Dance
As you, Abba, are in me and I am in you, may (the believers/spiritual ones) also be in us… I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one…
(John 17.21-23)
Push a million “separate selves” together in a crowd, and they cancel each other right out, because everyone else is too far away.
BE yourself. Stand out from the crowd. Be the best. These are the chants of Western-style societies in the twenty first century. Since the rise of capitalism, ‘right’ living has been measured in terms of social climbing, quantifiable career enhancement, building of personal wealth (often with charitable add-ons of course) and championship of the strong. The wisdom of the elder is all but eradicated; even prime ministers and presidents are, more often than not, first half of lifers, privileged, groomed for office and completely devoid of any meaningful life experience. Nominal religious belief or, ideally, none are preferred to someone of faith when it comes to leadership selection.
This kind of thinking has led to indigenous peoples all over the world being either made extinct or confined to government designated reservations, except for the ones who have been willing and able to be blandly assimilated into the ‘mainstream’ mind set. The prevailing societies of this time have been built on genocide, slavery and the exploitation of plant, mineral and animal resources wherever they have been ‘discovered’.
Such way of being is opposite to the prayer of Jesus that the Fourth Gospel has recorded and which we will hear read in our churches this first Sunday after Ascension Day. Jesus knows the oneness of the stars and all space with the earth and her creatures, seas, rocks and plants. Jesus knows the harmonies of a cosmic dance between creator and created, between God and human, parent and child, through the one holy breath pervading all that lives. Jesus embodies the harmonies, at once dancing on the earth, Christ fully human, while traveling like light into every moment of space and time, timeless and timed, Christ fully divine. It is a dance and a traveling into which the Cosmic Christ calls us, each one of us and all of ‘them’ too. You see, in Christ, there is no dancer nor traveler.
There is
simply
the dance and the travel.
Tangnefedd i chi, blentyn Duw.
Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin 