[The text for this sermon comes from 2 Sam. 6:1223.]
"I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment!" If we just collapsed a few millennia, I think we might be able to hear David, king of Israel in the eleventh century B.C.E., shouting out, in ecstasy, these words written in our own twentieth century by a Bengali writer-the words of Rabindranath Tagore that we read together earlier this morning [Responsive Reading #529, "The Stream of Life," in Singing the Living Tradition hymnal]. "My limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And the life-throb of ages is dancing in my blood this moment!"
David dancing-whooping and waving his arms and kicking up his heels (and his skirts, in his linen ephod) ... Some of you will be relieved, and some will be disappointed, that I chose not to have Scott, at this point in the service, appear on the chancel modeling a linen ephod and leading us all in a version of the hora. No, I decided not to ask anything more of you-or of Scott!-than to let these images of David, and of dancing, and of what keeps us from the dance, play in your imaginations and maybe even stir in your hearts and bodies as they have played and stirred in mine all year long.
It's not too surprising that of all the scenes I've studied this year from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, this image of David dancing has struck the deepest chord. On the one hand, there have been times when the sheer intellectual explosion of what I've been learning, the joy of the mind really kicking into gear, has felt like an exuberant dance; you know this feeling, when you get caught up in the ideas and the connections they create-it can happen when you're at work, or walking down the street, or reading a good book....
On the other hand, grad school encourages us, maybe even requires us, to live very much "from the neck up" (perhaps you know this feeling too), and David's utter abandonment to a physical expression of joy and spirit has sometimes looked like a distant, delicious oasis from my vantage point in the often arid climes of academia. But on a deeper level still, the image has haunted me because David's dancing represents an experience of aliveness that I hunger for. We most often begin our prayers here with "Spirit of Life " Well, David is dancing because the Spirit of Life is streaming through him; open and available to this "flow," he becomes, in this moment, connected-inward to the core of his being and outward to all the world. Remember, in the story, David's rejoicing leads him straight into feeding the masses: all the people of Israel file past as he ladles out big portions of bread and meat-the very stuff of
Life-and then, just for the sheer pleasure of it, he crowns this pile of food with a yummy dessert. David dancing, David serving-in this story, this is what it means to say that God has come home. David is dancing with the divine
One of the hardest things about writing this sermon was that I knew I would have to use this word God. It is a word that I have just recovered in my own life, a word-a feeling?? a concept?? let's say, an experience-that has just come home to my heart, and I may spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to express what this means to me. But perhaps you feel as wounded as I have felt around this word, as confused by it, as turned off-or perhaps it simply evokes nothing for you. That's all right. You don't have to believe in God to want to dwell in the very middle of the Stream of Life; now in some ways, we can never be anywhere but there, "in the middle"-but to be there mindfully, to be in our life fully, with whole-bodied, whole-minded, whole-spirited Presence: this is difficult. This is rare. I would call this way of life "holy"; I would say that this too is David dancing.
When I was here for the Fourth of July weekend, staying with my good friends in Brooklyn, I spent much of one hot afternoon spritzing my four-year-old friend with the garden hose. I was using one of those spray nozzles with the trigger that lets you stop and start the flow of water unexpectedly. Davie-for my young friend is a David, too-would dash past down the sidewalk, squealing, "You can't get me," and I would squeeze that trigger-and drench him.... It reminded me of the old days, in the suburbs, when if you were young enough, you could just strip down-to your underwear, or the altogether-and run back and forth through the sprinkler, cool water surprising your sunburned skin and laughter bubbling up from your belly. Moments of unself-conscious, full-bodied joy, of feeling alive and awake in every corpuscle-I would call these whole and holy moments, when the Spirit of Life fills us, and we, like David, are dancing with the divine.
But you don't have to be a dancer or a dasher to experience this full-bodied sense of presence and connection. We can open ourselves to it in the simplest and quietest of ways-through a tune that tugs at our heart, a kiss from a child or a lover, the slant of the sun in the fall-whatever brings us home to what runs deepest, and richest, and truest in our veins. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh suggests using meditations of gratitude-to our heart, our lungs, all our organs, our skin-for though we can turn out the light at night to rest our minds, to replenish those brain chemicals that bring us such interesting dreams and thoughts, the lights are never out for our organs. All our lives, they keep on working-at some times better than at others, but the very essence of being alive lies in our being in relationship with all these parts of our own body. One of Thich Nhat Hanh's meditations begins,
"Aware of the hair on my head, I breathe in; smiling to the hair on my head, I breathe out," and then you repeat the in-breath and the out-breath, thinking, "Hair smiling"-and the litany works its way all the way down, through the eyes, ears, teeth, shoulders, arms, lungs, heart, liver, bowels, kidneys, feet-to the toes: "Aware of my toes, I breathe in; smiling to my toes, I breathe out." From our hair to our toes-and just think what the hair and the toes go through!-they too can awaken us to whole-bodied presence. All of these are ways to keep the Stream of Life flowing through us-they are all ways to enter into the dance.
