Final notes from Chance or the Dance? Ch. 8

"...it is in the nature of union to produce fruit, or, conversely, that the fruit owes its life to a prior union. Further, he might observe that it is in the nature of that union to be ecstatic, and he might thus conclude that joy is somehow written into the sources of life. And he will undoubtedly see that there are pain and agony involved and will have to come to terms with what he can see only as an intrusion or an ambiguity--that pain is somehow bound up in the whole process of joy. ... And he will see at work over a long, long span of time the difficult notion that reward or fulfillment commonly follows rigor and renunciation and austerity... and is not available on demand."

"It will occur to him that one of the oddities of love (erotic, paternal, filial, social) is that its motion is outward and away from itself, and that it experiences this motion as joy"

"...life issues from death--that spring rises from winter, and the oak from the dead acorn, and dawn from the night, and Pheonix from the ashes.

These are old moral saws. Nothing new here. Bromides. But then there is nothing new anywhere. The business of the poet and prophet has always been to take the saws and astonish and delight us into a fresh awareness of what they mean by discovering them suddenly in this image, and in this, and this. And the rest of us may see it all either as a pointless jumble of phenomena, or as the diagram of glory--as grinding tediously toward entropy, or as dancing toward the Dance."

The Dance awaits, breathless with hope

From Chance or the Dance?

"The old myth would have seen all these phenomena as images--images of some paradox that lay at the heart of things: that freedom for a thing is that state in which it appears at its highest performance (its perfection, in other words), and that this is a state that lies on the farther side of rigor and austerity. And it would have seen all these images as suggesting not a moral servility for that unique creation man, but rather the brilliant display, under a thousand forms, of the Dance, which goes on aeon after aeon, and which waits all breathless with hope for the Man to recogize the pattern, see his place, assent to it, and join. He may or he may not; that is his option. But his freedom is the ecstatic experience of the joyous measure whose music rings from galaxy to galaxy."

The growth of the Father

I stole a few moments to think more about whether or not the Holy Spirit expands, and He jumped in to lead my thoughts.

In the post linked above, I thought about the love growing between my dearest of friends and I, and how the Spirit seems to be making Himself known more and more obviously to us through that friendship.

If the Spirit is (as Augustine claims) the love between the Father and the Son, can it also proceed from the love of us for God and for each other? Could He expand and increase through that love?

When conveying this question to my BP, he reminded me that the Spirit is also a person, and so I brought this into my pondering.

And it occured to me that persons grow.

Bodies grow, and Jesus has a body which grew (and is growing?). We are the body of Christ, and the body and it's members grow.

And love grows.

This all leads me to think that the Spirit Himself can and does grow, and one of the ways He does so is through our love of eachother and for the Father.

But then I wondered, if the Son and the Spirit both grow, does the Father as well?

This one was harder.

He must grow, because the Trinity is one nature. If one grows, all must grow.

And yet He is unchangeing. Immutable.

It is relatively easy to contemplate the Son's growth. And we understand the way that love grows, and can apply that to the Spirit. But how is the Father's growth manifested?

How is One who is unchangeable changing?

It stumped me for a minute, until He stepped in.

And then it occurred to me; perhaps the Father's growth is not in His essence but in His production.

Perhaps it is in the very expansion of the cosmos.

Perhaps the increase of our love feeds the very force of the Father's creative power, and out shoots matter and energy and liturgy and ritual and order and beauty and passion and endurance and hot, molten, burning, unconquerable love.

And so the stars and the planets dance, and the bees and the ants dance, and the church and its liturgy dance, and we dance.

We dance.

We dance.

Retreat image #2: Rainbow connection

God sent me another image while praying for someone at the retreat. I initially resisted passing it on because it was so...

So...

Twee.

You see, I pictured her dancing on a hilltop, in hippie garb (Let the Sunshine In!) and there were rainbows flowing out from her head.

Yep. Rainbows.

I continued to pray, despite wondering why I was picturing something so My Little Pony.

But the image wouldn't go away so I gave in and told her about it, feeling ridiculous the whole time.

As the prayer continued, she mentioned that as a teenager she had prayed to be a light to her friends. She loved God and wanted Him to shine through her.

