Reflections after reading Thomas Merton

My worries are trivial to God. He wants me to experience the serious joy of Love. A Love that dances through all creation. She wants me to know the joy of love that expresses so easily in creation. Its’s a dance I am endlessly invited to join. God is always reaching out, saying, “May I have this dance?” When you come with me to the dance floor its like nothing else you’ve ever known. Allow yourself to become lost in the seduction, lost in the rhythmic movements of love. Its a vibration that moves through your body to everything in you and around you. It’s a dance in a beautiful garden with bees, butterflies, flowers and trees swaying in the wind. The music of a birdcall opens the heart to Love’s rhythmic variations.

There is a rhythm we are invited to get in step with, to move into. It starts with letting go of certainty and plunging into mystery. Its like waking up inside the animal of my body and letting it sway with the rhythm of Love’s presence sustaining everything in this instant, where everything is loved into being. Each flashing instant is new, another movement and step on the dance floor.

God fills up the emptiness of the universe and dances with the stars. Dark matter bends in the gravitational force of Love and fills the vast emptiness with the dancing light of stars. galaxies, nebula, black holes. God speaks “let it be” into emptiness and time, the world and I are dancing forth on the vibration of His vocal chords.

The light of Love dances through space and time, consummates in the wedding of God with matter forming conscious life. The harder I try to make sense of all that happens, the more I look at things from the perspective of my small selfish existence and believe its all about me, I will stay trapped in a closed loop of pain and purposelessness, collapse in on myself and ultimately despair. It doesn’t make much difference. No fall into myself can change what is always happening in this dance. The delightful rhythm of the dance will continue, nothing can stop it. It is everywhere, inside me outside me, all around me. It keeps time with my heartbeat and yours, innate to being, to everything that exists.

Me and Him, me and Her together where I lose the memory of what I think I am. This Presence desires to be recognized and entered into— let go of self-consciousness and sway, dance, be vulnerable, cast away the clothes you wear and give your love to Me! Her dance swirls, entangles, absorbs. Let the seriousness and dignity go! Let this be the child like hour of our spontaneous Love dance!