Is there anything better for the spirit than to take off from work and domestic chores on a day when the sky is flawlessly blue, the sun agreeably hot, and the greenery lush after the previous day’s heavy rain? That’s what my wife and I did last Saturday, much to our pleasure and inner profit.
We had plenty of time to wander around the spacious grounds of the retreat house, Campion Center in Weston, Massachusetts and luxuriate in the splendor of our surroundings. Inside, we could draw inspiration from talks given by Father William Barry, the Jesuit priest who led the day of recollection in which we were taking part.
“What does God want for us?” That was the question he posed for our prayer and reflection, a question that anchored the day. The responses that he suggested were calculated to stir in us a deeper sense of God’s creative action in our lives.
His ultimate answer? That we dance. God invites each of us to enter into the di-vine dance of His own life. God wants us to live consciously this way and thus find our deepest happiness.
As a spiritual director in the Catholic tradition, Father Barry places the dance in the three-in-oneness of God. In this faith, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share a dynamic inner life. The three persons interact constantly with one another in sublime love.
It was a vision of this Trinity of divine persons that St. Ignatius Loyola saw and described as three notes in one musical chord.
So, in a spiritual sense, God invites us to become his whirling dervishes, dancers caught up in intimacy with Him. This fits with the vision of a universe in motion, of a world where everything is alive with the power of God’s creative force.
Father Barry cited the experience described by the writer Frederick Buechner when the latter went with his family to visit Sea World in Orlando. In his book, The Longing for Home, Buechner uses the same central image of dance to describe what was for him an ecstatic experience.
“What with the dazzle of the sky and sun, the beautiful young people on the plat-form, the soft southern air, and the crowds all around us watching the performance with a delight matched only by what seemed the delight of the performing whales, it was as if the whole creation – – men and women and beasts and sun and water and earth and sky and, for all I know, God himself – – was caught up in one great, jubilant, dance of unimaginable beauty.”
Though without the poetic gifts of Buechner, I too felt transported by a larger vision on our day of spiritual renewal. Since my college years, I have always loved the line written by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”
I experienced that freshness for myself while watching a butterfly flutter about the broad lawn that I was crossing. Was not this creature’s flight a kind of dance too?
This creature, all splendid with yellow wings speckled with black, landed in the grass at my feet and spent time burrowing into the roots, flapping those wings and appearing to draw out nourishment.
This butterfly may have been one of the Monarchs whose flying feats scientists have recently tracked in detail. They migrate each year thousands of miles from this region and elsewhere to Mexico, a marvelous feat of navigation and perhaps another opportunity for dance.
The butterfly that I observed on this day provided me with a glimpse of “the peaceable kingdom” where all God’s creatures will one day live in harmonious dance. That creature’s lightness of touch seemed spiritually connected with my own ideal of living in the moment instead of worrying about what is to come.
Later, Father Barry suggested that what God wants and what we want are identical. At least when we look deeply into our own hearts we will recognize there the desire for God. As our director said, “The deepest desire of the human heart is what God wants.”
That deepest desire finds expression in Psalm 42: “As the deer longs for the flow-ing streams, so my soul longs for you.”
Richard Griffin