Dancing in the Face of Death

	Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	April 30, 2000

All of creation is in a dance, if we can just see it.  As we sit here
immobile in this room in this apparently immobile wooden building on
this apparently solid piece of ground, we know that in fact this piece
of ground is part of a globe that is performing a perpetual pirouette
on its own axis and in the process describes a giant circular path
around the sun.  We know that our only natural satellite, the moon,
performs a perpetual pas de deux with us at a near distance, shyly
keeping the same face turned toward us at all time, either because she
doesn't trust us or because she doesn't want us to see the stain on
the back of her dress.  We know that the other dancers on the floor
include Mars and Venus and Mercury, each absorbed in its own figure,
as well as Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune, each with its own coterie
of swirling satellites and.  Saturn, the bell of the ball in her
multicolored rings.  Asteroids are constantly attempting a clumsy
break-dance in their own belt, and occasionally a comet swooshes in
from outside to do a do-si-do with the sun.  We also know that whole
system waltzing around our sun is itself positioned at the outer arm
of a huge crowd cakewalking around the center of the Milky Way galaxy,
which in turn is tangoing at the edge of an expanding universe.  The
dance was first called thirteen billion years ago and the dancers show
no sign of exhaustion yet; in fact, they seem to be speeding up as the
dance progresses.

And it doesn't just happen at the huge end of the scale.  While you
are sitting in your pews, your red blood cells are performing a wild
snake-dance through your veins, arteries and capillaries.  Within the
cells the various parts, whose names I once knew, sashay in and out,
delivering fresh hot nutrients and taking out the garbage.  The
molecules dance around on the proteins and the atoms dance around on
the molecules and the electrons dance around on the atoms.  They go so
fast, in fact, that we can never be certain of both the size and
position of a particle.  This was the famous uncertainty principle
discovered by physicists named Heisenberg and Schrodinger in the
1920's, which got them the Nobel prize.  I remember this fact because
at the time I took my one college course in physics, there was a
popular verse form called Higgledy Piggledy.  The rules for higgledy
piggledy was that it was two verses of four lines each, each line
except the last had to be two dactylic meters, and one of the lines
had to be one word.  Anyhow, my physics professor won the college
newspaper's prize for the best such poem with the following entry:

Higgledy piggledy Werner H.  Heisenberg Turned his uncertainty into a
prize.  Atoms and molecules Dancing unceasingly Complementarity
Shielding our eyes.

Indeed all is in motion and everything changes, despite the appearance
of stability and permanency.  Heraclitis said that you never step into
the same river twice, but good Buddhists maintain that you never even
step in once.  At around the time that Werner Heisenberg was working
out his uncertainty principle, Alfred North Whitehead was coming up
with the idea that nothing ever is; rather everything is the in
process of becoming.  This spawned the movement called process
theology, and Whitehead's students Charles Hartshorne and Henry Nelson
Wieman developed elaborate systems of thought based on this insight.
But the Buddha had declared 2,500 years before that everything is
impermanent.

The dance, then, is ubiquitous and you are going to be dancing whether
you like it or not.  The human race has probably been dancing since
the dawn of prehistory, and dance is known in almost every human
culture.

One of the oldest reasons for dancing is to enhance fertility.  Some
would say that this is why the peoples of Northern Europe have since
time immemorial erected poles around the first of May, decorated them
with flowers, and danced around them.  The pole is an obvious phallic
symbol, planted upon the earth, we might conjecture, in order to
fertilize her.  Certainly in Celtic religion the land was conceived as
the embodiment of a goddess, and the king had to mate with this
goddess in order to ensure continued production of crops, livestock
and people.

However, if you're not in any great need of fertility at this stage in
your life, don't let that stop you from dancing today if you feel like
it.  For we dance to celebrate the phases of the moon, we dance to
please the king, we dance to tell a story, we dance to find a suitable
partner, we dance just for the pleasure of moving our bodies
rhythmically in space.  Some of us, of course, have conditions,
temporary or permanent in parts of our bodies that may restrict the
kind of dancing we can do, but most of us can find some way to move in
some kind of rhythm.  We have ritual dance, art dance, folk dance,
popular dance.  Dancing is all around us.  I can't remember who said
it, but it's certainly true:  "Dancing is music made visible."

