Remember, dancing can be good!
Today the paper smacked me as it too often does with another sign that our culture is headed in the wrong direction. The front page story in the Lancaster Intelligencer entitled “Lewd Dancing Roils Schools”. Here is the link to the article:
The article outlines the problems with modern dance and some of the frustrations felt by school teachers concerning dances. I really feel for Christy McCanna, the teacher who quit being responsible for dances at Lampeter-Strasburg because of some of the sexually explicit moves occurring during their dances. The moves are described in the article. I will not relate them here.
There are three problems that the article highlights. First, we have a deep cultural problem. Some of our children believe that they are objects to be used by others (these would be the girls and to some extent the guys). Others of our children believe that their classmates are things to be used rather than images of God to be respected and loved. Second, we have the obvious destructive absence and abdication of parents. What 18 year old should be trusted on a dark dance floor with the members of the opposite sex wearing as little as possible. These kids are not monks and we should not make believe that bad things will not happen if we create an optimally bad environment and look away. Any father that would send his daughter into a dark room (the teachers have to use flashlights to check for rule breaking) full of hormonal boys needs to think again. Finally, we must note that respect (for self and others) and parents are not the only absences at these dances. Jesus is absent too. This is most obvious when people start trying to save the dances—dances are a good thing—and go looking for standards to enforce. The standards mentioned most in the article are that dancing must be “face to face”. This, sadly, is ridiculous. There can be just as much lewd behavior “face to face” as opposite. We, however, cannot enforce any moral standards because we no longer, as a culture, maintain a worldview in which there is anything like morality. With Jesus and the moral law (like the 10 Commandments) banished from the building—and increasingly banished from the culture—what is there to do?
There is, however, another alternative. We can dance! But we have to dance with our worldview (and our Lord) in the room. At Veritas Academy, we are trying to do this and by God’s grace we have had a little success and a lot of fun. We have a Colonial Christmas dance and we have had swing dances. We are looking to dance more…not less. And guess what—most of our parents (and students) are glad. What are the differences? The main difference is that Christ is in the room. The standards that we look to enforce are derived from biblical principles. We still have problems. I have had to talk to parents about the behavior of their children and we have had a few issues where we have had to discuss modest dress. We dance within an authority structure. Parents are welcome at the dance. Every student or guest is connected to some parent or adult. (The parents are more unruly at Veritas dances than the students.) Our dances have form and take skill. We have to practice and to learn the rules of decorum and etiquette. After doing this, our dances are wonderful. They teach our young men and women how to relate to each other. They teach men the responsibility of care and protection of ladies. They give our guys and gals (and parents) a place to get together with the lights on and to begin to learn to show kindness, care, and charity for each other. This, perhaps more than all of the horrors of this article, is the biggest loss. These kids are in the dark. This darkness is bad because in darkness things can happen that we would not want seen in the light. The other darkness, however, is one that keeps them from learning to relate to each other—and even seeing each other—as they need to.
Someone said of the colonial Virginians that their education consisted of Latin, Greek, and dancing and that if they had omit two parts they skipped the Latin and Greek. Our culture desperately needs to dance. Young men desperately need to see young women as people rather than objects to use in the dark. Our culture is starving for joy and we, as a culture, are sadly offering them no direction home.
Here are a few pictures from recent dances at Veritas Academy:
