Life is the dancer

it is quite spectacularly beautiful.

In his book "A New Earth", Eckhart Tolle says that life is the dancer and we are the dance.

Life, god, the ground of being goes on and on, bubbling up in various forms.  It has done so for millenia and will continue to do so long after I am gone.  I am just one of the little bubblings.

When my husband and I were in Iceland we walked along a beach that had little bubbling geothermal pockets here and there.  That heat, that energy, that life was underneath all along and everywhere and just burst forth unexpectedly here and there.  The Icelandic people made the best of it; hot pools to soak in, energy to heat their homes, we even saw them bake bread in the ground using the geothermal "bubblings" as ovens.

A lot of the time, I get it backward and start thinking that I am the dancer and life is the dance.  I am the poet and life is the poem.  I am the writer and my life is the story.  It's a lot of pressure to write the script of my life.

Turns out I write tragedy.

But life is the dancer.  It's dancing through me for a little while and dancing through you in a different form.  Life is the playwright playing out a scene in my life and a different one in yours.  Life is the poet writing a poem through me and another through you.

And life, love, God, the universe  - whatever you name it - writes a much more beautiful story than I do.  Overall, it's a story of life, diversity, beauty, and wonder.  Have you ever just looked at nature and thought how amazing it all is?  The colors?  The weirdness?  The wonder of it all?   Oh, sure, it has its moments of tragedy, pain and death, but over the course of the entire show, it is quite spectacularly beautiful.

For we are God’s masterpiece, his work of art, her dance, his story, her poem. God has written us anew through using the word that was there from the beginning, so we can be the dance he planned to dance through us long ago.  Ephesians 2:10  (Paraphrase mine) 

To comment click on the header of this post “Life is the Dancer”

Blog - Chasing the Red Dot RSS

God as event

“Every moment is a portal through which the Messiah may enter” - Walter Benjamin

Using words like “god” and “church” can be problematic.    You might believe in god or not.  If you do believe in god, words are still difficult.  All words are metaphors for something.  Words become most difficult when we use them to describe something we cannot see.  Love, justice, fairness, equality are all examples of words we have that might mean vastly different things to different people.  When we use words as metaphors to describe the spiritual, we are wading in murky waters. 

As through a glass darkly

The word “god” is fraught.  What you think god is might be vastly different than the believer beside you.   If you do not believe in god, the very use of the word might conjure up ideas that you have decided to reject, and likely should reject.  This problem with the word “god” may at least partly be due to the fact that we start with a concept rather than an experience or a confrontation.   If we start with a concept of God, most will see god as the source of order in the universe.  But perhaps there is a different way of viewing the idea of god.  If we start with the idea of Christ – one who enters the world to disrupt our concepts - we start from an entirely different place.  In one sense, god may be the thing that maintains order, but necessarily god is also the thing that smashes our world apart.  God is the thing that holds things together and also the thing that breaks things open. 

The Hebrew words in Exodus 3:14 for “I AM THAT I AM” are ehyeh asher ehyeh which should more accurately be translated “I will be what I will be” which is also translated as “I shall be there howsoever I shall be there” or  “I will become whatsoever I may become.”  This expression in Exodus 3:14 is an idiom, an expression that has a meaning that cannot be understood by the individual words.  The name is about presence and fluidity.  Not a name that can be pinned down.  An active force.  A becoming.  Not a concept, but a confrontation.  More verb than noun.

So, believer in god or not, there is an ultimate reality behind the universe, an absolute nature of all things, an active becoming that contains both order and chaos.  And whether you define that reality as a personal being such as god, or an impersonal being such as the origin of being or being itself, or some kind of ultimate principal that governs the universe, that’s fine.  The principals are the thing, not the metaphors or words we use to describe them.   

A rose by any other name......

Theology conceptualizes god, revelation is an event. 

