Good morning…
Yesterday I facilitated our final weekly class of the season. This semester has been a doozie. Our discussions have embraced real life, ups and downs, hopes and hurts, whys and why nots. Planning weddings, funerals, and impending graduations. Facing challenging family issues and life-changing divorce. Mourning the death of pets and parents, friends and family members, dashed dreams and old ways of being. Inching our way through overwhelming health issues, for us and for our loved ones. Feeling first hand the ugly ripples of addiction. Struggling with the uncertainty of a new life phase, what to keep and what to shed? Supporting kids wrestling with big decisions, future plans, and gender identity issues. Coping with anxiety, depression, and other brain health issues. Our hearts have bonded deeply as we have journeyed through winter to spring.
“I remember the quiet call to wait, the ongoing confrontation with my false selves, the unending letting go, the still prayers, the sacred questions, the dazzling dark, the trembling new,” writes Sue Monk Kidd on the next to the last page of When The Heart Waits. ” I stood there, two years after my midlife pain had begun, and celebrated what the journey had given me, what it had taught me. Every brightness, every tear, every grace, every turn, every truth, every homecoming, however small.” As Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes, we have also waited, confronted, let go, prayed, questioned, felt darkness, welcomed new, learning more deeply to delight in the life that is ours to live.
“This is the quote I like most of the entire book,” one woman said and many nodded.
“Delight can be a way of life, a way of journey,” says Sue Monk Kidd. “There’s a saying, ‘Religion is not to be believed, but danced.’ I like this idea, for it shifts the emphasis from our endless pursuit of religious knowledge back to the dimension of living our religion in such a way that it becomes a dance, a celebration in which we open our arms and say yes to life. At times I’ve interrupted my spiritual journey by lingering in a corner of the dance floor watching others dance or by studying the movements of the dance in a book. The point of the spiritual life is that you dance the music God pipes in you… We’re called from plodding to dancing. The True Self presents us with dancing shoes.” (185)
Do you also sense God freeing your feet, fitting your True Self for dancing shoes?
…Sue…
