The Party Did Not Sing

During a Tuesday morning chapel service at my Private Christian High School, the Superintendent of our school led us in a reflection on Ecclesiastes 3, which you’ve most likely heard in the song “Turn, Turn, Turn” by The Byrds. One of the things our specific brand of Christian school was known/mocked for was not being allowed to dance. Instead of having a prom, we had a “banquet.” Parents of seniors who thought the dancing rule was ridiculous would pay for an afterparty each year where kids could dance together.

As the Superintendent read through Ecclesiastes that morning, he had to face a practical, ethical, and I’d even say, political dilemma. If he read there was a time to dance, even half-asleep high school kids would waken to the hypocrisy. If he left it out, he’d be editing his infallible, inerrant authority pad, which according to his theology, put humans into some deep trouble with God. The politics of it? What power was he willing to let go of to be faithful to the book?

I’ll let you know which decision he made that day with an all-time great quote from my best friend’s dad, Bob. At dinner, as we told him about the chapel lesson, he replied, “He’s editing the frickin’ Bible!”

Any guesses as to whether our head of administration left out “There is a time to kill?”

What we’re living in right now in the United States can be directly tied to a theology comfortable with including there being a time to kill in their worldview without there ever being a time to dance. It’s a theology that claims the Bible can be understood because of its own grip on its own inerrant interpretation of things which usually replaces joy, empathy and freedom with repression, cruelty, and domination.

And it can’t dance. And it can’t sing. And it can’t, ultimately, outlast the humanity that springs from singing and dancing.

George Orwell put it this way in “1984”:

In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?’

‘He wasn’t singing to us,’ said Julia. ‘He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.’

The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing.

All of these thoughts arose in me this morning as I watched a video of Indigenous Mexican dancers protest the inhumane killing of Renee Good by dancing and chanting in front of ICE operatives in Minneapolis. When dancing is a threat, joy has left the neighborhood. And where dancing is seen as a threat, somewhere underneath all of the masks, the weapons, the posturing, and the bravado, there is soul longing to be reconnected to the soul of the dancers.

It’s the same dynamic with the frog costumes in Portland, which so brilliantly mocked the imperial joylessness that attempted to wage war on its own citizens. It’s a satire that calls those waging war back into a common soul. It’s an invitation to those who have given over to the machine to take off their ridiculous costumes by exposing them in ways arguments usually just can’t. It’s an artful performance saying, “I’m not really a frog, but you’re not really a defender of anything other than the fragile lies of wealth and power that believe the threat of death always wins the day.

When Fox News clown prince Jesse Watters informed his audience of Renee Good’s death, he attempted to mock her as a “self-described poet.” Why is Jesse afraid of poetry? How do he and his writers know this mocking will land with an audience? You know what else the party can’t do? Tell good jokes. Jesse is mocking humanity, while the Portland Frogs are mocking the idea that anyone is completely hopeless to rejoin humanity by taking disarming the lie.

Activist/artist Pete Seeger added this verse to the classic hymn, “How Can I Keep From Singing”:

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear
And hear their death-knell ringing
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?

So much of life right now feels like what life felt like in 2020 during the pandemic, the police violence, and the election. This past Sunday, as I sat in a sanctuary with my community and heard voices singing, I was struck with the memory of not being able to sing together when we were in quarantine. I really wish I didn’t agree with historian (and current life-line) Heather Cox-Richardson, when she predicts things have to get even worse before they get better. Narcissists have two moves: flattery and threat. And when their flattery means nothing to a person or a group, buckle up for the violence. Who knows what sacrifices folks are going to have to continue to make to endure this onslaught of joyless, desperate violence?

Whatever those sacrifices end up being, they will be sustained and bolstered by our communal singing, dancing, laughing, crying, and by all the other things that make us part of this wonderful fabric of creation. And though they’ve seem to have forgotten, our soul can’t be fully saved until Donald, Jesse, and Kristi hear the song, detach from the machine, and join the dance.

15th Century, MesoAmerican poet, Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, observed of the coyolli bird:

He goes on his way singing, offering flowers
And his words rain down
Like jade and quetzal plumes.
Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?
Is that the only truth on earth?

The truth is, it’s not the guns or the insecure masquerade of authority that have carried all of us this far on the earth. It’s the ones who have resisted with songs of hope, grief, joy, and love. Or as my friend Flo Parish Oakes puts it in her song, “All These Ruins (Love will Overcome)”:

Love’s the bravest soldier.