When I heard this, I nearly wept with wonder, because the rainbow image clicked.

He has made her to be a prism. To take in His light and refract it into a brilliant spectrum of visible color.

She was made to be like Mary, magnifying the Lord.

I'll never dismiss one of His images again, no matter how silly.

Dance of veils

I don't tend to be a visual person, but it seems that God is speaking to me visually more often, particularly when praying for others.

During the retreat I prayed with a tender soul who our Lord has been wooing. She was tormented because she thought she couldn't hear His voice.

She loves to dance, and the image that He sent me for her was that she was dressed like a harem girl in a room hung with layer after layer of veils.

Curtains of filmy white.

She danced her way in joy, weaving in and through them, back and forth, going deeper and deeper in.

He is behind all the veils, waiting for her, smiling as He waits.

He does not hide.

He merely waits behind the veil and watches us dance.

C.S. Lewis on valued things

The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.

-- C. S. Lewis

The bitter and the sweet

I'm looking back on a week that has been both bitter and sweet, and thinking about the Passover Seder. Liturgy and ritual are so very satisfying for entering into the richness of God's plan for us.

In this Seder we ceremonially partake of Maror, the bitter herbs which symbolize the bitterness of slavery. When done right (by my book,) the bright sharpness of horseradish makes your eyes water and your nose run. No mild, dull ache for me, but a sudden harsh slap of reality, the pain of which lingers on the tongue.

Later in the meal we dip the matzo in Charoset, a sweet mixture of apples, nuts, and cinnamon.

Still later, we eat matzo with both horseradish -and- Charoset, mixing the bitter and the sweet.

That has been my week; the sharp bite of reality softened by gentle tastes of sweetness. The two co-mingling.

Actually, it's been the tenor of the last few years, the bitter and the sweet dancing in and out, taking turns, intermingling, becoming harder and harder to separate.

Lord, thank you for the sweetness. Thank you for the bitterness. Thank you for the dance.

On dancing before the Lord with abandon

In yesterday's musical worship at mass I thought about David's abandoned dance before God, contrasted with my own reserved participation in the act of singing as praying twice.

I love to dance. What a joy it would be to enter into whole-body worship of Him who is song itself. But it's hard to picture entering into the sensuality of dance amidst the congregation, those people who know me but don't -know- me.

My dance would be lovemaking from a distance. My dance would be the enchanted swaying of a charmed snake. My dance would be a cry for union.

My dance would make them uncomfortable and suspicious.

So once again I realize that I am both like and unlike my namesake. Like him, I long to dance with abandon before my Lord. But unlike him, I refrain because of the reaction of those who would witness it.

At Jacob's Well

This is the most beautiful thing I've read in a very long time. Needless to say, it comforts me.

At Jacob's Well

Here's what I want to know about the woman
carrying her water-jar to Jacob's well
outside the town of Sychar, in Samaria:
what charms, what freshness bubbled up
from which corner of her heart, and made her the oasis
that she was? Five husbands and a lover
come one by one to slake their thirst in her,
and still some water-truce holds in Sychar, protects
this frank green spring from all polluting shame;
and now another thirsty man, this foreigner,
sits asking, and again her charms bubble up
like the water, like her questions. Could that be
what enchants them all, her way of asking
straight to the heart of things? And did she know,
before he spoke, how long her heart had thirsted
to be answered the same way? Hear the dance
of their talk, these strangers, as they sit together
on the path to Jacob's well, speak in circles
around the deep water: thirst and drinking,
husbands and lovers, mountain and temple,
Spirit and truth--askings and answers
bowing in, leaning back, swayed and spun
to the beat of two hidden drums. Here's what
I wonder about the woman, dancing back now
to the village, her water-jar left behind
for him to drink from: did she notice
what the disciples half-saw, how deep he had drunk
from their talk, from their dance? See the gleam
in his dark eyes, like sunlight sparking deep
on well-water; see his toes tap inside dusty sandals
in time to the dancer's steps; now see him rise
and laugh, shake his head, rinsed by her charms,
sated by her questions, enchanted by her thirsty
generous heart, a vessel after his own heart,
a dancer who matches his own steps in the dance
of ask and answer, of Spirit courting soul.

--Elizabeth A. Nelson