June 21, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
Come dance with me, you God… is a narcissistic ecstasy in a universe of privilege among those who have the time and money to engorge themselves with god-shots and personal enlightenment. But there is a dance floor in between these two extremes. Somewhere between No God and My God, and on a plane between Pure Reason and Pure Self-indulgence, we can dance with the holy.
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Trinity @ 7 Anniversary Reflection
June 20, 2010 @ 7:00pm
by Cam Miller
Dancing with the holy…
To junkies of the spiritual high,
dancing with God is an alluring,
even titillating notion.
For some people,
getting off on God is a regular quest:
endless retreats,
the next great book,
jumping into the most promising new thing.
The promise of dancing with God
would be just too good to be true.
To other people it is absurd.
To many, maybe most people,
the notion of dancing with God,
even as poetry,
it just so ridiculous that it demands ridicule.
For many people, God, danced with or not,
is a fanciful legend buried in the human past of ignorance and wishful thinking.
God, even if one could be proven and verified,
would be as impossible to boogie with as the sun.
Come dance with me, you God…
is just not happening in a world of
multiple mp3’s, sound-surround home theaters
and readily accessible ice cream.
Here’s the thing:
Our imaginations are leaden,
and it gives us heavy feet.
We are weighed down
in body, mind and spirit
by inherited notions of God and Not-God,
that are themselves
vestiges of dead and dying generations.
We need to free ourselves from this slagheap of ideas
trapping us into their heaviness and gravity.
Think about it.
The European religions that we inherited
are based upon a God atop a mechanistic universe.
God, in the old European-based religions,
which also reflect the Age of Reason,
is a cosmic precision clock-maker,
that has engineered a tidy universe
that is in effect, a perpetual machine.
The gears and pulleys and levers
all click into place as designed,
and God becomes the night watchman
instead of a hands-on Creator.
Even the music of the old European religions
is the unspeakably gorgeous orchestrations
of Bach and Beethoven,
their music itself a testament to precision and order.
Which, by the way, is why we use jazz at Trinity@7 –
as if to say, God is a jazz musician
improvising across Time
not an engineer.
Come dance with me, you God…
seems like a psychotic plea
when heard within a universe of mechanistic order
and reason
that does not require a hands-on God.
Come dance with me, you God…
is a delusional rant
in a universe held together
by the super glue of Natural Law and Laws of Science.
Come dance with me, you God…
is a renegade heresy
in a universe regulated by the gate-keepers of religion
that get to say who has God and who does not.
Come dance with me, you God…
on the other side of the spectrum,
is license to kill for the New Age of
consumeristic spirituality,
in which the individual is an open mouth
and a black hole
with endless capacity for consumption.
Come dance with me, you God…
is a narcissistic ecstasy
in a universe of privilege among those who
have the time and money to engorge themselves
with god-shots and personal enlightenment.
But there is a dance floor
in between these two extremes.
Somewhere between
No God and My God,
and on a plane between
Pure Reason and Pure Self-indulgence,
we can
dance with the holy.
There is a vast, unregulated field
in which the generations of human experience
have romped and played,
and it holds no hard boundaries between religions.
It is what many have called mysticism:
an encounter-centered spirituality,
that dances upon one eternal truth –
we cannot know God.
We can dance with God
but we cannot know God.
Every religion has its mystics,
and at Trinity@7
we have a cornucopia of them:
Hildegard of Bigen,
Julian of Norwich,
Rumi,
Hafiz,
Tagore,
Rabia of Basra
Milrapa
Tich Nat Han
Ryokan
and the Hebrew poets: Isaiah and Micah.
We’ve read together 1316 poets and mystics
over the past seven years of Sunday evenings.
And what the mystics know,
and what the mystics tell us,
is that we can encounter God
but we cannot know God.
They tell us
that God is not a partisan of any one religion
and moves through every religion.
They tells us
that God is a Lover of Souls
in search of souls that desire to be Lovers in return.
Come dance with me, you God
is an invitation to this unknowable God
to allow us to encounter it.
Come dance with me, you God
is an invitation to encounter God
with the mind,
or the body,
or the imagination,
or the intuition,
or the sacraments of Nature…
There are so many portals
through which to encounter the holy;
never just one,
never just one way,
never just one time.
So…we have to perform a dance
in order to dance with God.
It is the dance between the parts of ourselves
that insist upon proof of God
before investing too much of the self;
and that other parts,
that is on a needy self-centered quest
to get a rush
or slake a thirst
or stuff a hungry emptiness.
Those parts will always be with us,
but they cannot
lead the dance
if we want
to dance with God.
Neither pure reason nor pure indulgence can lead.
So as we light candles tonight,
I invite us to open our minds,
to open our imagination,
to open ourselves
and invite God to dance with us –
this night, in the days ahead,
whenever and wherever
God chooses to take us by the hand
and give us a twirl.
Come dance with us, you God.
