PLANET DANCING
According to Hafiz, the Sufi mystic, God knows only four words and keeps repeating them: ‘Come dance with me’; the invitation written in our genes and coming from the great Mover and Shaker whose nature is dance, who sets the universe dancing.
So Earth spins as it goes on its annual journey around the sun, our parent star, (something impossible to believe while we held earth to be the centre of everything), which feels for its planets and senses the allure of other stars and galaxies, all choreographed to dance in space-time.
The whirling dervishes of the Sufis understand something of this, for they twirl and wheel to express their ecstatic communion with the Divine who is dancing in them. Most of us, however, opt for a more static God who moves rather stiffly and is not much fun. By contrast, one of the earliest images we have of the divine is of a threesome dancing together with heaven and earth an extension of that original ballet.
A dancing world makes sense to us, confirming our place in the cosmic flow. One day a parliament will stand up before the order of business and begin to sway together, moving as one body. And a praying community begin to dance, having ‘got it’ at last that God is the dancer, creation the dance as we fall into step with every other dancing life form from hydra to hippo!
(from ‘Time to Call Home’, Hugh O’Donnell, Veritas 2021)