Life Is A Mystical Dance

FRI., SEPT. 11, 1992,, 6:03 AM
FARM, STUDY

Your culture has a general perception about life. Though it actually “begins” at conception, a life has official and legal status only at birth, at a particular time on a specific date at a particular place. A life then goes on for… from a few minutes to over 100 years, ending when a death certificate gives another time, date, and place. Your reality is confirmed by pictures, by words written about you, by a name (both pronounced and written), and by several numbers, some longer than can be remembered. A life is tangible. It is necessary to eat. Your body can do many things, some automatically and many learned.

Even the Christian community accepts this secular perception of life. The American Christian view of life takes this “fact” of tangible reality and grafts a spiritual dimension to it. Death is memorialized, with some assurances, tentative to certain, that this spirit lives on. Life, however, is over. Death is the negation of life.

Life is a journey, a process. It is marked in years, methodically, and sometimes exact numbers become important, as in… going to school, getting a license to drive, buying beer, and being eligible for Medicare and other senior citizen benefits. “Birthdays” are celebrated. Physical conditions, particularly ailments, are considered real. Christians go to doctors as often as any others in the culture. As the boy in the film expressed, the one with cancer, “Life is tough.” The daily news focuses firmly on the “tough” side of life.

So… how does My lilting title relate to all of this? I shall urge you to step away from this reality that I have described, briefly, and that you know and accept. Oh, you have some “experience” with what I shall tell you, for this is not the first Teaching to tell you of life as I want you to see it. I cannot tell you to accept this fully, for I still want you to function well as a professor and teacher, as a Presbyterian Christian, and as a rather normal American.

And yet I want you to have and highly value this knowledge… like a pearl of great price. Life is a mystical dance. An individual life, which is fundamentally spirit, begins at some indeterminant time, for it is outside of time. It is a spiritual challenge to come into the earth scene, with its perceptions of reality. It is also a “lark.” Even those who come on over after a hard, “tough” life have to smile and laugh at how seriously they took their earth misfortunes, and how little they learned from them… and how little fun they had in this unique realm.

It is of no importance at all when your life began. Some lives are patterned dances, with activities quite prescribed and done with much precision. Even so, life still is a dance. Stay on your toes. Exert yourself. Relax and glide. Feel the rhythm.

Your life has some pattern to it, but it is more of an interpretive dance. You have freedom to express yourself… to be in different ways, as roles and circumstances change. As you occasionally dance in an uninhibited way, usually after drinking, you feel the rhythm of the music and let your body move as that rhythm moves you.

I want you to know… to really know… that life, actual life, is just like this. Don’t see your body and mind as “baggage”, but as unique means to enliven the spiritual dance. You, the spirit that is you, has had many and varied life experiences. I needn’t tell you all of these, but you have been in the earth before, and you are mature enough as a spirit to know that you are somewhere in the midst of your dance, one with a mystical commencement and a mystical closing… and a mystical reality throughout.

You have remembered the occasion of dancing up on the chair, having it break, but not interrupting the dance. That was a memorable moment… a sudden brief picture of what life is and how you deal with the “tough times.” You just keep dancing. I don’t want to ruin your performance as a health educator, but I do want you to know how I see health… as a mystical, spiritual dance. I saw it this way as Jesus, but even those with Me constantly didn’t perceive Me as one dancing. Too bad. Try to read the Scriptures with this perspective.

Selah
7:12 AM