A More Expansive Dance

Fr Thomas Keating told an apocryphal story about an elder monk on his hands and knees, combing through the grass in front of the hut that was his living quarters. A younger monk walking by asked, "Father, what are you doing?"

"Looking for my keys," replied the elder.

The young monk immediately got down on his hands and knees and began to comb through the grass.

Other monks passed by. Each stopped to ask what was going on and each received the same answer: "We're looking for Father's keys." Before long the expansive yard was full of monks crawling through the grass, looking for lost keys.

Finally, one of the monks who had joined the search gathered the courage to ask the obvious question which no one to that point had the nerve to ask: "Father, are you sure you lost your keys out here in the grass?"

"Oh no, my son," the older monk answered. "I lost my keys in the house. But since there is no light in the house, I thought I'd look out here in the sunshine."

When Fr Keating told the story, he would summarize the imaginary scene this way: "And that is the human condition. We are all looking for the keys to happiness where happiness cannot be found."

This is the perennial challenge of the spiritual life . . . to shift our center of orbit from all the ways, places, and things to which we look for fulfillment . . . to shift our orbit to the One who is the Center of all life. The shift is so difficult because we receive almost no cultural validation for making this shift. In fact, culturally we are encouraged to chase after all sorts of other things that promise happiness, but in the end cannot hold the weight of our being.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the center of life is not measured by your bank account . . . by the number of friends you have . . . by what others think of your work . . . by how mannerly -- or petulant -- you are . . . by the success you achieve.

For many of us, at issue is the way life itself, by its very nature, tends to sweep us up and carry us along, so that we feel carried along by a train whose destination was determined by someone else, and from which we cannot seem to get off.

In the daily run of life, it is so easy to believe that the thing right here before us is the only thing.

I remember in 1998 when my dad died . . . his death was the big thing squarely in front of me, demanding all the attention I could muster. Trying to be present for my mom, for my own children, for the funeral preparations which needed to be made, and still attend to my own grief, my orbit became very small, very focused on that which was right in front of me.

But I also had a couple of experiences that week around his funeral which said to me, "While my world has stopped at this place . . . while all I can see is this loss and the shape of life now in the aftermath . . . there are many others in the world who are completely unaffected by his death. For them, life is moving on."

It was a moment of revelation for me. My world had stopped. But the world did not stop for others. Life continued. At first, I railed inwardly about it: "My FATHER has died!! Can't you have some respect?!?! Can't you stop for a moment as I have stopped?!" When I realized what I was thinking, the lesson for me became clear: My life and existence so easily becomes the center of the entire universe, and actually I'm not the center at all.

Usually it takes the created world to remind me that life is happening always and everywhere, sustained by God, whether I am present to it or not . . . regardless of what concerns fill my life . . . no matter the deadlines I'm facing that feel as if they are pinching or the "pressing work" that calls for all my attention.

The waves of the surf will continue to roll in and out, no matter what my life is like today.

The river which slices through these mountains will continue to sing whether I am sitting there to listen or not.

These deer grazing by the roadside will go on finding their own "daily bread" whether I meet my deadline or not.

The lush green woods will lose their leaves, but then produce them again, far apart from whatever I think is important in my life.

Thomas Merton described what he called the General Dance or the Cosmic Dance . . . the dance of the world which humans often miss, as we are consumed with the far smaller dances of our own creation . . . shuffling papers . . . tinkering with websites . . . posting for "likes" on social media . . . building the life we imagine we are supposed to have . . . crippled by anxiety over political and denominational realities.

The things that mostly consume us are too small . . . they are not substantial enough to hold the weight of your being. They are dances we have learned from culture, from those who tell us what we should dance around. Most of them are completely disconnected from the Cosmic Dance.

Read Merton's words as he describes this larger dance, then spend some time meditating on them over several days.


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 Basho 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 (New York: New Directions, 1961), pp. 296-297]

Lenten Thoughts about Comfort and Happiness

Through Lent – and even for weeks before – I’ve been immersed in scripture and story that speak to the spiritual journey through the wilderness. Most of us don’t choose spiritual wilderness as much as spiritual wilderness chooses us. In the run of life, we find ourselves in places that feel unexpected, untamed, and uncomfortable.

Last week, I spent several days with fellow pilgrims in a wilderness setting at the Benedictine monastery in Pecos, New Mexico. The setting is not primitive, but it is rustic in a sense. The place is not dangerous – the bears, mountain lions, and feral dogs that dwell in the surrounding mountains notwithstanding – but wilderness tends to put us in a place where we are out of control . . . where we are not entirely comfortable.

The stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 3rd – 5th centuries are set in the wilderness of Egypt and the Middle East. The lives of these faithful Christians testify to how life can be harsh and demanding; yet, in that harshness their lives were transformed. In many respects, the very harshness of the surroundings brought to the surface their own darkness. They dealt with their inner darkness in order to be more fully the persons God created them to be.

Some of the Christian mystics have called the harsh and difficult settings of our lives our “furnace of transformation.” In other words, the discomforts of life become the fire that purifies us. The aspects of life that are beyond our control become the things that bring to light the illusions we carry. Wilderness itself, while not necessarily comfortable, is a place in which we learn to lean more fully into God and into the interior resources that God has placed within each one of us.

Frankly, this flies in the face of what contemporary religion, especially Christianity, has come to embrace. Christianity is offered as a path to happiness, a road to personal fulfillment, the way to make a good life even better.

Jesus, we are told, does not want us to be unsuccessful, but rather wants us to have health, wealth, and only good and pleasant experiences. Those who experience lack, disease, or discomfort must be lacking proper belief, or be poor in prayer, or be unfaithful to this Jesus.

[Apparently, there is another “Jesus” on the loose who did not experience being run out of town by local authorities, who was not cursed by the religious crowd, who was not betrayed by his closest friends, and who did not end up crucified on a cross between criminals.]

Preachers posit all light and no darkness, all comfort and no discomfort, all abundance and no emptiness, all happiness and no sorrow.

For a few days now, I’ve had in mind these words of C. S. Lewis, sent to me by a long-time friend. I ponder them in light of Lent and in light of my own expectations of the spiritual life. Try them on for yourself.

“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy.
I always knew a bottle of Port would do that.
If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable,
I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” (C. S. Lewis)

These seem to me to be important words as we journey through Lenten wilderness with Jesus, toward death and the cross, and onward to the empty tomb.