First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Cheerful Subversion

Whatever my gifts in life may be, dancing is not among them. That this has been the case from early on can be attested by the two seasons of tap dance lessons I took at a very young age - I think I was about five. I enjoyed the lessons, and at least in my own mind, I was good at them. I quickly memorized the entire sequence of complicated motions we were asked to repeat; I could do it accurately and in order; in fact -- and I was proud of this -- I could complete the whole routine faster than anyone else in the class; I always finished ahead of everybody. It was a mystery to me why the teacher insisted on playing the same irritating song in the background every time we did the routine - some sappy ditty about lollipops, which I have mercifully forgotten. She even gave me my own copy of the little 45 rpm disc to take home - to practice with, she said - and though I practiced willingly enough, and got even faster, I didn't understand why I needed to listen to the song over and over again, since we had been specifically told not to sing along with it. Apparently, it never occurred to anyone to try to explain to me that the dance movements were supposed to correspond to specific parts of the song, and clearly, I wasn't born with rhythm! Not in my feet, anyway...

However, not withstanding this expressive disability, I find myself heartily in sympathy with Emma Goldman's famously misattributed phrase, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution." She may never have said it that succinctly, but it was her philosophy after all, and I think she was quite right. The more pressing the problems we face, the more daunting the challenges that lie before us, the more important it is to keep sight of the pleasures and satisfactions of life. In fact, I would suggest that there is a kind of credibility check that is measured by joy; people who are not, at some deep level, capable of losing themselves in some sort of sheer delight, ought to be regarded with suspicion. And religious traditions that produce a dour, joy-killing, hyper-earnest life stance, are more likely to be expressions of human hubris than of divine creativity.

The position that human pleasure is a legitimate end in itself was part of the early humanist Renaissance energy that in the 15^th century transformed European culture and broke the thousand year stranglehold of the Catholic church over intellectual life in general and the arts in particular. Music and painting began to be seen not strictly as means for glorifying god and enhancing the church, but as expressions of human thought and feeling, that might have no other purpose than to make people happy by bringing color and harmony into their daily lives. Intellectual pursuits and philosophical ideas might deal directly with the experiences of this world, for the sake of knowledge itself and the satisfaction of human understanding, rather than seeking always to attain greater insight into the divine. As the shifting tides of religious history flowed over the European continent during the succeeding four hundred years, this question of the role of human pleasure, understanding, and happiness would be debated fiercely, and repeatedly. From the Italian priest Savonarola urging people to burn their secular books and works of art to the vandalism of church organs and statuary by the English Puritans, both religious and political conflict often took the form of despising anything that gave ordinary people comfort or pleasure.

Modern secular revolutions, too, have often enough carried this ascetic quality, assuming that saving the world is serious business, with no time for frivolous activities and no energy to waste on mere entertainment. Religious and political liberals of today are generally ready to mock the theological Puritanism in which it seemed that God didn't want anyone to have a good time, at least not in the present world. But we are perfectly capable of adopting wet blankets of our own; of being so earnestly unyielding in our economic imperatives, our ecological responsibilities, and our general political correctness that we forget the part about dancing, and it doesn't take God to make sure that nobody enjoys themselves.

I know when I find myself in that rigid, humorless, anxious stance, that it is time for a spirit check; time to ask, in the traditional Quaker greeting, "How is it with thy soul?" My feet may not have the gift of rhythm, but I assure you that when I am functioning at my best, there is dancing in my inner life. And when the dance of the spirit falters and grows paralyzed within me, it is a sure sign that something is out of balance, and I'm in trouble. Indeed, it seems to me that one important part of the function of religion - any authentic religion - in a person's life, is to nurture that capacity for the experience and expression of joy. Moreover, it is probably that capacity, more than any other single thing, that makes one person curious about another person's faith. I think I have mentioned before the remark I once heard in a newcomer's orientation meeting at a UU church, from the person who said, "I simply had to come and visit, to check this place out, because of how happy people looked in the parking lot after service!" It is that unconscious witness that draws others, without elevator speeches or arguments or advertisements, to want to know more about a place that helps us to be in touch with joy. I believe that people all over the world, oppressors and oppressed alike, both the marginalized and the privileged, hunger for this, for the possibility of ordinary human happiness, and the inner dance of the spirit's delight.

