Dancing and Drinking the Mosel


What brilliant hosts the people of Winningen are! Not only did they take Kemp's Men into their homes and hearts but into their cellars as well!

We danced, drank and chatted the festival through - renewing old friendships and making new ones too! Among them Romanetz a Ukrainian Dance group from Canada, a group from Treviso in Italy and others from Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Benin, Columbia, Switzerland and dozens from around Germany.

What was it about? I think the words of the Evangelische Kirche's minister at an ecumenical service on Sunday had it about right - God plays the music of life and we all respond to it one way or another - sometimes just tapping a foot, at at othertimes "putting your whole self in!"

After the service there was impromptu dancing on the green outside - the Treviso musicians appeared to be playing "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes." What asked my friend is the significance of that?

Here is my considered response - She is God who is coming at the end of the world to judge all flesh! It appears to me the community that the people of Winningen created for us for the festival was an approximation of the New Jerusalem (see the last chapters of the book Revelations)

When, on the last night of the festival, I saw the Rev'd Canon Phillip McFadyen dancing with the Weinhexe I was reminded of William Blake's "Little Vagabond"


And God, like a father, rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as He,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the barrel,
But kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.

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