The Sin of Dancing

A Childhood Memory

I’m departing this week from my practice of sharing stories by elementary school children.  I’m going to share a memory from my own childhood.  I have many memories of childhood puzzlement and those memories undoubtedly have nurtured my curiosity about how children think.  I used to think that I was a very strange child – much more concerned with philosophical questions than the other people my age.  The last forty years of listening to children, however, has disabused me of the notion that I was so atypical.  Many children, probably most, concern themselves with questions about the nature of reality, beauty, knowledge, goodness – all the branches of philosophy are born from childhood puzzlement. Here I describe a salient memory of 7-year-old Marsha.

In the second grade, Mrs. Tooten (that is my memory of her name) taught ballroom dancing.  She moved all the desks to the side of the room and all the girls sat along one wall and the boys were taught to select a girl to approach with the question, “May I have this dance?”  It was something between embarrassing and agonizing for most of us.  I was growing up in a fundamentali Baptist family, and my church taught that dancing is sinful.  I resolved to say ‘No, thank-you” when asked to dance.  I enjoyed watching the others, until I saw what was happening to Tommy Simms.  Tommy was very overweight, and sometimes had to be sent home because he had peed himself.  He was almost always shunned and frequently ridiculed by the other children. Today, he was in the humiliating position of having to be refused by each girl in the class.  I watched him go from girl to girl, making the awkward request as instructed.  When Nancy Bloomsbury held her nose and shook her head, I saw that Tommy was about to cry.  When tommy asked me to dance, I said ‘yes’ and I learned how to waltz. 

For the rest of the day, I was tormented by the knowledge that I had committed the sin of dancing.  I had been taught to say “Get thee behind me, Satan” whenever I was tempted to sin, but I had failed to resist this temptation.  I prayed for forgiveness, but that did not make me feel better. I was a sinner.

At home that evening, my mother noticed that I was troubled, and I told her about what I had done.  My mother’s words, I committed to memory: “Marsha, God knows your heart.  God knows when you act out of love.”  These may have been the most important words my mother ever said to me.  They may have protected me from the unhealthy theology of my childhood church which was much more focused on sin than on love.  It turns out, acting out of love is a much higher bar than resisting the temptation to dance.  And it was not always comforting to believe that God knew my heart, but this was a better God than the one I was learning about in Sunday School.  I held on to this throughout my childhood.

I would be delighted to learn about memories that you have of childhood revelations, or puzzlements.  Do you remember an early moral dilemma?  When you first contemplated infinity?  When you first recognized the pervasiveness of uncertainty?  Click on ‘comment’ to share these memories, and I will share similar or contrasting thoughts expressed by elementary school children from Memphis, Orlando, and Shenzhen, China.