Until Medieval times dancing was a feature of Christian worship, as
dancing is used in sacred ceremonies of many other religions around
the world.  Dancing creates a sacred space in and around the body of
the dancer, a time out of time and a space out of space, in which the
dancer and those observing can get in touch with a higher reality.
While there are many conservative religious groups today who frown on
social dancing because of a supposed association with sexual activity,
we should keep in mind that the original Puritans did not object to
dancing.  Oliver Cromwell was said to be a good dancer, and the
English country dance tradition that still survives today got its
start during the Puritan era in England.

The other ubiquitous fact of human existence is death.  In fact in two
texts from the bible, dancing is paired with death as kind of
opposites.  The first is the familiar passage from Ecclesiastes, "a
time to mourn, and a time to dance."  To everything there is a season.
The second is the passage attributed to Jesus that I read today from
Luke, although it also appears in Matthew.  In the passage, Jesus is
complaining of the people who have heard his good news about the
Kingdom of God but somehow don't get it.  He says these people who
resist the good news are like children in the marketplace who call out
"we played the flute for you and you did not dance, we wailed and you
did not weep."  What this passage says to me is that if you want to
get it, if you want to be part of the kingdom of God, you gotta dance
when the flute says dance and weep when they say weep.  You must be
plugged in to the ongoing dance of creation.

For I am not one to look for the Kingdom of God in heaven, or in any
kind of afterlife.  If it's going to happen, if it's happening, for me
it's happening in this life, right on earth, and right now.  It's
happening between you and me, whether we know it or not.  Try this
mindset on for size:  whatever your own feelings are about an
afterlife, I want you for a moment to think about death as the
absolute end, lights out, all she wrote, nothing to report.  I know
that is difficult for some of us, particularly those who are still
grieving for loved ones.  But contemplation of death is also
liberating.  Robert Fulghum, in his book From Beginning to End, talks
about the gravesite he bought, and how he likes to bring a lawn chair
out to it and sit and contemplate the place where his body will spend
the rest of time.  If you allow yourself to think of death as a
complete end, doesn't it make the rest of life more vivid?  Doesn't it
say to you, you better dance while you got the chance?

A full-stop death implies that the meaning of life is found inside
life, not outside of it.  Last week, I urged us to practice
resurrection.  We can practice resurrection by affirming life, no
matter what our views are on an afterlife or the Easter event.  The
meaning of life can be found inside of it, and it's going to be pretty
much what meaning we make, collectively and individually.  The dance
is one of the meanings we make.

It's certainly been one of the things which has held my life together.
I've been folk dancing for the last 20 years century, and I find great
comfort in knowing that wherever I go in the United States, I can plug
into a community of people who get together on a regular basis to move
their bodies to music for the sheer pleasure of it.  You'll see us
driving hundreds of miles for a dance weekend, hauling our aging
bodies, sleeping bags, and instruments out of cramped little cars with
stickers that say "dance gypsy" on them, ready for two or three days
of nonstop allemande and do-si-dos and waltzes, greeting each other,
"didn't I meet you last month in Maryland?"  The good are always the
merry, save by an evil chance, and the merry love the fiddle, and the
merry love to dance.  I chose Boston as the place where I would come
to make myself a minister because first, there was an active folk
dance scene here, and second, because Harvard Divinity School was
located here.  The former has been more important in helping me stay
sane in all the other changes of my life.  In looking back on it, I
think there may be more than coincidence in the fact that I started
dancing the year my father died.

Indeed, since I took up dance, it has been a constant in my life, one
of the few activities I have continued since moving, and this puts
into perspective that I am about to meld my life with someone who is
considered within the small but fervent community of English Country
dancers as the best dance pianist in that genre.  I met Jacqueline at
a dance weekend in Brasstown, N.C.  in 1991, and I hired her to play a
concert and dance in Charleston in 1994 or 95, long before we started
going together.  So Jacquleine is part of the continuity that dance
represents in my life.

In many cultures around the world, death is marked by dancing, as many
other life transitions are marked by dance.  In Irish culture, the
dancing at wakes used to be quite prevalent, though it has fallen into
disuse lately.  It takes courage to dance in the face of death.  It
takes a certain spirit to say, "death, I don't know what you are or
what's on the other side, so therefore I'm going to dance."  But it is
reality.  It is a recognition that life is larger than any one
individual, that the dance goes on, that we must remember we are part
of life.

