Building Community

Traditional social dancing is all the rage among Traditional Latin Mass communities around the world, and naturally Scotland is no exception. There will be not one but TWO ceilidhs in the Scottish TLM community during Easter Week: the first, of course, is the Eastertide Dance in Edinburgh on Easter Friday night (19:30 – 23:00), and the second is the Easter Family Ceilidh on Easter Saturday afternoon (16:00 -19:00) in Dundee.

I have a message about Dundee’s Easter Family Ceilidh I’m happy to pass along: The Dundee TLM community are hosting a family friendly ceilidh next month, with a live band and buffet. Family tickets cost £35. This will be our 3rd year running the event; it’s been a great hit the previous two years.

For more information, drop me a line. It is fortuitous that the Dundee Dance is the day after the Edinburgh Dance, for it provides TLM parents with little children the same sort of event enjoyed by TLM parents with teenage children. I do not even ask myself how the organizers can afford to charge only £35 a family ticket, for their hall costs only £10-£20 an hour. I don’t think you could even sneeze in an Edinburgh hall for that amount. But the important thing is that all the TLM families who want to celebrate Easter as a community through dancing can do so.

When I began organizing dances, I thought hard about how to include parents of small children, without thinking all that much about the infants. God didn’t send my husband and me babies of our own, so I know very little about Generation Alpha. I once assumed that contemporary infants carted along to dances just fall asleep under piles of coats, as they did at adult parties when I was small. I also vaguely pondered who might be called upon to babysit, while mourning the loss of the babysitters as dancers. To quote Pope Francis, “Todos, todos, todos” (i.e. everybody) was my ideal.

It turns out that this is not entirely practical because local TLM parents don’t want to abandon their infants under coats or with teenaged neighbours. Also, not everyone who goes to the TLM likes dancing or even associating with other TLM-goers. (Last week I served a funeral tea for 20-year TLM veteran who had never spoken a word to me or my husband or our friends, let alone come to After-Mass Tea, and the hall was packed with his bereft and adoring pals, none of whom were TLM Catholics.) A few people hold that dancing is wrong. Thus, my dream of uniting the whole TLM community through dancing was dashed. However, this does not mean that dancing can’t help build the community up. Behold how I am promoting the Easter Family Ceilidh of my brethren in Dundee! And perhaps I will go myself if I have any money left after our Edinburgh dance.

One reason to go would be to learn how to include very small children in ceilidhs. I learned a little about that during my Christmas party, when I cut out all but one of the waltzes and focused on what the weans might be able to do.

Meanwhile, I think it absolutely splendid and practical to present Scottish children (and other children who live in Scotland) with the nation’s musical and terpsichorean heritage as soon as they are old enough to grasp the figures. The same arguments I offered recently apply in their case. And at the same time, it is good for them to grow up thinking of dancing as a family and community activity, so that when they are teens they don’t automatically connect dancing with vice. (One might make the same argument for wine: better to teach teenagers to respect good wine and beer at your table than to send them to college unprepared to resist the “adult” allure of alcopop or keg parties.)

Speaking of vice, I am suddenly reminded of Graham Greene, who was a brilliant novelist but (alas) a terrible Catholic. This sad fact cannot be banged into the heads of impressionable young Catholics hard enough–and ought to be done before handing them The Power and the Glory. Greene, who was a serial adulterer, told a friend that he very much liked the introduction of the Sign of Peace to the Mass because it gave him an excuse to hold the hands of pretty young strangers. All things are impure to the impure, to paraphrase Titus 1:15.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that there will be an Eastertide Dance dance workshop on Easter Monday at St. Andrew’s Ravelston from 7 PM to 9 PM. Everyone coming to the Eastertide Dance is welcome. We will review two basic waltz steps and as many ceilidh dances as we can pack in. If spontaneous Lindy Hopping breaks out after the long Lenten privation, I would not be at all surprised.