Lord of the Dance | John B. Buescher | Catholic World Report
Grounded in Gnosticism, dubious historical scholarship, and hyper-individualism, liturgical dance is by its nature unsuited to Catholic worship.
“Medicine-man, relent, restore—
Lie to us,—dance us back the tribal morn!”
— Hart Crane, “The Bridge: The Dance”
Please take “Lord of the Dance” out of your hymnbooks, assuming you don’t attend a Gnostic church.
Sydney Carter wrote it in 1963, based on the apocryphal, second-century Gnostic Acts of John, where Jesus is supposed to have led his disciples in a round dance before his death. As the Lord of the Dance, he was simply an avatar of a cosmic principle.
In line with Gnostic thought, Jesus was not both true God and true man, but only a kind of pure spirit, who disguised himself in a cloak of matter. Because he wasn’t really a man, he couldn’t really be killed. So, for Gnostics, some kind of trick occurred at the crucifixion: some taught that a switch was made, so that a surrogate or disguised stand-in (some said Joseph of Arimathea) was crucified instead, while Jesus watched from far off.
Other Gnostics made Jesus’ body a kind of puppet that appeared to undergo torture and death, while in fact the “real” Jesus, residing in pure spirit, laughed at their foolishness, and eventually sprang away from the cross. (“I am the dance, and the dance lives on.”) This Jesus, a sort of cosmic trickster and shape-shifter, is captured in the Acts of John.
The round dance and its little song were supposed to be part of an initiation ceremony after the Last Supper, in which Jesus, standing in the middle of a circle, sang in order to achieve an ecstatic separation from his body in preparation for his Passion (thereby “supplementing” Matthew 26:30: “And when they had sung a hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives”). This is the Gnostics’ secret teaching on the Last Supper, assumed by them to have been kept out of the Gospel accounts because it was the true heart of the events described, and could not be told to the unworthy.
Dancing in the sanctuary?
In Exodus 15, “Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took the timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dancing.” In 2 Samuel 6:1-5, David “and all the house of Israel,” as the Ark of the Covenant was being rolled into Jerusalem, celebrated “with all their might before the Lord, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals.” And in Psalms 149 and 150, we read that “they shall dance in praise of his name, play to him on tambourines and harp!” and, “Praise God in his holy place…Praise him with tambourines and dancing.” This might in theory be an inspiration for dance as part of worship in His holy place, which is to say (in line with Exodus 32:19, in which the Jews dance before the idol of the golden calf), in the place where worship is directed to the true God. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that dancing was ever a part of Temple worship.
There was dancing at annual Jewish religious festivals (outside the Temple itself), and done in groups separated by gender. Certainly people danced after weddings, just as we do today (Matthew 11:16-17 says, “But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates, ‘We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn’”). Then there was the banquet celebration for the Prodigal Son’s return. And, of course, there was what Salome did for Herod, but that would hardly qualify as something to inform Christian worship. Apart from the spurious round dance in the Acts of John—that’s it, for dancing.
In medieval times and later, there was folk dancing at festival celebrations outside churches, drama reenactments of miraculous scenes in the lives of the saints or of Bible stories, and mystery plays. And there were pilgrimage processions, such as the Corpus Christi procession or the touring of neighborhoods by decorated statues or relics brought from churches, sometimes done with participants coordinating their steps or other movements, with everyone having a joyful time.
This is all quite robustly Catholic. But none of this dancing actually intrudes into the sacred liturgy of the Mass itself, just as dancing was not part of Temple worship in ancient Israel. Until recently, Catholics had always saved their dancing for outside the church—or at least not during the liturgy itself.
Comments