there is participation in temporal flow fully extrapersonal, yet neither alien nor unwilled either – rather, it is deeply willed, and a communal temporal “space” opens up. Thus, dance is, perhaps, a fullness of that mode of existential joy proper to human temporality. We know something about the rhythmic and ecstatic character of David's dance: “They made merry before the Lord with all their strength, with singing and with citharas, harps, tambourines, sistrums and cymbals” – and that was even before the unfortunate Uzzah incident when they came to the threshing floor.

The soul is the visibility of the body, but the body is no static thing of photographs and paintings. To adapt some writing of Balthasar’s, “it is the inner vitality of God that creatures will reflect more or less obscurely or brightly.” This explication of Bonaventurian theology refers specifically to “God’s inner, personal fruitfulness.” While we see the anti-relationship between prudery and fecundity in the Michal narrative, spiritual fruitfulness occurs in spontaneous praise, more than in the literal childbearing of bios alone. Or, as Ratzinger says, “The life a mother gives to her child is not just physical life; she gives total life when she takes the child’s tears and turns them into smiles.” Again, from Pope Francis’s 2014 homily,

Joy, the prayer of praise makes us fruitful. Sarah was dancing for joy at 90 years old in the great moment of her fruitfulness! Fruitfulness gives praise to the Lord”. The man or woman who praises the Lord, who prays by praising the Lord and rejoice as they sing the Sanctus at Mass is fruitful. On the other hand, those who “close themselves into the formality of a cold, measured prayer perhaps end up like Michal, in the sterility of formality.

If we join with the angels in their aeviternal music, how can we not walk away literally uplifted, shining with energetic participation in the veiled glory which clamors for expression according to our psychophysical unity? A thing is according to the mode of its operation: trees grow; birds fly; Vals dance (like Snoopy, I’ve been told) – as do happy and loved persons everywhere. One of the best dancers I know is disabled, but she moves stunningly from her chair.

How can I, can we, keep from singing? From dancing? From laughing, at times uproariously? Ratzinger again:

Where joylessness reigns, where humor dies, the spirit of Jesus Christ is assuredly absent. But the reverse is also true: joy is a sign of grace. One who is cheerful from the bottom of his heart, one who has suffered but has not lost joy, cannot be far from the God of the evangelium, whose first word on the threshold of the New Testament is ‘Rejoice!’

As Paul preveniently danced himself to health, and I managed to avoid cracking up from stress and worry (too badly), in this joyful season during which I ordinarily never even listen to recorded music, let alone groove to it freely, troupes of dancers of the Argentine tango (of which Pope Francis has said, “It’s something that comes from deep within me.”) assembled in St. Peter’s Square, to bring life, joy and healing to our suffering Holy Father, come back from the brink of the grave. Today, less than a week later, he is on his way home.

[Editor’s note: I had intended to include a note in the text suggesting that I am not in fact an accident-prone walking disaster area with a monthly subscription to the Emergency Room, and that in fact I had not needed hospital care since childhood before the last five years. As it happens, I am completing my edit of this entry in UConn Hospital, having (subsequent to the events of this post) broken my nose (badly) and lacerated my forehead in a mishap at… wait for it… choir practice. As it stands, it suffices to say: I tripped over a chair leg opening the door for some fellow choristers (one of whom, who just happens to be the head of ENT at this very hospital, provided me with immediate, expert, and loving care, for all my excessive bleeding, and drove us here). Also, please note: I most emphatically was not dancing at the time of my injury. -PJC]

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[1] Were my professor still with us, he would probably have been scowling worse than the surgeon at our crazy antics, but would have secretly relished the moment all the same… though, come to think of it, it was exactly one year before to the (liturgical) day, at the same late hour, that an intense spiritual conversation was in full swing, with the four of us remaining dancers and my mentor – the exact same people, the young Marine, another great friend (and great dancer!), Paul and me… plus Roger. Perhaps Roger wasn’t so far off – or scowling so much – after all.

[2] Specifically, it is noted that, in Western culture, dance is “tied with love, with diversion, with profaneness, with unbridling of the senses.” It would seem that the prohibition on dance in the Roman Rite has a twofold sense; the “traditional reserve of the seriousness of religious worship, and of the Latin worship in particular” cited in the article, and a certain loss of the spiritual meaning of dance in Western culture. This latter may yet perhaps be restored, albeit outside of a liturgical context: “If the proposal of the religious dance in the West is really to be made welcome, care will have to be taken that in its regard a place be found outside of the liturgy, in assembly areas which are not strictly liturgical.”