I love this quote from Thomas Merton about all of us being part of God's dance! I can let go of trying to understand it all and just get carried along by the Dancer and enjoy the Dance! Life is so precious, so beautiful..something to treasure and savor, not analyze and categorize. Life is meant to be lived, a Gift is meant to be enjoyed, a Dance is meant to be danced! I love the carefree abandon of the Grace Dance we are all caught up in, whether we are aware of it fully or not..yet when the light of Grace breaks like dawn upon our hearts, how wonderful to let go of our works and thoughts and struggles and just watch ourselves flow with the Dancer in HIs beautiful Dance! It's always so playful and light with Him, all earthbound heaviness somehow rising in the lilting buoyant arms of the Dancer as He holds us, swings us high, laughs with great laughter like bells ringing, and twirls us around in LOVE!
Here is Merton's wonderful quote to savor:
"What is serious to men is often very
trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as "play"
is perhaps what he Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord
plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could
let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it
all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious,
cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that
game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by
chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of
junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are
really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the
Japanese poet Bashō we hear an
old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the
awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the
emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide
a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
"For the world and time are the dance
of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a
wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of
life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex
purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity
and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours
can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance
which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in
the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to
or not.
"Yet the fact remains that we are
invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the
winds and join in the general dance."
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation