About the Artist and the Work: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569) lived his forty-four remarkable years in the midst of the Protestant Reformation, which divided the Netherlands into Catholic and Protestant provinces and put practicing artists into a political arena where the authority of the Catholic hierarchy to control the subjects and styles of art was being challenged on many fronts. Though he drew, carved, and engraved, Bruegel’s main achievement lay in his elaborate paintings of peasant life, often against wide landscape backgrounds. At times he dressed up as a peasant and attended peasant weddings to give himself a closer look and deeper feel for peasant life. The earthy, intimate representations of that life, as in The Wedding Dance (1566), mingle pathos and comedy and bespeak a lively sympathy for his subjects. Some of his paintings offered undisguised social protest, satirizing the religious factions around him. Many of his paintings illustrated biblical proverbs or precepts. All show the influence of a biblical sensibility focused on community life in which people in all conditions and of all ages help one another in their miseries and join with one another in celebration.

 

Bruegel’s images of village life in sixteenth-century Holland may seem quaint, antique, and remote, but they speak eloquently of what it means to live well and flourish in a vulnerable, uncertain world. The Wedding Dance depicts a crowded village street where, it seems, a whole community has gathered to celebrate.

Weddings change things for everyone: Families are reorganized, property is redistributed, and the geography of old intimacies and friendships is remapped as the community makes space for a new household. Though wedding celebrations are among the most festive in our shared life, explicit moments of hope and happiness, they are also shadowed with losses remembered and impending, with awareness of fleeting time and mortality, and with sharpened loneliness for the solitary. Bruegel recognizes this ambiguous character of human celebration in figures like that of the orange-shirted watcher who stands to the right of the dancers, hands clasped behind him, gazing at a kissing couple, or the observer in black who stands in the left foreground watching from the shadows half-turned away.

These figures, and others who seem preoccupied, separate, slightly disengaged—a cluster of men doing business, older women standing at the margins—are not tragic, but simply poignant. The community enfolds them; food and drink are available, the bagpiper pipes for everyone, and even the close proximity of one person’s celebration to another’s pensive solitude bespeaks inclusion. All are welcome, all have a place, and the place of each is not fixed, but open to further invitation and inspiration as the day goes on. A radical and cheerful egalitarianism reigns: Even the bride and groom are not particularly distinguishable. Their joy gives everyone occasion to participate in something bigger than any private life event.

How different such a spirit is from the messages purveyed by those in the “wedding industry”: This is your day. It’s a time to make your romantic dream come true. If you spend enough money, you can orchestrate an occasion to be documented and revisited for the rest of your life. It’s all about you. The commodification of weddings and other significant moments in the life of family and community diminishes something of the mystery that draws people together into a beloved community where, as Wendell Berry has put it, they see one another through tragedy into celebration and joy. They bear witness. They pool their memories and their casseroles and share the task of watching out for children. Some dance, some tell stories, and, inevitably, some gossip. In a healthy community, even the gossip may serve a purpose: People are aware of each other, know one another’s stories and tell them. That’s not all bad.

Flourishing, thriving, living abundantly can’t happen alone. We were made for each other. In painting after painting Bruegel testifies to this fundamental truth. The viewer of The Wedding Dance is situated just outside and slightly above the sight line of the inhabitants, surveying the scene, as it were. From our (the viewer’s) vantage point, we see what the village people don’t: a scene, a pattern, a composition, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The bright reds and whites of clothing, the yellow of the roadway, and the patches of darkness unite the figures into an image of gaiety and mutual trust that has little to do with individuation or portraiture. These are common people participating in a common life on common ground.

Ecologist Garrett Hardin coined the widely used phrase “the tragedy of the commons,” which refers to a theory that when individuals pursue self-interest, however “enlightened,” they tend to behave in ways that threaten the whole group’s long-term best interests. The “commons” includes all we depend on for life: water sources, soil, air, animals, wilderness, words. Commodification erodes our sense of accountability to each other—a kind of accountability that was much easier to imagine and sustain when the scale of shared life was smaller. The climate of economic competition, the anonymity and apparent independence of atomized urban life can easily erode the sense that “everybody does better when everybody does better.”

Sermons and writings about the kingdom of heaven from every corner of Christian tradition emphasize the countercultural message that there is no competition there. That when we share we foreshadow the life we are ultimately invited to and made for. That sun, rain, and manna are indiscriminate, prodigal, abundant, and out of our control. That a few loaves and fishes can be enough. Sharing is a core value in the Gospels, and accumulation tragic folly. Sharing prepares us for a life that is repeatedly imaged as a wedding feast. From the miracle at Cana to the parables of the kingdom of heaven the wedding is foregrounded as an invitation to imagine what heavenly life will be about—union and unity, shared food, drink, stories, leisure, acceptance without judgment, empathy, compassion, and general good will. Dance belongs to that vision. Dance draws us into a timeless moment, having no object but the beauty and freedom and delight of movement, using our bodies in the service of beauty, tapping into what Dylan Thomas so memorably called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” When people synchronize their movements in couples or circles or lines, they realize at a physical, visceral level what it is to be a living part of a living whole that includes us and enlivens us and of which we are members.

We are members of one body, Paul tells us, different in our gifts and necessary to one another. Without that willing alteration of our own rhythms, habits, and intentions, without the redirection of gaze and rebalancing of the body it requires, without the music some provide and the teaching of elders and the “still point in the turning world” that organizes galaxies and atoms and the bodies we know as our own and ourselves there would be no dance. And as T. S. Eliot reminds us, “There is only the dance.” We’re in it. None of us has a definitive view of it—none but the divine witness who sees and smiles and calls it good when we enter into the harmonies of earth and heaven that faith calls us to. When we entrust ourselves to one another and to God, we know ourselves to be held, accompanied, and loved, and so are free as children to frolic in the village square.

Poignancy is an unmistakable dimension of Bruegel’s work. Suffering is always suggested, if not depicted, in the bodies of those who labor and in those who endure infirmity or old age, and there are shadows that remind us of the earthbound, time-bound character of earthly celebration. The moments when heaven is foreshadowed remind us with a particular sharpness that we don’t yet inhabit that dimension. There is waiting to do and loss to endure and danger to face on the way. Though “God be with us when we know it not,” we are pilgrims on an arduous way where even the next step on the path is not always clearly demarcated.

So we dance. We learn steps we can take with confidence and return to for consolation. We take them together and teach them to our children. In some churches we gather around the communion table to dance our praise in a simple step even the youngest can follow. In some parks, the beautiful moves of people practicing Tai Chi or Qi Gong give onlookers pause and perhaps a moment of longing for what their lovely movements effect. Or we visit museums like the one in Detroit that houses Bruegel’s The Wedding Dance and stand and gaze and remember something fleeting from deepest childhood—a hope built into the body that darkness has not and cannot overcome.

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01.  The Wedding Dance (Pieter Bruegel the Elder)

by Marilyn McEntyre

 

Children who once played games in the village square,
dance now in a darker world. Some still watch
their steps like good children at their tasks.
Others drink from the cask, steal kisses, play at old seductions,
expecting less, knowing better what revelry may cost.
Two watch from the margins. One pleased, one sad, they listen
to the piper’s drone as if it played for them. Their neighbors,
lustful, gluttonous and lost in cheer claim all the grace
the day affords to join this man and woman in whom
their hope is once again renewed. Bride and groom
dance in their midst. They lift up their hands. They lift
their eyes beyond the crowd, paying solemn heed
to a great command “Therefore choose life.” Joyful in the face
of all this visible mortality, they call down blessing once again
into this fallen world.