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Ray Buckley is an American author from Portland, OR. He is an actor and cinematographer.

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Hard To Dance With the Devil On Your Back

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

SCRIPTURE: Read 2 Corinthians 4:8-9; 2 Corinthians 12:9.

When I was a child, my family and I attended a church that did not encourage dancing. To be truthful, this church didn't encourage a lot of things. My father used to joke that at times some folks were so narrow-minded that if they hadn't had noses, their eyes would have bumped together. There were moments when it seemed that about all we could do for fun was to be hit by a bus and get prayed over for healing. (That, of course, is an exaggeration. A car would have worked equally well, particularly if the driver was going to see a movie.)

In our home we danced. We danced to music—spinning, jumping, and falling down. We danced in fun. We danced for the pleasure of dancing. Dancing is contagious with children. No one dances alone when children are present.

I remember the first time I heard Aretha Franklin sing. It was more than just music. It was as if there were things inside that you never knew were there until you heard her sing. It was as if all the things-you-had-wanted-to-say-and-couldn't-find-the-words-for were right there in her voice. It wasn't just feeling the music. It was experiencing the music, coming away a different person. Somehow, when the music stopped, the world seemed incredibly quiet. You wanted to play the song over and over and over to keep the feeling. You looked forward to the time when you could hear it again. Sometimes people thought you were crazy, playing the same song again and again ...

I am not Aretha. I couldn't make those beautiful sounds. So I sang along with her.

In Scotland, when the English outlawed the playing of the great-pipes (bagpipes), Highland dancing, and the wearing of the tartan, people would go to church clutching small remnants of plaid between their thumbs and forefingers. When Irish clerics ruled that it was inciting immorality to move any part of your body in dance except your ankles and feet, the Irish began beautiful step-dancing, keeping the body rigid but moving the feet in intricate patterns and at varying speeds.

Among our Native people, dancing was a rich part of our cultures. There were social dances, times of community celebration, but there were also sacred dances. There was dancing that was prayer. In the late 1800s it became illegal to teach our children in our Native languages. The motto of one of the first boarding schools was "Kill the Indian, save the child." It became illegal to practice our ceremonies. Sacred things were destroyed or seized. Missionaries told us that our dancing was sin. When dancing is a form of prayer, and prayer becomes considered to be sin, then the spiritual core of a people begins to fragment. You begin to grasp for the sacred. At times you turn inward in despair, convinced that there is nothing good about the person God created.

In quiet places and in secret, some of the dancing continued, but some was lost for good. The lament in Psalm 137:1-4 became real:

Alongside Babylon's rivers we sat on the banks; we cried and cried, remembering the good old days in Zion. Alongside the quaking aspens we stacked our unplayed harps; That's where our captors demanded songs, sarcastic and mocking: "Sing us a happy Zion song!" Oh, how could we ever sing GOD's song in this wasteland? (THE MESSAGE)

In Canton, South Dakota, there used to be the Canton Federal Indian Insane Asylum. Native people deemed insane were sent there for the rest of their lives. It was closed in 1934. In the investigation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which led to the institution's closure, it was determined that many of those incarcerated there had no form of mental illness. Some had received no medical examination, and no records were kept. Many had been traditional spiritual leaders who had refused to give up their religious beliefs, and because of that they were deemed insane, often through the influence of reservation missionaries. Nearly half of those held in the institution died there. There is a graveyard in Canton. It contains no markers and is in the middle of a golf course. These were the ones who literally refused to give up dancing.

The 2010 U.S. Census began in Noorvik, a small Native village in Alaska. As the first location for the census, media from around the world gathered to cover the first person registering for the census. It was the first time in almost one hundred years that Native dancing had been allowed in the village. Before then, missionaries had deemed it pagan, and it had long been illegal. Now, Native people from other villages came to teach them the old dances. The people of Noorvik had forgotten how to dance.

There are metaphors and similes so powerful that they can take your breath away. Imagine hearing the hymn "Lord of the Dance" when you haven't been allowed to dance. Imagine hearing of God dancing the world into being, God embodying the dance. Feel the weight of history, cultural and personal, when this line is sung: "It's hard to dance with the devil on your back." Yes. It is.

Here it is, laid out before us. Social, political, or other events may weigh us down in the dance, but the dancing is not gone, nor is the creative force that leads it. Dancing, after all, is not only a physical activity. It is an act of spirit and the Spirit.

It is hard to dance with the devil on your back. But it can be done.

In the play The Great God Brown, one of Eugene O'Neill's characters asks, "Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter?"

Following World War I, Germany was left in such depression and desperation (and kept there by world powers) that a wheelbarrow of German currency would buy a loaf of bread. We are reminded by the German theologians of the early twentieth century that one may lose everything and know that God is enough. After having survived a concentration camp as punishment for hiding Jews during World War II, Corrie ten Boom shared the words spoken by her sister on her deathbed, "There is no pit so deep, that God's love is not deeper still." The noted psychiatrist and father of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, after enduring the horrors of four Nazi concentration camps, would remind us that everything could be taken from you (your home, your family, your identity, even your clothing), but not your ability to choose how you will respond. That response is based on that which is deeply spiritual and meaningful. That can never be taken away.

Dance The gospel is precisely about the dance. It is precisely about changing the concept of who can dance. It is about the right to dance. It is not all about the difficult times. It is also about the dance of joy. The dance of the spiritual life is real, and it is about discipleship that is real. It is about dancing when it looks like what you expected from life is crumbling. It is about dancing with burdens on your back, and still dancing. There is a Lord of the Dance and an inexplicable, inexhaustible invitation that is given to us. All of us.

The mind and spirit remember the dance long past the body's ability to produce it. You can "see" a dance even if you have no sight, and you can teach a dance even when you yourself can no longer dance. It is as if a phantom of the dance remains in the memory...