Chuck Moreau Memorial (edited)

October 20, 2021

Brazilian Room, Tilden Park, Berkeley

Rev. Douglas Olds

 Grief is a river in winter, its swollen-faced cataracts blocked by direct and ancillary cares recruited into whole-world troubles. Jagged ice floes descending on grief's rock-braided winter current pierce our brow and temple by morning. Black, they harden by evening into numbing and hardscrabble slate onto which no words can be scribbled to express what we might feel were we able—which we are not--to make comprehensible our stifled intentions to erupt with pregnant lamentation and hollow wailing.

Yet let us raise our head and look: on the banks are soft and silent pillows of snow--God has passed this way (Psalm 147:16; 68:14; Proverbs 25:13; Isaiah 1:18), deeply abides, and offers us rest in knowing that Spring will surely come. When we will thrive in the lee of the whispering Spirit that tells us that we are friends of the Lord of Life and the Living. 

 

Grace and peace to you. 

I am honored by Ann’s invitation to speak this afternoon. I was privileged to officiate the wedding of Chuck and Ann in 2012. Some of you were at that ceremony, and now we have come to a moment that celebrates Chuck’s life and legacy.  

At the wedding, I termed Chuck “the ambassador of cajun/zydeco.” Today, I’m changing that to Chuck was the Apostle of Bay Area Two-Steppin.’ In my wedding address, I delivered a message about how dance functioned to bring Chuck and Ann together in love. Today, I want to direct my message to how Chuck served to create community among dancers. 

Dance shakes free isolation and vanity and serves the transcendental of love.  Dance is ecstatic, which means to “stand outside” ourselves, opposes detachment and stoic imperturbability.  Dance’s ecstasies “unstick” us of ourselves; we make ourselves available to others.  Dance liberates the body to allow the tides of spirit to wash both inward and outward, creating wholeness –and so dance is spiritual and keeps both body and soul healthy.  

You all know this. I’m preaching to the choir here. 

But I will extend this thought with the claim that dance reveals goodness in addition to promoting health.  

Chuck by all accounts was a good man.  

I’ve been contemplating how space becomes place. Dance turns space into a place.   

           A place is recognized in the spirit that reigns in that space.  Chuck was a window to the goodness he brought to isolating spaces to make them places that reflected and spread hospitality, courtesy, patience—especially with beginners--and courage. Chuck’s spirit created community and made our spaces into places of what the ancient Israelites called shalom—where body and soul are made whole by their tying together in the spirit of God’s excellence.  

Chuck’s gentle conduct humanized our dances and helped form a healthy community.  Chuck was, to use an unfortunately outdated word, chivalrous: he noticed the presence of a person where that person could be missed, which is an act of insight and kindness. Chuck humanized what could have been a social desert by hospitality, welcome, introductions, potlucks, and modest courtesy. 

I was asked what meaning could be given to the recent spate of dancer deaths.  I was unsure how to answer, but I’ve been thinking that sometimes a cluster of deaths like the dance community has experienced may facultatively (not intentionally) ensure that we do not forget that death always looms, and that the time for stepping outside our lives is ever present to meditate on the Absolute things—God, life, love, and meaning.  What have we made of our life, and what account of it will we give to our Creator. 

        Consider this poem from T.S. Eliot that I’ve changed a bit for this occasion: 

Old men ought to be [dancers] 

Here and there does not matter 

We must be still-- and still moving-- Into another intensity 

For further union, a deeper communion… 

In [our] end is [our] beginning. 

At its most spirited, dance is the opposite of suffering.  But both, paradoxically, involve tight embraces. One CAN and should remember that both dance and suffering are relational.  By the mutually charismatic embrace of tight companioning, grief jagged and isolating can be transformed into mourning’s loving and tear-soaked recollection like lump coal a diamond. Let us consider our relationships and dancing in this way, transforming the lump coal of our estrangement and isolation into the diamonds of companionship. 

Let us consider both our grief and our dance in this way of tight, companioning embrace, recalling Chuck in our embrace as one of Creation’s gems. 

          “Dance like nobody is watching,” we are repeatedly told. I would instead say, Dance because God is watching.  Today, let’s dance and commune together like Chuck is also watching.  May it be so for you and me.

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You should never despair when you lose something, a person or a joy or happiness; everything comes back even more glorious. What must fall, falls; what belongs to us stays with us, because everything goes according to laws that are greater than our understanding and with which we only seem to contradict. You have to live within yourself and think about all life, all its millions of possibilities, widows and futures, against which there is nothing past or lost.

~Rainer Maria Rilke