A Supernatural Delight
What if some of your deepest experiences of God happen outside the places you expect? This reflection looks for the Sacred in joy, music, love, and a crowded dance floor.
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Creating from the Soul: A Conversation in Story & Song with Javier Mendoza (aka Hobo Cane)
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A Supernatural Delight
Last Saturday night, a dream came true. My family got bigger. My son, John Harry, married our beloved Sophie. The next thing you know, the second wedding liturgy kicked into gear: the dance party! For my money, I think of the wedding dance floor as the closest approximation to heaven that you can get while here on earth. For one thing, there are all those generations of people mixing and mingling, while shaking their groove things together. Then there are all those rusty tin woods-men, and rusty tin woods-maidens exercising their unselfconscious, self-deprecating humor as they cut their respective rugs. By way of contrast, it’s not rare to find a Fred & Ginger, not so much cutting, but elegantly weaving a rug together.
For those with eyes to see it, there are scenes of tender beauty all over that sacred space. A grandchild might pull a widowed grandparent onto the floor, creating a moment that both surfaces a barely submerged grief, while simultaneously healing it. And then there’s the moment when the grandparent and parent generations drift away like colorful autumn leaves. That’s when the earth starts to shakin’ and the dancers start to quakin’ and somehow the moon gets big and bright... a supernatural delight!
Like the red oak in our front yard, that doesn’t drop its foliage until February, Lisa and I weren’t about to drift away. We staked our claim on the uncongested perimeter of the action. That allowed us a front-row seat to observe the throbbing heart of it all, where all manner of athleticism and unselfconscious exuberance swept over the duo-genarians.
It happened like this: an unscripted movement—like a movement in a symphony—would spontaneously take hold of the dancers, like a wave. Then that moment would crest, making way for the next wave. For example, as if obeying a shared hard drive, when Kenny Loggins’s Footloose began to play, the Twenty-somethings immediately jumped into a line-dance formation. No rusty tin-woods people here. While keeping perfect rhythm in formation, unique little expressions of individuality would pop up and get stirred into the synchronicity, providing little delightful splashes of color. Moments later, the tuxedoed boys tied their cummerbunds together to form a dual-functioning jump rope and limbo ribbon. My favorite was when that signature song from that ‘80s dance movie, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” started to play. Immediately, John Harry became Patrick Swayze, and Sophie transformed into Jennifer Grey. The dance floor cleared. My son prowled the floor, Swayze-style. At just the right moment, Sophie dashed, caught air, and executed the perfect yoga plank as they helicoptered to the beat.
Lessons from a Dance Floor
When I was on retreat a month ago, after about the third day, I was aware of how available I was to see the metaphors and coincidences that are usually hidden in plain sight. For example, a cicada slowly, slowly shedding its old grub-skin so that it could inhabit its new life as a flying insect, spoke volumes to me about the patience required to grow in the contemplative life.
Similarly, on my son’s wedding night, the veil between heaven and earth became mighty thin. Sacredness and sweat were everywhere! I’m not sure when the wedding venue transubstantiated? All I know is that at one point, it was clear to me that our dance floor had transformed into a kind of chapel. My spiritual tradition is so clear that the least wrong thing you can say about God is that God is Love. That night, love was tangible. Similarly, a clear indication that you are in the Divine Presence is…joy…not a joy that is here one moment, and leaves you feeling empty the next…but a joy that feeds you.
I love those rare occasions when I know that I am in the midst of the Sacred, and I have the good sense to Stop…Drop…and Savor. What I feel called to in the afterglow of my son’s wedding is to retrospectively feed off of the joy of the sacred liturgy that he and his friends provided me on that dance floor. It most certainly was Eucharistic for me.
Dialogue and Discussion Questions:
Longtime SMC readers know that “the Dialogue” section of this article is set aside for a good conversation over a cup of coffee—with a friend, with a group, or just with yourself! As always, feel free to share your reaction or reflection in the “Comments” section below.
I’d venture to say that many of the dancers I shared the floor with at my son’s wedding did not think to name what was happening as a “religious experience.” That great twentieth-century German theologian, Karl Rahner, spoke of the “anonymous experience of God.” With that concept, he was trying to get at how people with no religious background can have religious experiences, whether or not they would name them that way. When have you had unconscious experiences of God’s presence that only became clear to you in retrospect?
In this account of my son’s wedding dance party, you heard me describe the conscious experience of sensing Divine Presence on the dance floor. Has that ever happened to you? If it has, either describe the experience to your dialogue partner, or step back into the experience with your imagination, and simply savor it again.
Can you name several songs written and performed by secular artists that strike you as songs that deal with some dimension of the Sacred?
Religion, at its best, reveals the Sacred contained in all of creation. How does your practice of the Presence open you to see the sacred in your everyday life? Whether religious or secular, how does your spirituality make you love people better?
Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.
Since I can remember you have always flourished on the dance floor.
Tom, I love this! It is such a beautiful reminder that God has His finger on everything…even the dance floor!
And because of you I stop, drop and savor every evening!