At the heart of many Whitsun Ale celebrations was the election of a Lord and Lady, or Squire and Lady, who functioned as mock aristocracy for the festival, ordering people around, imposing fines, and making fun of the social structures. It was in some ways an extension of the medieval role of jester. The one who was a fool could tell the truth, however unpalatable, generally without fear of reprisals from his master.
Morris dancers in the nineteenth century were on the bottom layer of society - labourers, unemployed - trying to make a few extra shillings and stepping outside the social structures, while poking fun at them at the same time. I'm sure that this is the reason that Morris Dancing was so frequently banned in Victorian times - not because it had pagan roots, for which no real evidence exists - but because it threatened and poked fun at the social order. In a society in which everyone was expected to stay in their proper place, this was too much for authority to cope with.
Times have changed. Most of the Morris dancers I know are teachers, computer programmers or local government officers. No longer are we at the bottom of the social heap. But despite our respectability in normal life, there is evidence that the folk movement generally had not lost its roots in protest. On the Warwick Festival site last night I heard songs of prisoners transported to Australia; songs of fishermen whose living has been lost due to the failing fish stocks; songs of Irish people who emigrated during the potato famine. Last week on holiday in Ireland I visited an exhibition in Cobh telling the story of the two and a half million people who emigrated through that port in just one decade in the middle of the nineteenth century. The pain, fear and hope of those people is still heard in their folk music.
In the Gospels, Jesus often tells stories of social inversion. In the parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Matthew chapter 20), we are confronted with a moral challenge. It is a story of men being hired for labour in the fields. The owner employs men for a day, and when he returns to the market later in the day, he sees more workers, and hires them also. At the end of the afternoon, he hires some who have not worked all day. At the end of the day, he gives all the workers the same wage, irrespective of how long they have worked.
Was the owner fair? Don't the workers who had slaved all day have a legitimate complaint when they claim that they should have been paid more than the men who had only worked a couple of hours. What if everyone stayed in bed late, nursing a hangover, struggling into the light at mid-day (rather like a folk festival) and then expected a full day's wage. The fabric of society would unravel. The parable overturns our expected conventions because the owner employer displays startling equality and generosity; because he refuses to be straight-jacketed into the usual way of doing things. So, says Jesus, the last will be first and the first will be last - the ultimate threat to those who classify themselves as insiders; to those who possess privilege and power. It calls for a view of God as having a policy of radical inclusiveness - and carries a danger of him being misunderstood.
This view of God can be found throughout the Gospels. The elder brother in the story of the Prodigal Son no doubt thought his father a doting old fool when he celebrated his younger son's return home after squandering his inheritance. The Pharisee who thanked God that he was not a publican was deeply offended by the suggestion that they might be equal in God's view. At the heart of Jesus' message is the revolutionary view that divine grace rips away our presumed privilege, and puts everyone on a par.
The second reading at this service is an obscure passage from Luke 7 - but we really had to read it today. Jesus says : "To what, then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the market place and calling to one another, 'we played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not weep'." The children's friends are unresponsive; they have no intention of dancing to the music. They are unmoved, po-faced, stuck in the mud. Satisfied with their humdrum routine, they see no need to change their outlook on life. By way of contrast, the following story shows someone who is open and responsive. A notorious woman, perhaps a prostitute, washes Jesus' feet, and he is criticised by a religious leader for allowing this to happen. It is a story about God's radical openness and acceptance; an illustration that there are no bars to God's love; that the accepted rules of society are thrown out of the window where God is concerned.
From the ridiculous to the sublime; from Morris dancing to T.S. Eliot:
At the still point of the turning world ... at the still point, there the dance is....
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Life is about responding to the music which emanates from the still point at the heart of the universe. It is about listening to the rhythm, and then joining in with it. Christianity is often associated in this country with the proper, the stuffy and the serious. It is true that there is a time to laugh and a time to cry; a time to be frivolous and a time to be serious. But we in Churches are not good at celebrating humanity. On the evidence of the Gospels, Jesus would have been out there on the Festival site listening to the music, having a beer or two and relaxing.
Now, I'm not so naive as to try suggesting that Jesus was a Morris dancer, or that he was a 'folkie'. But there is something about the Gospel's deliberate challenge to social order which has echoes in our Festival this weekend. The Festival site last night was a peaceful, relaxed and happy place, so different from the rush and competitiveness of 'normal' life. We are invited to step outside the conventions; to view life (and God) from a different perspective; to ask the radical question of how things might be different if we were to accept that all people are children of God and are equal in his sight.
David Brindley
[July 2001]