O love that fires the sun keep me burning.
~ Bruce Cockburn
The man, bruised and filthy, chained by his feet and wrists to the wall, smiled to himself. Seeing this, the guard barked, “What are you smiling at?”
The prisoner said softly, “You can shackle me. You can try to chain up the entire earth. But you can never stop the dance.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
We could do far worse than to rise each morning with the words of St. John of the Cross on our lips: “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.”
The fact that love has been so saccharinized in our culture, so cheapened and divested of its true grit and deepest glory does not lessen the truth that it is the greatest power in the universe. As people of faith, we believe that love was the instigator that set the universe ablaze, that love is the motive force of the universe’s existence and form, and the animating Spirit of its unfolding. The universe itself is the incandescence and incarnation of Divine love. What Thomas Merton called “the general dance” of the cosmos is the dance of love, the interplay and interaction of immanent and infinite love.
And the BIG but personal question, the only real question of consequence to which we wake each morning is, “May I have this dance?”
For Christians, Jesus is the human form of the incarnation and in-spiration of love. Christ is the flint against which the flame of love is reignited in a world in which so many humans have “gone crazy / for power / for things.”1 Christianity as a collective and Christians as persons have always run amok and embarrassed ourselves whenever non-essentials displaced the authority of love, its incarnational source and summons. The primary vocation of the human person, Christian or otherwise, is to be the beloved– just that– to become who we already are in God. It begins by receiving with awe and gratitude the ineffable reality of one’s existence, the mystery and truth of one’s being as an expression of Divine love.
The potency of human life and the potential for daily living come by way of the inherent Divine interrogative: “May I have this dance?” so that human being means, first, to be the recipient of this extravagant gesture, this ridiculously generous invitation to participate in the divine dance as the beloved of God. This dance that is at once the dance of the cosmos, the dance of humans with the other-than-human world, the dance of our truest identity, and the dance Who is the Source and Giver of life is the way we become who we already are in God. In other words, becoming human, as opposed to being a human, involves responding to the invitation implanted in our God-given belovedness. It requires taking (our) part in the dance of love. And however graceful or awkward the dance might feel or appear, saying “Yes” to the invitation always involves the fleshing out of love. A wallflower at the junior high dance of life can think “Yes,” but never take his shoulders off the wall. Participating in the dance is the expression and confirmation of our full response to being the beloved.
If our primary vocation is to be the beloved of God, then we have one primary task, one essential reason for being, and that is to incarnate love, to act in and out from our belovedness, to move from an awe-filled recipient to being a grateful responder to the extravagant love from whom we and the cosmos came to be. To be the beloved, to become human, to fully, consciously, and actively join in the dance of life means deliberately and intentionally to embody love, to make love, not logical, but real, tangible, and credible.
It is that simple, and, at times like it was at the junior high dance, that frightening, and at other times that costly. The solemn and audacious pledge of the Christian is “Today, I will be the incarnation of love.” Whether the incarnation comes in the form of a rare, big, public, heroic splash or in a common, small, unseen, seemingly insignificant droplet does not matter. Any act of love– the simplest gesture, the secret deed, the kind word, the supportive glance, the hand reaching out, the compassionate presence when words would be irreverent, the sacrament of reverencing and loving the earth, the works of mercy, resisting the malicious, the doing of justice, and the practice of peace– is a step in the dance of the Divine with all the earth.
If and when we enter an environment suffering from or depleted of love, a place or community where the dance has been forbidden or forgotten, our obligation by virtue of our humanity, our vocation by virtue of being images of God, our task as those who take the name of Christ, is to put love there. To join in the Divine dance in whom we “live and move and have our being” is to incarnate love so that we remember ourselves and all the earth to the one sustaining, resplendent truth: love reigns.
1 Mary Oliver, “The Sun” in New and Selected Poems