I’m surprised that, in all my reading about liturgy in _Adoremus_, _Crisis_, etc., I have never come across this before.
I’ve read articles about inclusive language, about how songs where we sing the lines of God (“Here I Am Lord”, “I am the Bread of Life,” “Blest are They,” etc.) confuse the roles of God and us, and can be seen as promoting “New Age” (really Gnostic) beliefs about people becoming God.
I’ve seen articles about tastelessness, improper clarity on the Eucharist, etc. Articles on the alleged homosexuality of ex-priest Dan Schutte or the fact that Marty Haugen isn’t even Catholic and is hostile to certain moral teachings of the Church.
But I have *never* seen an article talking about the real ideology behind “I Danced in the Morning.”
It turns out that the “Lord of the Dance” is a Hindu God, Nataraja. The article I cited the other day on the New Age talks about Fr. Bede Griffiths, OSB. I was wondering why I knew the name: he was a former student and close friend of C. S. Lewis.
Griffiths was a Benedictine who eventually adopted an almost totally Hindu style of religion and monastic life, one of the founders of the movement that has infected Catholicism with Hindu beliefs.
According to Dr. John Shea, in “The Church and the New Age Movement”:
Siva Nataraja, the Cosmic Dancer, has become for many of different
backgrounds, the symbol of Creative Energy. “The Supreme Intelligence dances in
the soul… for the purpose of removing our sin” (Unmai Vilakkam – Tamil text).
The late Father Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., has stated that Christians must see
Nataraja as the symbol of the risen Christ. The danger in his Neo-Hindu
Christianity has been described as “a superficial attempt to give Hindu concepts
Christian meaning and Christian concepts Hindu meaning. The result is a system
which is neither truly Hindu nor Christian.”
Footnote: Robert Fastiggi (Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St.
Edward’s University, Austin, TX), and Jose Periera, Crisis, 1814, ½
N. Street NW, Washington, D.C.
Read the above-linked Wikipedia article and then consider the lyrics to “I
Danced in the Morning.”
It is Nataraja Shiva, not Jesus Christ, who allegedly “Danced in the morning when the world was begun”.
If someone wrote a song where “Jesus” sang something like, “I am the Sun, and I rise in my chairiot in the morning!”–wouldn’t we see the obvious reference to Apollo?
I mean, it’s one thing to say that pagan deities prefigure Christ, to help point people to the True God.
It’s one thing to say we can “plunder the Egyptians” and use the pagan myths for allegorical purposes.
And there’s nothing wrong with some poetic language (though the primary purposes of hymnody should be prayer and catechesis, and poetic license should not impede those functions).
But when one sees the intentional movement of some Catholics to try and integrate Catholicism with Hinduism or Buddhism, and then we see that a hymn is based as much on Hindu “scriptures” as on the Bible, that ought to raise a serious red flag.
The Lewis Crusade 