Dance

I'm reading a lot of C.S. Lewis lately as the Sunday School class I teach is working through Mere Christianity.  This week's portion is the essay he titled "Good Infection" (Book 4, chapter 4) and he's continuing his efforts to try and convey the Three-Personal-God to us.  He's striking up images and analogies that make me think (and make my brain hurt at times), and he's exciting the senses with many of them.  Lewis talks about Eternal Love being the pre-existing basis for the Father begetting (not making, mind you) the Son and that Love being the perfect expression as well.  And it's all in some sort of perpetual motion that he likens to "a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama.  Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance."

No, I don't think that's irreverent at all.  I think it rather captures things in a unique way that perhaps we can see from our human perspective.  We see "the dance" in the way our solar system rotates and moves through time and the seasons.  We see it in the way our own Earth prepares in the coming weeks to "sleep" for a season so it can awaken to new life.  And we see it in children dancing perhaps demonstrating the purest reflection of all.

Now, here's the great part.  This "Triune Dance" Lewis eludes to has been going on since before there even was time.  It's the communion between Father, Son and Spirit that not only gives life and motion but is life and motion!  It is the heart of the Story where God the Author writes us a part and then enters the story himself to win us back.  And it all comes because he wants to show us who he is and to invite us to come back and join in the dance like we were designed to in the first place.  When we do that, we'll dance with the reckless abandon that only children know.  We'll return to that place of innocence that looked so foreign but now feels like home.

The Crooked Path provides many opportunities to see life and motion and dance.  If I stop to take them in, I can see the image of what is yet to come.  My steps should grow a little lighter when that happens ... and I might just do a little dance myself.