Saturday was one of those days. The details would make a long story; suffice it to say that I left the house around a quarter of eight in the morning, and got back tolerably exhausted at a quarter of six. I was contemplating something drastic. I had been planning on going to a contra dance (a down-home version of what they do in Regency movies, or, conversely, an up-scale version of square dancing). Now, after the ten-hour-day, I thought staying home with a book might be in order.

First inclinations triumphed, and I went to the contra dance; nor did I regret going, even the next morning when I awoke stiff and early for Mass. Dancing is, after all, something that one may properly say grace over (or so Chesterton insists); and Saturday’s contra dance was particularly grace-filled—if not always graceful!

I’ve encountered over the years a number of Catholic objections against dancing—perhaps it is needless to add that the objections come mostly from young Catholic men. The music is horrible; dancing is awkward, both physically and emotionally; dancing has been condemned by various saints. (I believe the Cure of Ars was one of them, though I can’t say I’ve verified that citation.) That the music is often wretched I won’t attempt to deny; but that seems to be accidental to the art. As for the moral condemnations of dancing, I suspect they have more to do with ways and kinds of dancing than with dancing itself.

My personal defense of dancing—the justification I use with myself—is that dancing is generally associated with joy in literature: think Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen. (Well, perhaps not always with joy; but at least the occasion of a ball ought to be joyful, even if the evening also brings pains essential to the progression of plot.) There are the final chapters of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, where Sunday’s happy but bewildered guests are met by the sight of a dancing ship, a dancing windmill, a dancing lamppost, and a dancing apple tree. There are the dances of the fauns and other Narnians, especially the snowball dance at the end of The Silver Chair. There is Edith Tolkien dancing “in a wood where hemlock was growing, a sea of white flowers.”  Against these images, any objections against dancing on moral grounds take on a decidedly Puritan cast! Certainly dancing can be awkward and embarrassing; another way to put the same objection would be to call it humbling—making the objection no objection at all. To dance well is to dance self-forgetfully.

Most of my interlocutors are unconvinced by the literary evidence above. That dancing can be a grand and glorious thing, they do not deny; that it often fails to be so grand and glorious on earth, I will not deny. But I fancy that the party in favor of dancing holds trumps: we have no less a person than Dante Alighieri on our side. Those who will not dance on earth will, metaphorically at least, be bound to dance in heaven, their minds and wills moved “like a wheel revolving uniformly—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

A thing to say grace over indeed!