The Lord of dance

At the risk of coming across as terribly parochial, I’m sure anyone who has been around the city of Cape Town in recent weeks would have met up with performances that are part of City Public Arts Festival called “Infecting the City”.  My personal favourite among them is the re-enactment of slave experiences at the Slave monument in Church Square.

Most of the performances are funky, fresh with intense creative exertion. This is why it surprised me to hear some Christian groups had raised objections to one of the performances, the Black Tapping Jesus.

After watching the supposedly controversial Black Tapping Jesus, I felt the Christian groups were being a little finicky. The show does suggest casually flippant familiarity with the story of Jesus. This may look and feel uncomfortable to conservative Christians. But to say the dancer’s dress code suggested that Jesus was a cross-dresser is pushing it a little.

Also using arguments of whether the same portrayal of Mohammed or Buddha would have been tolerated or not is a little disingenuous. For one, Christianity, throughout its history, has showed a lively interpretation of its story. It has shown more tolerance by introducing a spirit of comedy where it needed to evangelise and entertain.

More still is the fact that we live in a free and democratic country where people’s right of free expression and dissent is guaranteed, as long as it does not offend or infringe on the rights of others. The big question, I guess, is by whose standards do we interpret whether something is offensive or not to others’ beliefs. What is reasonable when it comes to the spirit of free expression? I would not like to enter into the technical details about all of this, but I do sometimes feel we, as the faithful, need to understand that having a sense of humour does not mean we lack deep convictions.

Perhaps, with my stoic amor fati to religious absolutism, I am not really the best person to make this argument. To me, to quote Montaigne, “it is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account”. Such cruelty never starts as such, but as something minor—even something apparently dutiful, such as defending one’s faith.

Yes, our faith is under attack from the spirit of secularism, relativity, atheism and so forth. But if we allow this to make us dour, to make us lose our sense of humour, or—God forbid—act cruelly, then we are playing into the hands of the enemy. We’d not only betray our lack of humour, but also our shaky convictions.

If we’re serious about our freedoms—all of our freedoms—then we must promote a society that invokes variable truths about who we are; of course as Catholics we have to make sure that this also does not violate the Truth as brought to us by Jesus, the Christ. We must be unflinching about our convictions, but honest also about allowing other people to be who they want to be.

Throughout history the greatness of religion has been how it can persuade and transform normative cultures and traditions, and not how it prohibited them. Religious greatness, in other words, is measured in the level of its engagement with society; otherwise we would not have seminal books such as St Augustine’s City of God, which has stood the test of time in these things.

Personally, at the tapping Jesus show, I decided to follow my daughter’s lead. She simply joined the dance, humming her own song: Lord of the dance, you’re the dancing Lord! Children are our teachers in intuitive things—because their guarding angels stand before the face of God.

As the psalmist saw it long ago: we live our lives as if in a (narrated) story, which is why I’m almost certain it is permissible to dance along now and then. The pain and chaos of life is painful enough. Where we have the galvanising potential to insert some joy, let us not resist the triumphal (or despondent) storytelling by flattening out the narrative even where it is not necessary.

Let’s kick off our shoes (or put on our dancing shoes, if we prefer) and join the dance. Lord of the dance, you are a dancing Lord!