I can dance
The moment Adam and his friends take the stage, their faces lighten with sudden recognition, as though with the stage lights beaming and the violins singing and the performance blooming, they have all at the same moment just realized they can dance. Their mouths relax into broad grins, and gradually their lips slide apart, and they twirl, and they twirl, and they twirl, their arms floating and swinging about like dandelion seeds exploding on a cosmic breath, and their faces radiate pure joy.
In the dark, sitting with my hands open in my lap, I think it—joy, joy, joy, watching as the dancers begin to make a snaking line diagonally across the stage from one corner to the other, still with those wild, reckless smiles stretching across their faces. Their joy spreads, wide and free and satisfied, and I want to grab it up for a treasure. My fingers tingle with the longing to feel it, inexpressible and glorious, to be filled so full of that joy that it spills from my body too, flooding the room. Joy like that changes everything it touches. I can feel it now, covering me in the darkness, changing me, as the light from the stage shines on my face. A while back God showed me this, that joy is the recognition of His grace, and that as such, it can run right into our suffering and poverty like a wave, pouring over, swelling up, turning our hearts toward rich generosity. Right now, on the stage in front of me, grace tells her story—we lack nothing, nothing– through bodies the world would call broken.
I will say it a thousand times through recital weekend, standing afterward in the aisles with friends, with family, that this is what it’s like when we dance before God, with all our differences and all our scars, all of it beautiful.
The dancers bend and fold into each other, making a picture—in my mind–of God’s hesed, their bodies like a smile, like a line underlining the truth. Hesed is a Hebrew word that appears so often in the Bible it’s as though God inhales and exhales it, or maybe it’s just the beat of His deeper-than-the-oceans heart. Hesed, hesed, hesed. Hesed means so much that it has been hard for scholars to summarize in a definition. In Ann Voskamp’s masterful work Waymaker, I read that the Biblical term lovingkindness finds its origins in that attempt (33), because how else do people who don’t know how to love describe God’s connected-in-union, steadfast, immeasurable, everlasting love and kindness? But of course, I am oversimplifying.
As I watch Adam and his friends rest their heads on each other, cheek and cheek and cheek pressed lightly to spine and spine and spine, as they sigh and melt together, safe, I am thinking about hesed. Whenever we finally learn to receive God’s hesed, we naturally discover our joy.
Take a close look at the dancers now, watch their eyes, their steps, the way they hold their bodies rigid sometimes, or the way their bodies fail to move exactly how they want, and see that there are real trials, real afflictions that challenge and hurt them. Right now, those facts can be easy to miss, because there is that joy, that experience of hesed, that grace. Their joy shines so brightly as to leave a mark on your vision, not a shadow or a blot as when you stare too long at the sun, but a radiance that changes how you see.
The violins sing on, and the dancers smile their wondrous, prodigal smiles, their faces shouting like new freedom, I can dance, I can dance! Their legs fight for extensions while their souls leap across the stage. I make a sound I had not intended to make, an agreement rising up from my heart before I can subdue its expression. My soul only gets weighed down sometimes by the way my body groans.
Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds, James the brother of Christ wrote. He did not write, because you face so many hard things, but “at the time that you fall into” your difficulty. And the word that becomes consider actually means “to come first in priority,” such that what James actually means is that when you fall into trouble, because you will, joy must take the lead in response, captaining all your other feelings and thoughts and perceptions, shepherding them carefully—guarding them, even–under the recognition of God’s grace. He means it’s just like what I’m watching right now, when the children the world would call least dance with outshining joy, changing a whole room of people with such tangible force that we leap to our feet in thanksgiving.
