How blessed is Kabir, that amidst this great joy
he sings within his own vessel.
It is the music of the meeting of soul
with soul;
It is the music of the forgetting of
sorrows;
It is the music that transcends all coming
in and all going forth.
Teresa of Avila, a great mystic of the
Catholic Christian tradition, testifies to the abiding joy and
strength she has received through union of soul with the
Beloved:
She lives not for herself, but lives
To serve the Lord of Love in all,
And swims across the sea of life
Breasting its rough waves joyfully.
For those who have surrendered themselves
to the mystery, life is transformed and God becomes “Lord of the
dance.” In such
persons there may occur an awakening that is an inner attuning
to the rhythms of the cosmos and the spiritual life uniquely
lived.
Adrian van Kaam spoke of this phenomenon in the spiritual
life as a “dance of formation”:
Human life, like a river, must flow in
consonance with the dance
of formation in space, time, and history.
This forming mystery manifests itself in the resistances
of everyday life that invite us to rise up in nobility and
strength.(Formative
Spirituality, Volume III, p.53)
The theme is admirably presented in a
startlingly evocative poem of Madeleine Delbrêl, a twentieth
century French woman who left an indelible mark on the Church of
her time.
Two essays on
this website fill out relevant aspects of her biography and
spirituality. The
dance in this case is audaciously related to the foundational
disposition of obedience.
For Delbrêl, who came to faith by choice and conviction,
obedience to God’s will expressed the precise way in which the
believer is called to respond to God’s invitation to the dance.
Obedience is the effective means of learning to flow with
ordinary reality and bearing with life’s rough spots: Dancing
with God we discover our rhythm, we learn to move “with” rather
than away from or against the daily resistances we encounter in
our daily field of formation.
With God as the ever-present Lord of the dance, we learn
the steps required to dance appropriately with each unique
person, situation and event in life.
For the interested English reader an unofficial
translation of Delbrêl’s poem “Le bal de l’obeisance” (M.
Delbrêl, 1966) follows:
The Dance of Obedience
by Madeleine Delbrêl
We played on the flute
and you did not dance.
It’s the 14th of
July.
Everyone is going
dancing.
Everywhere, for
months, everyone is dancing.
The more we are
dying, the more we dance.
Waves of war, surges
of dance.
Truly there is much
noise.
The serious people
are in bed.
The religious recite
matins of saint Henri, king.
And I think
Of the other king,
Of King David who
danced before the Ark.
For if there are
many holy ones who do not like to dance,
There were many who
had to dance,
So happy were they
to be alive:
St.Teresa with her
castanets,
St. John of the
Cross with the Infant Jesus in his arms,
And St. Francis,
before the pope.
If we were happy
about you, Lord,
We could not resist
This need to dance
which unfurls in the world,
And we would come to
guess
Which dance it
pleases you to have us dance
In espousing the
ways of your Providence.
For I think you have
had perhaps enough
Of people who,
always, talk of serving you with the airs of Captains,
Of knowing you with
the airs of professors,
Of overtaking you by
the rules of sports.
Of loving you as we
love ourselves in an old relationship.
One day when you
desired a bit of something else,
You created St.
Francis,
And you had made
your juggler.
For us to be allowed
to invent
To be joyous people
who dance their lives with you.
To be a good dancer,
with you as elsewhere, one must
Not know where that
leads.
One must follow,
To be cheerful,
To be light,
And above all not to
be rigid.
One must not ask for
explanations
On the steps you
like to make.
One must be like an
extension,
Agile and alive
before you,
And to receive from
you the rhythmic transmission of the orchestra.
One must not want at
any cost to advance,
But to accept to
turn, to be going beside.
One must know how to
stop and to slide instead of walking.
And that would only
be imbecilic steps
If the music did not
produce harmony.
But we forget the
music of your spirit
And we make of our
live a gymnastic exercise;
We forget that, in
your arms, life dances,
That your Holy Will
Is inconceivable
fantasy,
And that there is
monotony and boredom
Only for the aged
souls
Who are wallflowers
In the joyous dance
of your love.
Lord, come, invite
us.
We are ready to
dance this errand for you,
These accounts, the
dinner to prepare, this evening watch where one will have
Rest.
We are ready to
dance for you the dance of work,
The one of heat,
later the one of cold.
If certain tunes are
frequent and minor, we will not tell you
That they are sad;
If others cut our
breath a bit, we will not tell you
That they are put us
out of breath.
And if people knock
us about, we shall take it laughing,
Knowing well that
this always happens with dancing.
Lord, teach us the
place
That, in this
eternal romance
Starting between you
and us,
Controls the
singular dance of our obedience.
Reveal to us the
grand orchestra of your designs,
Where that which you
permit
Casts strange notes
Within the serenity
that you want.
Teach us to don each
day
Our human condition
As a ball dance
robe, which will make us beloved of you
All of its details
like indispensable jewels.
Make us to live our
lives,
Not like a chess
game where all is calculated,
Not like a match
where everything is difficult,
Not like a theorem
that cracks the skull,
But as in an
unending feast where your encounter renews one,
As a ball,
As a dance,
In the arms of your
grace,
Within the universal
music of love.
Lord, come, invite
us.
Translated by Romeo J. Bonsaint, SC,PhD
December 2, 2010
Dancing
is a recurrent theme in the mystical literature of spirituality,
expressing the notion that human life is created to flow in
harmony with God’s will and purpose for our time on this earth.