Creation is a revelation; a revelation of the ultimate reality of things, a revelation of god, a revelation of what IS.  Creation is also an incarnation.  It is the non-being becoming and evolving into being.  It is the ultimate reality becoming the present reality.  One might say it is god being incarnated from a non-physical thing into a physical thing.  Religion may speak of Jesus as the incarnation of God, but before Jesus, there was the universe.   It was god’s first incarnation, the first incarnation of the principals of ultimate reality.  And reality is being incarnated every moment of every day.

“Every moment is a portal through which the Messiah may enter”  -  Walter Benjamin

To comment click on the Title of this post (“God as Event”) above

May it be unto me as you have said

We are the third incarnation of the Christ.

My life has been filled with chaos of various kinds.  This is a great irony to me, since all I ever wanted was peace.   As a child, I just liked to be left alone so I could stay in my room and read a book.  As a teen, I played it safe.  I made choices that were calculated to avoid regret.  As an adult, I’ve taken few risks.  I like things quiet, calm, predictable.  But instead, chaos has surrounded me – over and over. 

Many times I have raged against this.  I’ve asked the proverbial “WHY?!?”  Over the years, I have spent countless moments screaming in my head (and sometimes out loud) to whomever would listen, “I’ve made choices in my life that were supposed to result in peace, WHY, WHY, WHY so much chaos!!!!?????”  I have found it hard to just accept what comes my way.   I don’t surrender well. 

I fight.  I fix.  I push through.  I don’t surrender. 

And so, my life has been visited and re-visited with chaos…..so I can learn surrender. 

Sometimes when I’m stuck in a pattern of behavior or thinking, I adopt a mantra - just something I recite to myself to re-direct my thought pattern.  Several years ago, I was particularly stuck in anger over the chaos.  Life just wasn’t going according to my agenda and I couldn’t find peace and acceptance.   So, I chose a mantra.  I chose the words that Mary the mother of Jesus said when the angel told her she was going to be impregnated by God, “I am the Lord’s servant, may it be unto me as you have said.” 

I mean, think about it.  You’re this 13 or 14 year old just minding your own business waiting to marry your betrothed Joseph and an angel appears to you and tells you, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.  So the holy one to be born will be called, the Son of God.”  

What?? 

This is going to put a serious kink in your plans.  People will gossip about you.  Joseph might not even marry you if he finds out your pregnant.  You didn’t ask for this kind of chaos, and your response is, “OK, do whatever you want, I’m your servant” ?     This seemed like a pretty extreme story about surrender, so I adopted the mantra.  That year, every time I felt rage, or bitterness rising up, I would simply say, “I am the Lord’s servant, may it be unto me as you have said.”  It was a powerful move in the journey of accepting what occurs in life and just taking it in without judgement or anger. 

It calmed me. 

Today, I was thinking back on the story that Mantra came from and it came to me in a whole different way. 

Mary was being asked to open up her body and allow the Christ to be incarnated in her, and she surrendered to it.  I reflected on how my life story is about me being penetrated by life circumstances and being opened up so that the Christ can be incarnated in me as well. 

Incarnating the Christ spirit inside my own body. 

So that my body becomes the very body of the Christ spirit in this world. 

The Bible tells us three ways the Christ spirit was incarnated (isn't it fun that it's three?):

First: in creation “Through him all things were made ……In him was life.”   Think about it, the creation is the first expression of the Christ.  The Christ spirit is in every part of creation.  If that doesn’t make you an environmentalist, nothing will.    

Second: through the life of Jesus.  This is the one we are taught about in church.  We are taught the story like the birth and life of Jesus was the only incarnation of the Christ.  But it wasn’t. 

Third: through us.  We are the third incarnation of the Christ.  His body here on earth.  And in order to actually be that, we have to surrender and open ourselves up to be penetrated by the spirit of love and to become the container, the womb and the birther of the same creative, loving, healing force that we see in the first incarnation, and the second….

“I am the Lord’s servant, may it be unto me as you have said.”

(To comment, click on header)