Sermons

Come dance with me

Preached by Fr. Paul Burrows on Interfaith Service for the Ballet (Sunday, January 15, 2012)

Sunday. January 15, 2012
Interfaith Service for San Francisco Ballet
Advent of Christ the King

Do you realize the difficulty of this art, at once so beautiful and so ungrateful?

The world is full of easy fixes and instant gratification, fast food, quick fixes, and glib answers, but most of us are aware of a longing for something just a bit more, a sense that we count, that there is more to life then those things we experience through the TV screen. We spend much of our lives looking for something beyond ourselves that seem constantly out of our grasp. For many, a faith community fills that gap and belief in another, spiritual, realm is the natural focus of our yearning. For some, religious practice makes the connection between the world that is and the spiritual world that seems so close and yet out of our grasp, but for many, the experience of the spiritual is put of as something only to be encountered after death. So much so that there is an almost pervasive belief that our physical selves stand between true spiritual experience and us.

But here we are today celebrating a very physical activity that bridges the distance between the spiritual and the physical. For the concept that there is a divide between our physical body and our spiritual self is a false dichotomy. We are beings of flesh and blood not spirits imprisoned in a body and much as we might like to dream of some sort of incorporeal existence when we try to imagine how that would be we find ourselves grasping at air.

Dance teaches us how to be simultaneously physical and spiritual and the dancer, in the dance, lives at once in both worlds. It takes years of careful training, repetitive exercise, attention to detail, and single-minded dedication to be able to dance and yet it is not in thinking about what one is doing that a combination becomes a dance – it is in abandoning the conscious mind and allowing the body to become the dance that it all happens.

This is the spiritual life; years of practice and dedication, working daily at technique and skill, only to let go of it all so the indescribably can inhabit our very being. Here, in movement and music, we reach so far beyond ourselves that we seem to be in another world, we seem to have the lightness of air. And yet that very lightness comes from the strength of our connection to the ground. The leap on stage comes not from reaching up but from pushing down and the ballerina can only spin if her toe is pushing down with as much force as her turn.

And so we give thanks for the life lessons of the beautiful art and for the dancers who stand in that uncomfortable but glorious space that links the spirit and the flesh and through their discipline and their talent give us a glimpse of freedom that calls to us all – to be those beings that communicate by who they are.