The Refiner’s Fire: The Dance

Reclaiming An Image

Although we have been given our orders regarding “graven” images, we find the Bible abounding in mental images that the Lord apparently uses to serve spiritual growth by means of our imaginations. All these images seem to compose a method by which the infinite Mind communicates with the finite mind. Any one image will fall short of the Fact and yet can help mortals conceive of that which for the present they cannot know in its entirety. The images of the Lord as Shepherd, Christ as Way, Truth, Life, Light, Bread, Water, Morning Star, Lily of the Valley, the Holy Spirit as Breath, Wind, Dove, the Church as Body and Bride, all speak to our imaginations and help us to understand certain aspects of the Unknowable by means of the known, the Real by means of the real.

Bruce Larson’s book Ask Me to Dance illustrates the effectiveness of a biblical-oriented image in conveying a needed lesson. Larson cites David’s exultant dance before the Ark of the Covenant, joyous act of worship that it was, as an example of the missing element of joy greatly needed in many modern churches. Perhaps because of the conservative Christian’s view that the “devil approaches the heart through the door of the toes” and “all who take part in a waltz or cotillion are mounted for hell on the devil’s own pillion,” we are in danger of losing even as image that which some reject only as act.

Both ancient Hebrews and Greeks regarded creation as an “act of music.” In Job 38:4, 6, 7, God asks Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?… What supports its foundations, and who laid its cornerstone, as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” The early Greek mathematician Pythagoras concluded that the clear relation between numbers and music reflected the harmony of the universe and that the movements of planets around the sun produced a musical tone dependent on orbit, rate of speed, and relation to other heavenly bodies. This notion of celestial music or mysterious heavenly harmony has had a powerful appeal for centuries, especially to poets and philosophers.

Kepler built on Pythagoras’s idea and formulated the laws of planetary motion, computing mathematically for each planet a “tune” that was harmonious with the Pythagorean musical scale. This dance of the planets around the sun meant to Kepler that man-made music and dance were a simple projection of the God-ordained music of the spheres.

The Psalms offer numerous examples of the Hebrews as people acting out their convictions about the power and harmonious precision of the Creator of music with praise in joyful dance. “Thou has turned for me my mourning into dancing … and girded me with gladness” (Ps. 30:11). “Let them praise his name in the dance.…” (Ps. 149:3). In addition to the Second Samuel reference to David’s dancing “before the Lord with all his might,” we read in Ecclesiastes that there is a “time to laugh … a time to dance.” Christ uses a dance metaphor in the New Testament when he compares the hypocritical Hebrews to perverse children who refuse either to mourn or to dance.

The Renaissance in England abounded in literary references to the dance as an image reflective of God’s order of things. Professor E. M. W. Tillyard describes the text of Sir John Davies’s Renaissance poem “Orchestra” in his The Elizabethan World Picture:

Since … the universe itself is one great dance, we should ourselves join the cosmic harmony. It was creative love that first persuaded the warring atoms to move in order. Time and all its divisions are a dance. The stars have their own dance, the greatest being that of the Great Year which lasts six thousand years of the sun. The sun courts the earth in a dance [Vintage, p. 104].

Tillyard describes such “invention” as a “cosmic commonplace” in the sixteenth century. Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice advises Jessica:

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick laid with patines of bright gold:

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings.… [V.1.58–61],

John Milton in the next century continues the image when he writes in Paradise Lost:

With the fixt Stars, fixt in thir Orb that flies,

And yee five other wand’ring Fires that move

In mystic Dance, not without Song, resound

His praise, who out of Darkness called up Light [V. 176–9].

In Comus he assumes that the earth’s seas dance, subject to the moon’s influence: “The Sounds, and Seas with all their finny drove / Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move.”

Anyone who has seen modern time-lapse photographic techniques in such films as Walt Disney’s Nature’s Half-Acre could hardly find fault with the following Renaissance poem, which includes even plants in the dance:

What makes the vine about the elm to dance

With turnings windings and embracements round?

Kind nature first doth cause all things to love;

Love makes them dance and in just order move.

In this twentieth century we speak casually of the whirling protons, neutrons, and electrons of the atom. What a dance our image-loving ancestors might have made of that! Or had they been permitted to hover in a helicopter at rush hours viewing traffic patterns, they might have seen multiple clover-leafs offering a “light fantastic,” or north-and south-bound drivers waiting while left-turn arrows allow east- and west-bound vehicles to “do-si-do” on their way. Once we recover consciousness of the image we may find it everywhere—to our delight, for the image of the dance carries with it characteristics desirable in the Christian community. In addition to order, form, grace, harmony, and rhythmic motion, we should expect to find interaction, exchange, and courtesy.

The Quaker hymn “Simple Gifts” popularized in a Judy Collins album implies the dance:

When true simplicity is gained To bow and bend we’ll not be ashamed

To turn, to turn ’twill be our delight

Till by turning, turning, we come round right.

This same melody is used by young Jesus-people as they sing “Lord of the Dance”:

I danced in the morning when the world was begun

And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun

And I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth

At Bethlehem I had my birth.

I danced for the scribe and the Pharisee

But they would not dance and they would not follow me,

I danced for the fishermen for James and John

They came with me and the dance went on.

I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame

The “holy” people said it was a shame:

They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high

And they left me there on a cross to die.

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black

It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.

They buried my body and they thought I’d gone—

But I am the Dance and I still go on.

They cut me down and I leapt up high

I am the Life that’ll never, never die.

I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me.

I am the Lord of the Dance said He.

Beautiful modern use of the dance image is found in the closing chapter of C. S. Lewis’s space-fantasy Perelandra. Ransom, the hero, is dazed by the voices of angels (eldila) who speak praise like that of the Psalms:

The Great Dance does not wait to be perfect until the peoples of the Low Worlds [planets] are gathered into it. We speak not of when it will begin. It has begun from before always. There was no time when we did not rejoice before His face as now. The dance which we dance is at the centre and for the dance all things were made. Blessed be He! [Macmillan, 1965, p. 214].

Lewis’s writing is consistent with the ancient tradition here, but he is doctoring modern imaginations and the fragmentation of twentieth-century Christendom by using the dance image. In The Problem of Pain he describes the abdication from selfhood necessary for participants in the dance and concludes:

All pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw near its uncreated rhythm, pain and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not exist for the sake of good or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it [Macmillan, 1961, p. 141].

Perhaps modern uses like these will lead us to reclaim the image of the dance and to recognize its efficiency in portraying that Love which is the Source of Music and Lord of the Dance.

Who knows? The day may come when we will even accept Sir Toby’s advice in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard1 and come home in a coranto?2 Thy very walk should be a jig.”

Figuratively speaking, of course!

COURTNEY ASHER MCKAY

1. Lively dance in triple time.

2. Dance with a running gliding step.

Courtney Asher McKay teaches English and French in Monterey High School, Lubbock, Texas.

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