Sing, Dance, Connect

lessons in joy from three (little) wise men

In our lives, God gives us friends and mentors who play significant roles in guiding our spiritual and religious beliefs, and it just so happens that, for me, those people tend to come in threes. Or maybe that’s just how my pattern-loving brain organizes them, but you could say that God gave us the first example of three in the embodiment of the Trinity we celebrate this week.

I talk to my friends who art in Heaven all the time and include them and their intentions during the Eucharistic prayers at mass. (Don’t sleep on the theology of the communion of the saints, friends. It’s one of the very best parts of our Catholic faith.) This week, I found a new unlikely group of ‘three wise men’, and I was surprised to find them not in Heaven but seated on the circle-time rugs in my preschool music classrooms.

As I finished up for the year in one of my schools, I walked out to the parking lot with these three little boys very much on my heart. There’s always emotion at the end of any school year, and months’ full of memories swirl in the heart of every teacher as the summer begins, but in my prayer I feel God continually bringing me back to these three faces along with an invitation to explore what these little muffins embody that might help me on my own path.

It's so like God to give us a peculiar or unexpected direction in our prayer when we open to the Holy Spirit – we’ll often receive a word or image that doesn’t exactly make sense in a given context, and as I’ve been praying about this time in the world with so much pain, injustice, fear and worry, I’ve been surprised at how often these three little wise men keep coming to mind and I wondered just what it was that our time together could be teaching me.

Eli, Braxton, and Liam

Eli and I had developed a ritual of silliness during our freeze dancing time. We’d always grab a moment or two to dance together in each class, and it was always full of joy and connection. Braxton was a very eager student, an active listener and (very) loud singer. His enthusiasm made me smile. Liam often struck me with the emotionally honest and older-than-his-years things he would say. There’s quite a lot of wisdom in that little boy, and he was never afraid to express it.

Together, they make a picture of who I want to be in this time. Like Liam, I want to know and express myself well. Like Braxton, I want to show up ready and sing loud. And like Eli, I want to dance. Even when things are hard or inexplicable in our country or the world, I always want to make sure that I make time and space for connection, joy, and dancing, and I did just that with thousands of other people at ‘No Kings’ rallies this weekend. Maybe you did too.

I believe that God puts people in our paths that we are supposed to know. We learn and grow from the example and experience of the other, and if we pay attention to the people God brings us, it can help us to know where He’s leading us next. These three little wise men showed me quite a lot this year, and maybe taught me more than I ever taught them, but that’s how it goes sometimes, right?

This summer let’s be learners and teachers, singers and dancers, thinkers and philosophers, like Eli, Braxton and Liam, and let’s bring the joy of connection wherever God sends us next.

“What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what he Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.”

― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

(Found this parked at a rally this weekend and loved reading about Laurey Masterton and her message of joy. There are no coincidences. Laurey, pray for us.)

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Prayer:

God, bless America.