Dancing Til the Cows Come Home
“If I can’t dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”
The Emma Goldman’s piece I read earlier this morning, is often paraphrased this way on t-shirts and social media memes. “If I can’t dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” That’s the declaration I had in mind, along with the final lines of Click, Clack, Moo, I Love You, when I titled this week’s sermon: Dancing Til the Cows Come Home.
I want to be clear from the outset that while I’m using both “revolution” and “dancing” metaphorically and literally, the cows are entirely metaphorical.
We can and have and will, as I alluded to last week, argue about the words to name and describe how we and others are and will continue to stand against the hate fueled, power hungry, anti-democratic swath of destruction the current administration has set upon the very core of our country’s foundation. The lawsuits, such as the one the UUA and 27th other religious bodies are bringing against ICE, challenging the ending of its sensitive locations policy, and opposing any interpretation of law which would allow immigration raids in houses of worship and religious ceremonies; the other lawsuits; the court orders; the rallies; the resignations of Justice Department attorneys; hundreds of phone calls to the offices of Congress every day–are these acts of revolution or seeds of resistance?
Whatever it is, it is arduous work–much of it repetitive in nature, some of it endangering job security, most of it undertaken with great uncertainty, none of it with a clear immediate or even eventual path to success. Our outrage; our passion for protecting our migrant populations, the food insecure, LGBTQIA neighbors and families, and other vulnerable groups; our conviction that the public health of our nation must be preserved; our sense of right and moral decency–all of this can fuel our work for only so long before exhaustion sets in. Rest is a vital component of long term resistance. Joy is a necessary tool of successful revolution.
We are going to need to do a lot of dancing–or playing ball, or swimming, hiking, sailing, knitting, baking cookies, creating art, singing or a thousand other embodied, expressive pursuits – to revive our spirits and rest our bodies, to sustain us as we continue the work for the long haul. For it will be a very long haul– stoppring what destruction we can, fostering adaptive workarounds as the destruction continues, and rebuilding in its wake. Without sufficient rest and abundant joy we will not make it through.
And this is not unique to this time in history, this time in our collective lives. Any prolonged, stressful situation, from the breakup of a marriage or other primary relationship to a long-term illness, from recovery after the devastation of a fire or hurricane, from war to an economic downturn–any prolonged, stressful situation calls us to arduous work, much of it repetitive in nature, most of it undertaken with great uncertainty, none of it with a clear immediate or even eventual path to success, all of it exhausting of physical and mental and spiritual reserves. At such times, throughout such extended periods of recovery and rebuilding and recalibrating our lives, we need to do a lot of dancing. Not because our attitude toward our work is flippant rather than appropriately earnest, not because we don’t grasp the gravity of the situation, not because the cause isn’t life or death for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the strangers we call neighbors.
No, we need to do a lot of dancing because dancing, and swimming, and knitting, and cooking and all the rest, have real, proven benefits to our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. And we’re going to need to do a lot of it, because dancing amidst the very maelstrom of a world order crumbling is itself an act of revolution, a gesture of resistance. As poet Wendell Berry wrote, “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
The ancient preacher, in our second reading this morning, proclaimed a time for mourning and a time for dancing. What they failed to make clear is that those are not distinct and separate times. The time for mourning needn’t cease before the time for dancing can begin. And the time for dancing doesn’t end when the time for mourning begins. Our hearts are larger, more complex, more resilient than that.
Like the white dot in the black swirl, and the black dot in the white swirl, of the yin/yang symbol, moments of joy and celebration splash onto large expanses of mourning; moments of grief poke their way into the fabric of joyful days, weeks, months. Only not so tidy as the distribution of black and white on the yin/yang symbol, for our hearts are messier, more colorful than that, too. In fact, perhaps we have to return to dance a better metaphor: in a society, in a community, in a family, and even within an individual, mourning and dancing, resting and resisting, being joyful and being revolutionary–all these are themselves a dance, musical, graceful, energetic, sweeping, rhythmic, swelling and fading, pirouetting and breaking, on and on, through the revolution, through the resistance, through the mundane days of marriage and parenting, of school and work and retirement, until the cows come home. Until, that is, the end of all our days. And may those be long upon the earth and abundantly blessed with joy and, “freedom from convention and prejudice.”
