People
who study the doings of the tribes from which
we all descend will tell us this: It is not
easy to separate the two things we call worship
and dance. For most of us, dancing is something
that couples do at weddings, that people with
strong ethnic traditions do on their holidays,
that some very hard working folks do in modern
dance and ballet companies. But in this room
on Sundays? Worship and dance seem to have parted
ways long ago in Western Christianity.
Not so, of course, in other parts of the world.
If dance is an ordered movement of one or many
bodies, often accompanied by music, then dance
is very much a part of religious worship in
Asia and Africa and the Middle East as it continues
to be a part of the life and worship that belongs
to Native Americans from both continents. Where
we can witness this way of prayer-whether
it be Zulu or Lakota or Hindu-we usually
see that the movements we call dance are not
reserved for leaders but belong to the whole
community. Some people may have special parts
to take, but everyone is caught up in the movement.
Why should dancing and worship be so linked
for so many people? What is it about a community
gathered to praise or to beseech God, to initiate
newcomers or to bury their dead, that leads
to music and to dance? One part of the answer
has to do with this: A community praying is
a community. It is not that several hundred
people happen to find themselves in the same
room at the same time, as they might at a department
store, and each goes about his or her own tasks.
When those who share one faith come together
to give expression to that faith, then they
act with some sort of unity-a unity that
needs to be heard in song and a unity that needs
to be seen in the posture and the movement of
their bodies. That is the way human beings have
found that things work. Here, we are many people
doing a common task. To make that happen, there
is an order here, a flow to things. We are all
to be at home in this liturgy. It is not my
show; it is our privilege, our duty. The movements
of this liturgy are ordered movements. If they
are not so, then they can't belong to
all of us. And that is why worship and dance
have such a long story together. Only dance,
which is just ordered and practiced movement,
can carry the day.
Now it may not look like dance any more, but
maybe our notion of dance is not wide enough.
Whatever we wish to call it, the movements in
the liturgy are ordered movements. Yours are,
mine are, the movements of lectors and communion
ministers and servers are. And all our movements
together are ordered. We don't need to
call it a dance, this movement we do together
on Sundays in this room, but we do need to know
that the movements make a difference. Like the
music, they build us up as a church or they
tear us down. They are not neutral.
Look at just a few of the movements of our Sunday
eucharist. The liturgy, like any assembly of
people, has to begin and has to end with movement:
gathering and going out. The gathering is like
a great procession that begins in dozens and
hundreds of places each Sunday, all around this
community, and ends in one place, this room.
One by one, three by three, five by five, the
individuals and the households and the friends
arrive here, converging from all over, bringing
with us all those worlds where we live and work
and worry. We pass through an entranceway, maybe
not the grand porches and gathering areas of
some churches, but however humble, there is
our door, and on this side of it is this great
hall, this room that takes its name from our
name,
"church."
Inside, the little processions
perform some common actions. We take water on
our hands, water that is meant to remind us
of the baptism waters where we once put death
to death and put on the life of Christ. With
that water on our faces and bodies, we enter
among other baptized people. We may greet some
friends and some strangers alike as we find
a place in this assembly. All of these small
processions are then brought to their conclusion
as the presider and other ministers walk through
the midst of the assembly. Their procession
is only the end of all these processions. They
pass through the midst of the assembly here.
That is not a way to get from the back of the
room to the front of the room. This room has
no back and has no front. The procession binds
all who have gathered here into one assembly,
a church ready to do its Sunday work. In their
special clothing, with all of us singing our
songs, the processing ministers are the tail
end of this great movement, a climax that brings
into our midst the book of God's word
and then sets us down ready to hear that word
and celebrate the eucharist.
In the Liturgy of the Word,
the dance is in the way we sit to listen to
the first two readings and then stand to face
the reader of the Gospel. And the dance is the
Alleluia-accompanied procession that takes us
to that Gospel proclamation. Like all dance,
this is wasted motion. It doesn't accomplish
anything. It is totally inefficient. The Gospel
could be read from anywhere. It could be read
without a parade from point A to point B. But
this gathering is not about efficiency, it is
about beauty and about spirit and about faith.
And that is why our language here is poetry
and dance, silence and song.
In a few moments we will
begin the preparation of this table and its
gifts. Again, there would be far more efficient
ways than our procession carrying bread and
wine to set the table. But we are concerned
here with basic things that are also immense
things: real bread and real wine, good gifts
carried to the table by various people from
our community. And when we have prayed over
these gifts, giving God thanks and praise for
all the work of creation and for the saving
death and resurrection of Jesus, then we again
process toward the table, this time to receive
the body and the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
After a short while, we take leave of one another
and of this house, processing now into our Sunday,
into our week, into all this world.
It isn't hard to see why the church went
for most of its life without anything like pews.
What's the use of seating to a people
on the move, to a people engaged in this ritual
dancing-all these processions and postures
and other gestures-that we do together
each Sunday? And that image, the dancing of
this assembly, is perhaps the only way to break
out of our deeply held notion that the Mass
is something some people do for others, something
that a few people do while others watch. If
we want to compare the Mass to other sorts of
human activity, we wouldn't choose a movie
or a play or a baseball game. At these events,
most of the people are spectators, on the sidelines.
For a real comparison to
the Mass, we would have to choose a folk dance,
a circle dance, something that was alive in
nearly every culture until this century and
is still a part of many societies. In such a
dance, no one is a spectator, everyone is a
participant. There may be leaders, but each
person knows the steps and is at home in the
dance. And the dance does its work. It makes
the invisible community visible. It is an image
of what life in this world is all about. It
is the spirit of that life, and it somehow shows
each dancer how to keep on when the dance seems
to end.
Our Sunday liturgy is a circle
dance with many movements that we all know:
taking the holy water and signing the body as
we enter, bows and genuflections, signs of the
cross great and small, greetings of peace, taking
bread and cup in the hands, even reaching into
pocket or purse for some financial sharing,
some pooling of our resources to get our common
work accomplished. All these things we know
well to do. Let us give each movement, each
gesture, a fullness that is new each Sunday.
Copyright © 1992, Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
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