Not only is joy the most effective method of recruiting through example, it is also one of the most perplexing and paradoxical strategies of resistance against encroaching authority. Power always feeds upon fear, and oppression wins whenever it makes us afraid. In my experience, the spirit can dance and weep at the same time, for the tragedies that are inseparable from life itself, but it cannot simultaneously dance and cringe. Especially is this true in the face of the tyranny of consumption, that would have us believe that we cannot be happy except through what we buy. The absolutely best answer to this deceitful seduction lies in the authentic pleasures of human life; in relationships, in nature, in the life of the mind, in all that delights the eyes and ears and taste buds and fingertips, in the dance of the spirit beyond the grasp of avarice and envy.

If all religious systems are, as I would contend, fundamentally attempts to answer the question, "What does it mean to live well?", then they are all in some sense concerned with what constitutes genuine human happiness. Every tradition answers this question in two distinct ways, by theory and by example; the theory explains the rationale for how human happiness allegedly works, and the example demonstrates what that idea looks like in practice. Much of the humanist quarrel with orthodox western religion has been that while the theory may call believers to lives of justice, benevolence, humility and peace, the actual examples have far too often demonstrated bigotry, violence, arrogance, and the celebration of suffering. In fact, it is always more difficult to present a good example than it is to propound a convincing theory, no matter what system you are advocating - not excluding humanism itself. For us, the problem is even more urgent, for if we are not offering people the promise of another, supposedly better life in the next world, then we really stand or fall on the basis of how much joy we can get out of this world. The only dance we are going to have is here and now; whatever comfort or pleasure we are going to know as human beings, we are going to find in the course of our brief journey together on this fragile planet. It's too short a time to spend being picky or cross with one another; it's such a little moment for our dance.

Which is not to say that we do not contend with grave and weighty issues; there are significant, pressing problems, and we need to be about the business of solving them, to be sure. We have work to do, and human happiness also depends upon taking that work seriously - but it is the work that we need to take seriously, not ourselves. Because if we want to be in it for the long haul; if we want to make a genuine difference over time, we have to do it sustainably. We have to be nourished by joy, by all that gives us comfort and pleasure, and makes this life worthwhile. We are called upon to demonstrate what well-lived lives look like; to show how caring, justice-making, peace-loving, wholeness-seeking people behave. The way that we treat each other and ourselves is our most powerful witness to the world to show the true meaning of humanism.

I see it all the time in this congregation; I hope that you do, too. When we bear one another's burdens willingly, when we go out of our way to comfort and strengthen each other, when we celebrate together, when we welcome strangers with warmth, when we embrace each other's eccentricities with gentleness, and listen to one another with respect, when we invite others to participate in the profound and joyful moments of our lives, when we share the spirit's inner dance, then we are truly enacting the teaching of humanism in a way that makes it visible and persuasive, and sends a compelling message out into the world. For in the end, it isn't going to matter how smart we were, or even how right we were, unless we have lived in such a way that the people whose lives we have touched begin to say, "I wonder what made her so wise? How did he get to be so kind? Where did she find her strength, where did his peace come from, what was the source of their joy?"

These are the kinds of questions that dogmatic authority can neither silence nor withstand. The presence of genuine joy in one's life cannot be hidden, and neither can it be falsely manufactured; it will shed its enhancing credibility only where real happiness, pleasure and comfort are to be found. To practice cheerful subversion is to live with confidence in one's own values, and in the value of all that makes life beautiful and full of delight. It is to practice the small rituals of appreciation; to sniff flowers, to hug friends, to make music, or soup, or love. It is to give and receive joy, when the great, gloomy powers that be would cast darkness and fear across the landscape. Cheerful subversion is sassy, surprising, delightful; it is refusing to be cheated out of our human heritage of happiness, either by our own anxiety, or by anyone else's hunger for control.

The poet Marge Piercy puts it this way in her interpretation of a card from the tarot deck, "The Seven Of Pentacles":

Under a sky the color of pea soup

she is looking at her work growing away there

actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans

as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,

if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,

if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,

if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,

then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,

a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us

interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,

after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

"Live a life you can endure. Make love that is loving. Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen." If you're not allowed to dance, it's the wrong revolution. What Emma Goldman really did say was this: "I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal."

So do we, still today - we want freedom from conventions and prejudice, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to the beautiful, radiant dance of the spirit. Whenever and wherever the forces arise that would diminish that access to human happiness, there cheerful subversion is again called for. It is always tempting to make rigid little fetishes out of our own convictions, to get all wound up in the anxious effort to control the world and everyone around us, to make seriousness the test of faith. But the world is never saved by the self-important; rather, it is redeemed from repression and the hubris of power by healing laughter, by acts of everyday kindness and connection, by love and beauty and all that gives us pleasure and joy, by the irrepressibility of the human spirit. May we carry this testimony of cheerful subversion into the world through our own lives, and in our work together here in the community of shared memory and promise, may this be the dance we do.