Dancing the right away

This will come as a shock to many if not most, but there was a time when I was a dancer. Not a tiny dancer, mind you, but a dancer. I, for a period of about five years, found that I had a surprising sense of beat and could manipulate my body to that beat.

I finished, believe it or not, high in some dance contests during the, er, the, er, well, disco age. Then John Travolta had the audacity to switch from disco to urban cowboy dancing and my world of dance crumbled. It faded away like the jeans I wore.

That said, that was two centuries or so ago. I don't dance now. Like, uh, ever. I would no more dance now than I would fly, and I don't much like to get off the ground. My grandson, Gavin, is a hip-hop dancer, competing in contests around New Orleans and even one in Los Angeles. He goes on by himself and body manipulation ensues. Oh, he's seven.

Me? I'm not seven, and the body manipulation that ensues for me now is on occasion my knees bend properly and I'm able to cut the grass.

No beat on the planet will get me to take myself for a spin again. The only disco inferno I could be aware of now is if I set fire to the soundtrack I have of Saturday Night Fever.

But I recently read that some ancient Christian rituals included less familiar things, like, DANCE;

Apparently Jesus and Peter and the boys danced. In the Acts of John, a "imaginative" second-century description of the apostle's missionary journey, John recalls that on the night of his arrest that led to his crucifixion, Jesus had the guys circle up and danced as he sang a hymn. They dance around him responding to his singing by saying Amen over and over.

In other words, on the night of his death, he broke bread and called it his body, he drank and passed wine, calling it his blood, and he sang some Chris Tomlin, or Mac Powell, or Matthew West, and the guys danced. I'm guessing no ho-down or such, but it sounds disco-ish to me, as I remember it on nights of nightmares and sweats.

But recently, a Coptic manuscript dated to the ninth century contained a dance scene remarkably like the one in the John manuscript. What this means is apparently the amount of dance in early Christian rituals continued for centuries awards.  Maybe there's another sacrament we are supposed to be doing, although words to that effect are non-canon.


Look, I'm the first one to say I ain't dancing, but you can if you feel the need. I'm the first one to say I can't dance, but I have no problem with you knocking yourself out. I'm the first one to admit I don't get liturgical dancing, at all. But I also want to be the first in line to try dance if it brings glory and honor to our Lord, and if our Lord said, "Dance, Billy, where ever you may be; I am the Lord of the Dance said me," or words to that effect..

Just don't ask me to do it well. Look, I can sing. I can clap. Just do not ask me to do them at the same time or I will tilt and eventually fall over. Add dancing to the mix, and I believe my head will explode.

After all, I'm a Methodist.