Welcoming

On Sunday I spied a new family coming into the parish hall for After-Mass Tea. Perhaps “new” is the wrong word to use, for members of this family have been coming to our Mass recently, thanks in part to the Michaelmas dance workshops held around the corner. However, the Michaelmas Dance is over and done, and there was no workshop this Sunday. The family had come all that way from the West just for Mass (and After-Mass Tea), and I was delighted.

These are sad times for Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass, but they are also hopeful, for the ancient rite is still tolerated here and there, including Edinburgh.* The highway drives get longer, but the Mass remains. So too does the TLM movement. Yes, many of the bonds of ordinary life are severed, as various families are forced to make the painful choice between the Mass of Ages and their parish, but this gives those in the surviving communities the joy and responsibility of welcoming the shipwrecked.

On Sunday night I held a post-Dance dinner party for the MMWP Committee, and one of the most delightful things I heard was that one newcomer had said ours were the most welcoming Catholic events she had been to in Edinburgh. That went straight to my heart, for I was once a newcomer here—and was generously welcomed by the TLM community—and I have been a newcomer in other cities, places where I did not feel welcomed.

There is sometimes a misunderstanding about what Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party’s dances are for. They are not matchmaking opportunities although I would be delighted if, like the old parish dances of the 20th century, they made some matches. No, they are for creating and strengthening ties of friendship among Catholics in Scotland, particularly among those who love the Traditional Latin Mass. The workshops are also for imparting social skills that will come in handy both in Scotland and abroad—and by abroad I mostly mean Newman Guide colleges in the United States where waltz and swing are popular, although there is many a ceilidh to be found among Catholics in Canada.

The most important part of creating a tie, I have realised as time goes on, is knowing somebody’s name and hame.** Thus, as soon as I notice somebody new at a MMWP party, I hasten to find out his or her name and, if he or she is a complete stranger, their parish. This last may sound as archaic as shouting “Halt! Who goes there?” from city ramparts, but I host children and teenagers, and so I need to know not just someone’s name but where they come from, i.e. their faith community.

“Ah,” I am wont to say. “One of Father R’s people! Very good! Welcome!”

Or: “The Jesuits! How nice. I went to a Jesuit college in Toronto.”

Every time someone comes to a dance workshop or buys a ticket to a dance, I write down their names in my Dance Notebook, a very important piece of kit that can be auctioned off, at my death, to social anthropologists. This helps me to remember everyone’s name, and this is useful for introducing them to other dancers. In the case of the young, this is absolutely crucial, for the young are more interested in meeting each other than in middle-aged Mrs McLean, obviously.

This leads my thoughts to the crucial role of teaching young men to ask young women to dance. To some, it might look autocratic, prehistoric and even cruel to order the young ladies to sit down and the young men to cross the floor en masse to ask the girls to dance. However, as coming-of-age challenges go, it is not horrible. It is even invaluable. After asking girls to dance 50 times, a quiet young man may discover that it is but a small step to ask a young woman if he might buy her a cup of coffee and, after 50 repetitions of similar invitations, if he might have her hand in marriage.

But let’s not to go from A to Z lickety-split. The short-term advantage of young men learning to ask women to dance is that young women find themselves asked to dance. Going to a community’s dance for the first time can be a nerve-wracking thing for a girl, so what a relief to be welcomed by a hostess, introduced or re-introduced by her to someone else, and then be solicited for a dance and (to judge by all the noise) engaged by a respectful young man in conversation.

The newcomer”s uncertainty is why I think hosts or hostesses of a dance must make welcoming guests top priority, and, as second, saying good-bye to them at the door, as well as they are able. The relative newcomer needs to see a friendly face, and hopefully his or her last experience of the dance will be sincere gratitude for his or her presence.

Meanwhile, dance cards make wonderful icebreakers. The men are given a challenge—to ask different women to reserve them dances and write down their names on these cards—and they all do ittogether. It is not one man confronted with a sea of women; it is a communal activity. And—should someone later not be able to put a face to the name on their card—it is the responsibility of an organiser to point the partner out. (Yelling “Gerald!” across the room, however, is not the best way to do that.)

I’m learning as I go, and one of my lessons is to make all expectations clear before a big dance: who can buy tickets, when ticket sales end, dress code, who guards the door from random strangers, who asks whom to dance, what music is played, who can change a dance from the one listed on the card (only the caller), and who washes and packs the dishes. Another lesson is that everything must be done to make dancers and musicians feel welcome. (I think perhaps I will start a new exercise in which girls practice introducing each other to their brothers and other boys they know.) Everything that interferes with that—worries about a guest’s attire, misgivings about a spontaneous rendition of a pop song, resentment over having to refill the water jugs six times oneself—must be thrown right out the window.

Right now my biggest challenge is how to make parents of small children feel welcome, for my community is now blessed with many young parents and their infants, but most of the potential babysitters want to go to the dances themselves. But I think I have had a good idea, so watch this space.

*Of course, many just opt to support the nearest SSPX chapel, but this must a gut-wrenching decision, I imagine.

**Scots for “home”, as readers might recognise from the folk song “Comin’ Thro the Rye”.