There are two other stories in the Bible that connect dancing and
death.  The one that has captured the popular imagination through the
ages is that of Herod's daughter, whom popular lore has given the name
Salome, through she does not have that name in the scriptural accounts
in Mark and Matthew.  John the Baptist had criticized Herod for
marrying his brother's wife Herodias and Herod, at his wife's urging,
had had John arrested and bound in prison.  On his birthday, Herod's
daughter danced for him and he was so entranced that he swore in front
of his guests that he would give her anything she wanted.  After
consulting with her mother, the girl asked for the head of John the
Baptist.  Herod could not go back on his oath, and so John was
beheaded, and his head was brought out on a platter.  This is dancing
in the face of death, and it is a tale of stark cruelty and
irresponsible power.

Let's look at the less well-known tale, which might have been a model
for the Herod story.  It is the story of Jephthah's daughter in the
Book of Judges.  Jephthah was an illegitimate son of Gilead, and was
driven out of family and tribe by his legitimate half-siblings.  But
he was a great warrior, and when the Israelites were threatened by the
Ammonites, the elders of Gilead came to Jephthah on their knees to beg
him to lead them in battle, and they would make him ruler if he was
successful.  Jephthah agreed and swore to the Lord that if the Lord
delivered the battle to him, he would sacrifice to the Lord whoever
came out of the doors to his house to greet him upon his return.  In
the battle he was victorious, and when he returned to his house, who
should come out to greet him but his own daughter, playing the
tambourine and dancing in celebration of the great victory.  That
victory turned to ashes on the tongue of Jephthah, since he knew that
he had to sacrifice his daughter.  Some commentators on this story
have said that Jephthah must have known that it would be his daughter
who came to him when he first made the oath, and that both he and his
daughter knew that she was dancing in the face of death.

I don't cite these stories with approval for the conduct either of
Herod, Jephthah or their daughters, but rather for the wonder at
tragedies that happen to us every day and how people somehow summon up
the spirit to come back to the dance.  In the raw cruelty of the tale
of Herod's daughter and in the tragedy of Jephthah's daughter, we get
a glimpse of the power of the dance even in the face of death.

I'm not advocating cruelty; I'm advocating courage.  I'm saying open
your eyes and ears.  There's something larger than yourself going on,
and if you let it, it can sweep you off your feet.  Thoreau said he
wanted to live life to the lees.  Don't get to the end and discover
that you have let the dance pass you by.  Don't let it be said, I
played the flute for you and you did not dance.  Dance and mourn.
Dance in the face of death.

Some people may find these ideas distasteful.  Certainly there is a
time and place for grief to be experienced in stillness and even in
solitude, or in weeping, and there are many occasions where in the
cultural context a dance could be taken as a dishonoring of the dead.
But acceptance of grief does not have to be a negation of life.  We
can dance with tears in our eyes.  We can affirm the dance as
something we hold onto in the face of the terrors of the unknown.

It's a matter of opening up.  When we can embrace the height and the
depth of life, when we can know its most ebullient joys and its most
searing tragedies, when we can hold in one heart at one moment both
the fineness of the dance and the finality of death, we stretch our
capacity, we make our souls more elastic, we break through the armor
that our fears have built around our vulnerability, and we give our
selves the precious gift of feeling the world in all its wonderful and
terrifying plenitude.

I'm going to give you a chance now to do that mentally.  I want to
tell you the context, as it was told to me, of the round the choir
sang earlier in the service, and then inviteyou to listen to them sing
it again.  Oxawa Pardine was a little girl who loved to dance, but she
had come down with an illness and was in a hospital bed in a coma when
John Krumm wrote this song.  He sang it to her, and perhaps she heard
it, but she never gave any indication, and she died a few days
afterward.  I want you to keep that context in mind as you sing it
once more.  Look for the stars in the eyes of the child and have the
courage to dance in the face of death.

Amen.

Here are the words of the song, titled Round for Oxawa Pardine:

I've been waiting all the day long, To see the stars in your eyes.  My
love, come dance with me now; See how the ev'ning flies.  And while
you sleep, my dear, Know that I'll be near, To hold you when you
arise.



And, the closing words of the service:

Dance, dance, 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.