Because in truth, as we get older, it's so easy to lose touch with those experiences of running-through-the-water-sprinkler joy, of being, like David, utterly in touch with the presence of God. I once heard Luciano Pavarotti, in his prime, say that 360 days out of 365 he'd wake up and he wouldn't feel like singing. Something would be wrong-physically, mentally, emotionally-and his voice just wouldn't be flowing smoothly. (Of course, most of us, if we had Pavarotti's voice even on a bad day, would find a way to make do-I mean, that's still a lot of "flowing"!) But my point is that we often go through days on end feeling kind of "blah"-disconnected, absent in mind, body, spirit. And unlike Pavarotti, we don't have the option of canceling our appearance.
So what is it that stops the flow?
In the story, David, still brimming over with this sense of Presence, turns to greet and bless his own household. But he's met on the front steps by his first wife, Michal, who is disgusted with him-and she lets him have it, in the worst possible way. She's sarcastic, and she sets out to shame David for his dancing. And David, being particularly vulnerable partly because he's in that open, flowing state-David lashes back at her, putting her down, and basically sealing her off into solitude forever.
You know, I listen to this nasty spat between the two of them, and both these characters seem so familiar! The person who is not having a good time-say it's a parent, or a lover, or a friend, or even a stranger-just can't stand to see this other person feeling so good. In fact, that person's good feeling seems like a personal affront to the one who is suffering, and so the suffering one slaps out to squelch or shame the other. Now, if we're the ones on the receiving end, we may feel particularly hurt by this because we don't feel seen; here we are, at our best, and this other person can't see the glorious Divine dancing in us. And so we slash back, shaming and putting down the other person, until both of us are suffering. This is how Michal takes up permanent residence in our own hearts.
Because here's the thing about Michal: she was once a loving young woman, full of Life. "Michal loved David," it's recorded, and it's the only time in all the Bible that a woman's love, a woman's choice, is expressed in just that way. She even saved his life, risking her own, when her crazy father Saul was trying to kill David; she let David down out a window so he could escape-I mean, this was a strong woman. Connected to the Stream of Life? I'll say! And then life-life-with-a-little-L, life for a woman in eleventh-century B.C.E. Israel-life happened. She became a pawn in the political skirmish between David and Saul, and she was pretty much ignored by this man David whom she had loved and saved, while David set about accumulating six other wives. Michal had a lot of good reasons to be hurt and angry.
As does the Michal who lives within us. We have all been shamed or ignored or hurt until we have shut down some part of our ability to be fully in our life. But unlike the historical Michal, we do have a choice. We don't have to let all our hurts and disappointments clog our arteries, harden our hearts, stop the flow, keep us from the dance. Oh, I'm not saying that the process of healing those hurts is easy-I believe in the long hard work of unearthing what has hurt us, of naming it, and of learning, day by day, how to grow out of it-but I will offer two thoughts, just two images really, that might help:
When our hearts are broken, we can let them break open. Because when our hearts break open, they are large enough to hold the universe. We can let our pain reconnect us with the Stream of Life, instead of turning us away from it. Many of you-many of us are here because we have done exactly this. We need to let our pain, and the pain we feel for others-our ailing parents, the bereaved in Turkey, our neighbors up the street-we need to let this pain move through us, we need to keep it flowing right through our hearts, keep it moving out toward the world, and in this way we will experience that "the same stream of life that runs through [our] veins night and day runs through the world-and dances in rhythmic measures."
But if that's too abstract, then just think of this: What if we rewrote the ending to our story? What if, instead of lashing back at Michal, David had taken a breath, and then taken her face in his hands? What if he had looked lovingly into her hurt and angry eyes, what if his own heart had opened even bigger to encompass all of her. "The human touch can light the flame ," we sang. Oh, it wouldn't be an easy fix-years of damage would take years of repair-but I wonder if that human touch could not have touched a spring in Michal's heart, couldn't have loosened up those hardened arteries so "Your heart is not supposed to be sad," Thich Nhat Hanh says. "Your heart is not supposed to be happy. It's supposed to be tender ..."
We are each other's partners in this dance; we can even partner the Michal, and the David, who reside within ourselves. Because that interplay-of abandon and restraint, of joy and pain-this too is a kind of dance. Oh, what a story that would be: David and Michal-dancing, divinely, together.May I offer it to you this way? Let it be a dance we do. May I have this dance with you? Through the good times and the bad times too...
Let it be a dance. Amen. Alleluia. Let's all sing! Copyright Nancy Palmer Jones 1999.