'Dancing in the Streets' - Rev. Claire MacDonald

Carrying the Song - A Blessing - by Jan Richardson

Call it everything

that travels

on the current 

that moves between us,

where what had been

unbearable

becomes, somehow,

borne

and all that lay

in silence

finds its cadence,

finds its flow,

finds the edge

of its own voice

and cannot help

but sing.

—Jan Richardson

Reading: Jan Richardson from Sanctuary of Women

We are dancing in the streets of the city of my college years. The downtown is lit up for the holidays, and the music blares as our feet repeatedly hit the hard surface of the street. Tomorrow we will long for hot baths to soak the soreness from our legs, but tonight we are dancing at the Festival of Lights. In the years to come I will learn how necessary it is to keep dancing, how celebration is not a luxury but a staple of life, how in the grimmest moments I will need to take myself down to the closest festival at hand. I will go not to drown my sorrow or to mask my despair or to ignore the real suffering of the world or of my own self. I will go to beat out the message with my feet that in the darkness we are dancing, and while we are weeping we are dancing, and our legs are aching but we are dancing. And under the night sky we are dancing; lighting a match to the shadows, we are dancing; starting to sing when they have stopped the music, we are dancing; sending shock waves with our feet to the other side of the world, we are dancing still.

Message

I love Jan Richardson’s words – I find them both comforting and exciting. She is a poet of life’s pleasures and challenges, of joy and grief, someone whose blessings – I read one at the beginning – attend to and witness the possibility that faith, hope, joy and love can usher in a way of being that can ‘make life matter more’ – as another poet, Joanna Klink, puts it. I like that too and I find myself drawn to people who know that we walk the moving edge of being and who look up and around at this beautiful crazy broken frightening world – and find ways to be here now. So today I want to explore that a little asking how carrying the song, dancing in the streets helps us to stay on the moving edge without falling – and maybe too, what’s beyond dancing in the streets.

Martha Reeves and her girl-band the Vandellas released the single Dancing in the Streets in what was called the ‘freedom summer’ of 1964 – as the Civil Rights act was signed into being - and though it was never intended as a call to action it fast became the anthem of civil rights and the soundtrack to social change. What was uniquely different was its call to joy - for Black Americans to find joy in public, urban spaces denied to them during a time of intense hostility and segregation (Financial Times). The people who adopted it as an anthem connected claiming the streets with joy to making life matter more.

And it came back to me this late winter as the war in Iran began and as the war in Ukraine intensified. I began to hear about defiant dancing in times and places of grief and fear. As violent responses to the protests in Iran began to take place, killing possibly thousands of people many of them young protesters I began to see videos of young people dancing at funerals (hip hop, rap, collective choregraphed dances) and hearing that in Ukraine where electricity was cut off, where there was no heating in arctic temperatures, of people gathering on the frozen river Dnieper in Kiev and partying. It would be too easy for me to say how inspiring this was – or to say we need joy in dark times & times of grief – true as that is. No, it’s something else that struck me - that it is in times of real extremity that we finally come into the present, that we let go of outcomes, of the future, of anything except the now that we become in fact more fully human. Its dancing at the very edge, dancing to make life matter more now.

The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the abyss. Ursula K Le Guin (The Farthest Shore)

There was always more to dancing streets as a political anthem. There was always faith. What I might call faith in the more, the growing edge that will reach beyond, a faith that that there is more love somewhere, that what we do, how we live, who we are together and as individuals matters, that we are held in some way we do not understand, in love. Angel Kyodo Willams the Buddhist teacher with a background in the Black church, says in her book Radical Dharma:

“We cannot have a healed society, we cannot have change, we cannot have justice, if we do not reclaim and repair the human spirit,”

A long time ago in America I turned towards spiritual community hearing Berenice Johnson Reagon, historian, musicologist founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, speak about faith and she said that there would have been no civil rights without faith. Faith is hope beyond reason, the bridge you get on to cross the abyss when you can’t see the other side. And she knew a bit about carrying the song.

In the weeks since the Iran war began, we have watched faith shudder and chaos emerge – burning oil fields, the terrible executions that continue, and Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan and Myanmar and Lebanon and Cuba we can all go on listing. Cruelty repression and pointless pain continue and that is not just human pain but the destruction of the planet itself – and I know how much you care and how many of you express your concern, your outrage, your own need for activism and witness and your own pain.

The former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association Susan Frederick-Gray says, as an activist and spiritual leader, that everyone needs sanctuary. Being here – in this space – together – with others around us who share our concerns, who are able to listen with compassion on a Sunday morning – that is in itself a sanctuary. This is a community of care, and we offer to one another here is to listen to one another, to tune in to our calling to act well, and to take seriously the labour of sustaining the joy from which change will come. As Bad Bunny has said, ‘grief and fear are rising in many places, but joy is a deep form of resistance’.

That call to dance was born in struggle. It is dance as repair – that term that is at the heart of Judaism’s concept of tikkun olam – the call to repair the world even when you know that it will always be broken because that is part of the human condition. But the act of repair – the attempt - of the world, of ourselves – is part of how we witness and care for that broken condition. In it we also find the joy of connection, we embody the more love somewhere, that faith that hope and in hope envisions. Our acts of repairing in love and care enact our belief that no matter what the future holds the present matters. Joanna Macy – nothing we feel about the future can take away from our passionate commit to our lives here now.

One of things intentional spiritual community can do is to collectively practice the knowledge of the human condition that spontaneously arises at the edge of crisis – to truly know what it means to be here now. And not to be shocked or outraged but to lean in and learn to be a wise compassionate community, able to act in full knowledge of what we face, and always able to dance, to carry the song. And here is a thing – there is no act too small in this context. It isn’t about the big acts, or grandstanding or performing virtue, or being publicly outraged. In the past few days as I have been writing this, I have been reading words by the Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax, and reflecting on her notes, her snippets of wisdom, about hard times.

She says:

stay aligned with the values of integrity and care, letting wisdom and courage be the guide, 

keep our communities of care, conscientiousness, compassion and connection close as wise communities of action and courage.

find beauty in our broken world and let that resource us as we engage hazard in every quarter.

Do not be afraid to take action. Give it your very best. Time is of the essence

And then she has this story:

‘…from the author Terry Tempest Williams: I always think about the old-time presidential candidate A. J. Muste. During the Vietnam War, Muste stood in front of the White House, night after night, with a single lit candle – many nights he was all alone. A reporter interviewed him one evening as he stood in the rain…

“Mr. Muste,” the reporter said, “do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?” Muste replied, “Oh, I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”

At the heart of all spiritual community is the intention to weave a thread of connection between the sacred and the social, the symbolic and the material, the collective and the worth and value of every person. To model the values of justice and being together well, embracing the need for every person whoever you are, whoever you love, whatever you are seeking to be welcomed. How we do that in this now gathered community is the beautiful at times pressing question that the journey of this community is here to make. We are here hold one another in our moments of grief and fear and joy and questioning and as Tich Nhat Hanh has said, it’s a question of practice and as most everyone else has said, it takes a village to do that. And we are, after all, a village.

Amen

Closing blessing

Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.