A Dance of Love and Beauty

Dear Friend,

Great images in this week’s readings: falling rain, falling snow, scattered seed, and to top it all off, all creation groaning in labor pains! Having just come from morning prayer with my brothers, I’d add another image, a song we sang together:  

“I danced in the morning when the world was begun, and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun, and I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth, at Bethlehem I had my birth.” 

The rain and the snow and seed falling to the ground speak to me of the Lord of the Dance, Jesus Christ, who came to earth, igniting a new creation to be born fully from the old. A new labor of love has begun, and as Paul writes, “we also groan within ourselves, as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” Stretching and groaning, we learn the dance!

Eugene Patterson writes that the scribes and the Pharisees were those with whom Jesus had most of his disagreements. “They had extensive knowledge of the scriptures,” he writes, “but they heard the voice of God not at all.” As my brothers and I sang this morning: “I danced for the scribes and the Pharisees, but they would not dance, they would not follow me.”

God’s word in scripture, writes Patterson, is meant not “to inform us about God, but to involve us in God.” Jesus Christ embodies a dance of love and beauty that requires loving attention - not just to look, but to see. “Blessed are your eyes, because they see and your ears because they hear.” It is the song of all creation we hear in the psalm’s own poetry: “The fields are garmented with flocks…They shout and sing for joy." Shall we dance?

Gratefully,

Father Dan ofm