the dance, day 3

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

My God and Father, Lord of the dance, allow me to see this day and this moment for what it really is—an invitation to dance the dance of life and faith with the One who made me. May I dance this day with joy and passion, knowing that there will never be another one just like it. In the name of Jesus I Pray. Amen. (JLB)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 149

Scripture for the Day: Luke 7:24-35

Reading for Reflection:

     I did not mean for all of this to happen to me.  Or any of it, for that matter.  I am still astonished by it all, and still a little afraid of it actually.

     I only started out to put a little formal devotion into my life, a kind of crash course in organized prayer.  At best, I had this vague notion of wanting to be a person whose first words in the morning were a prayer, a prayer that rose up in me as I rose up in bed.  I am not even very certain where that notion came from.  But since the day that it entered my head, nothing in my life is the same.  Everything has changed—utterly, completely, irrevocably.

     It started out harmlessly enough: my father had given me a copy of a book that he had been talking about for some months.  There was a note inside: “Your brother and sister and Mom and I have been sort of going along through this book together.  Next week we will be on week #17—Dad.”  Unbeknownst to him, I already had a copy of the book, he and I had been talking about it, and I confess that I did not even open the copy that he gave me until years later.  The note was inside the front cover and I did not see it until he had been dead for two years.  There were a lot of things to which I was not paying much attention in those days.

     It is a small book, bound in blue leather, with a gold cross stamped on the front and three silk ribbons inside.  Its pages are made of Bible paper.  The book is divided into fifty-two weeks, laid out against the liturgical calendar, with a pattern to follow for prayer and scripture and reading and meditation each day and each week.

     I cannot say exactly what motivated me to open the book on the particular March day that I finally did, how much of it was a deep sense of wanting to begin a disciplined routine of prayer and devotion, or how much of it had to do with marking my father’s passing and wanting to be near him again in some way.  It is clear now that I was being drawn slowly but steadily to a life that was more quiet, more contemplative, as I have come to know it to be called.

     The morning I came across the book, I was working in a loft studio that my father helped me to carve out of the attic space above my living room.  I sat at my writing table and looked over the rail and down into the living room at the patterns the morning sun was making on the floor below.  I looked out the window through the fields of the farm across the way to see if the neighbors’ horses were stirring yet.  Beyond the farm I could see the steeple on a small church some friends of mine attend.  I opened the book and something must have opened deep within me as well, though imperceptibly at first, even to myself.  Certainly it was with no grand plan on my part.

     “Painting cannot be taught,” said Picasso once, “it can only be found.”  I think that in many ways that is true of prayer as well.

     I do not write about prayer as one who knows the mysteries of prayer but as one, among many, who is drawn by the mystery of prayer.  I never think of myself as a theologian or a teacher.  On the days that I lead retreats, I think of myself only as the head cheerleader, and I am honored to be even that.  On the very best of my other days, I consider myself a poet.

     Sometimes I wish that I could sing or dance or paint or compose symphonies or build cathedrals to express somehow what all of this means to me.  I wish I were a priest or a robin or a child or a sunset.

     “I rage at my inability to express it all better,” wrote Monet to a friend.  “You’d have to use both hands and cover hundreds of canvases.”  A fountain pen and a blank page seem inadequate to me almost all of the time.  Yet they are the tools that have chosen me.

     Freelance copywriting and editing projects were what I did at the time to make a living.  For me, it was the writer’s equivalent of taking in laundry.  My studio was pretty much covered up with piles of paper, mountains of stuff.  I had been given a chance to ghostwrite a book, and I discovered that it was pretty hard to write a book in the same room where all the other work I was trying to do was calling out to me all the time about the deadlines to come and the money to collect.

     Frederick Buechner tells of how he wrote for years in a Sunday school classroom at a church near where his little girl went to school.  He would get up in the morning, put on a jacket and tie as though he were just like other fathers, and go off to work, dropping his daughter at school on his way.  Then he would take morning prayers with the pastor of the church and go upstairs to write until it was time for him to pick his daughter up from school and head for home.

     I looked across the field that morning and decided to give the pastor of the little church a call to see if they would let me work there.  It was astounding to me but they said yes, I would be welcome to come and write there.  It turned out that the pastor had known my father and he was kind to me because my father had been kind to him.  It was not the first time that such a thing happened to me and I do not for a moment expect that it will be the last.

     And so began the stretch of some months of rising early and doing the things that it took to help get young children to day care and preschool and so forth, and then over to the church to spend time in the sanctuary alone with the little blue book: reading from the saints and the scriptures, reciting the psalms, whispering the prayers, and scribbling in my journal.  After a while, I would go upstairs to write until it was time to go and pick up the children and head off home.

     Somewhere in that spring an ancient rhythm began to resonate within me, calling me, drawing me, compelling me to join in the general Dance. 

     I seemed then, and still seem, to have no control over my heart’s response to that rhythm.  Like the way one’s feet start tapping when someone plays a country tune, one simply cannot stop even if one tries.  My advice is that if you do not want to tap your feet, stay away from the jukebox.  If you do not want to pray, then do not go near prayer books.  Once your heart has heard the music, it is happy only when it is dancing. (Living Prayer by Robert Benson)


Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Canticle of the Sun

The heavens are telling the glory of God
And all of creation is shouting for joy
Come dance in the forest, come play in the field
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord

Closing Prayer
Lord God, draw me out on the dance floor of life this day and fill my ears and heart with the beautiful music of Your great affection. Give me such an awareness of your presence that my feet just can’t be still. Dance with me as I dance with you. Amen. (JLB)