where the ignes fatui dance

THOUGHTS
on
CHIEF EPISCOPAL OFFICERS,
BLOODY BIG RODENTS,
and the
FUTURE of the DANCE

(in three parts to save your sanity).

PART THREE: “where the ignes fatui dance”



[So to a third installment ... if you have stayed with me: we were on a dark march, 

“I had not thought death had undone so many,” wrote Dante, and it is undoing many more, trudging, trudging. Grossman wrote of the darkest of deaths: “immediately behind Viktor, right at his heels, followed doubt, suffering, lack of belief,” and then bleakly, “we will have vanished – just as the Aztecs once vanished.”  

Okay?]

But for the ecclesiastical community that was once a community of resurrection faith, the community that has become no more than a huddle of Labour Party, Green Party, Troglodyte Party, Masonic Party at prayer, this death is a wasted, self-inflicted death. It is death embraced in stubborn refusal to reach from sombre darkness to a crazy God-filled dance beyond the austere gate-keepers and their hostile portals. It is death clung to by those who sink unnecessarily with their leaking boat.

Just beyond the stern visages of the gate-keepers, the joyless CEOs and acolytes of prose, just beyond those standing there and grimly monitoring balance sheets and manning exits, just there dwells a dance. Gate-keepers and CEOs, Ads and RDs (but not LBWs)  could dance too, if only they reached out of fluorescent dull-holes and performance indication reports. Even the tax-collector Matthew danced. Sadly the majority of the pure and the holy did not, but stayed, counting beans, selling doves in the Temple to make the columns equate. The bridegroom went and danced elsewhere, and the columns crumbled. 

Yet just there, so within reach but beyond the reach of those who annihilate imagination, is the dance of the divine Ignis Fatuus, divine Will o’ the Wisp, divine firefly. He, She dances eternally. She, He, Wisdom, Word, dances before and after time (unless our prosaic theology has reached the depths in which the great mysteries of pre-existence and Resurrection are turned to dross and discarded). As the English Carol put it,

                Then down to hell I took my way
                For my true love's deliverance,
                And rose again on the third day,
                Up to my true love and the dance.

                Then up to heaven I did ascend,
                Where now I dwell in sure substance
                On the right hand of God, that man
                May come unto the general dance.
 
               Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
               This have I done for my true love. [1] 

Ignes fatui, dancing fireflies, or the mysterious (but also oh-so ambivalent) glow-worms, Lord of the Dance, leading on to … to death. But death happens. My death, your death, gate-keepers’ deaths, even dancers’ deaths, Baxter’s death, Merton’s spectacular death, death of a star, death of a universe. And beyond?

A firefly dances. The Lord dances. CEOs? Do they dance, even in funny hats and purpled shirts?

Death of a church. I wrote of that previously. Mother Ecclesia, shuddering on the fangs of an iceberg. And CEO types shuffle deckchairs, pore over balance sheets, seek redemption in columns of diminishing returns. Jettison vision, jettison hope, jettison dance, jettison Ignis Fatuus, for though these weigh nothing they weigh too much, and only the dreariest rationalism remains. 

Ah, Merton! Ah, Baxter! So many whose dance led them beyond the gate-keepers’ hostile, frozen ice-berg edge, beyond to dancier places where fireflies and Ignes fatui play. Ah, Francis and Clare and Heloise and Cecilia, dancers all beyond the barricades! Ah Desmond whose dance is visible still and dear God did he dance in ways most unbecoming of an Anglican! Praise be to the God of the dance, because you moved beyond prose to poetry, beyond mumble to melody, beyond  a gurgler’s pissant[2] throat  to piscina’s holy caress (because the latter points to the belief that water used in sacred rites is so holy it deserves caress). 

Praise God for those Holy Ones who irradiate blundering souls. Pray God Mother Ecclesia, her CEOs and their clay footed acolytes may learn to dance again. There’s room, my friends, in the boats beyond, out where the Ignes fatui dance the dance of the Risen Christ!

[1] No, Bill Gates and autocorrect, not “puissant”, a very different gurgler no matter the alliteration.
[2] From the English Carol “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” whose obscure origins are probably late mediaeval. Sidney Carter re-vivified the carol in his 1963 “Lord of the Dance.”