Maybe Somebody Should Have Put Baby In A Corner

A Grace
by G. K. Chesterton

You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Chesterton apparently had nothing against dancing per se, especially when it is part of celebrating. It is a natural human expression of joy and worship.

We see dancing in the context of worship and celebrating in the Bible as well. ("Let them praise His name with dancing; let them sing praises to Him with timbrel and lyre." - Psalm 49: 3 and "A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance." Ecclesiastes 3: 4 to cite two examples.)

And don't forget Snoopy's joyful dance!

But, of course, dancing has its limits, especially when it strays from celebration - such as David before the Ark - to sensuality - as with Salome before Herod.

Indeed, dance in Western civilizations too often strays into the realm of sensual and erotic. That is why the Catholic Church prohibits it in Masses (except when the Mass is for a cultural group that has dance as part of its worship):

" Here dancing is tied with love, with diversion, with profaneness, with unbridling of the senses. . . . For that reason it cannot be introduced into liturgical celebrations of any kind whatever: That would be to inject into the liturgy one of the most desacralized and desacralizing elements, and so it would be equivalent to creating an atmosphere of profaneness which would easily recall to those present and to the participants in the celebration worldly places and situations." - Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship, Dance in the Liturgy (1975)

One Saint who clearly did not like dance was St. Jean Vianney, The Cure of Ars. In the collection of his sermons (The Sermons of the Cure of Ars, translated by Una Morrissy), he decried dancing again and again.

Is there any place, any time, any occasion wherein so many sins of impurity are committed at the dancehalls and their sequels? Is it not in these gatherings that people are most violently prompted against the holy virtue of purity? Where else but there are the senses so strongly urged towards pleasurable excitement? If we go a little more closely into this, should we not almost die of horror at the sight of so many crimes which are committed? Is it not at these gatherings that the Devil so furiously kindles the fire of impurity in the hearts of the young people in order to annihilate in them the grace of Baptism? Is it not there that Hell enslaves as many souls as it wishes? If, in spite of the absence of occasions and the aids of prayer, a Christian has so much difficulty in preserving purity of heart, how could he possibly preserve that virtue in the midst of so many sources which are capable of breaking it down?

Did the Holy Fathers of the Church say too much about it? St. Ephraim tells us that dancing is the perdition of girls and women, the blinding of men, the grief of angels, and the joy of the devils. Dear God, can anyone really have their eyes bewitched to such an extent that they will still want to believe that there is no harm in it, while all the time it is the rope by which the Devil pulls the most souls into Hell?

St. Augustine tells us that those who go to dances truly renounce Jesus Christ in order to give themselves to the Devil.

And he says even more. Yikes.

We do need to be aware of the context of his condemnation. When he was stationed in Ars, the parish had been without a priest for a while. The population had seriously lapsed when it came to church teachings and practices, and to morality. So he was trying to shock them to break them of bad - and sinful - habits. Dancing was in some ways an entry-level activity for some of those habits.

Now it is true that there are forms of dance that do indeed cross the line. And they may indeed lead into sin. (Why did they call that movie Dirty Dancing?)

Personally, I think, like Chesterton, that dancing can be a good thing in the right forms and the right circumstances. I like that in the poem he calls for saying grace before dancing.

On the other hand, he did advise us not to dismiss the wisdom of the saints: "It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans."

St. John did have a point. And we know how foolish deans can be.

Speaking of foolishness, reading his sermons did inspire a clerihew (of course).

St. Jean Vianney
went to the hootenanny
but left in horror when he happened to glance
some people starting to dance.