I’m at a cocktail party. Old school Washington style, with valet car parkers, women in honest-to-goodness silk cocktail dresses, and white wine flowing. I’m talking to Andrea, the Assistant Rector at Saint Patrick’s Episcopal Church.
“Have you ever asked God to dance?” I say, on my second glass of wine.
Andrea cocks her head and smiles at my provocative question. “Do you?” she asks.
“All the time,” I say. “Eckhart Tolle has an intriguing supposition: ‘Life is the dancer and you are the dance.’”
Despite my Roman Catholic upbringing, I’m not religious. At all. Despite years of trying. That feeling of being connected to others and wanting to be a better person feeling that my Boston College friends get out of 7 a.m. mass, I get after a sweaty hour of flow yoga.
My way in is spirituality; yoga, meditation, and writings by authors like Eckhart Tolle and Pema Chodron. Yet I still go to mass, and my kids are enrolled in St. Patrick’s Sunday school. I want them to grow up with religion, like I did, and then decide for themselves what to believe.
I ask Andrea her opinion of how spirituality and religion intersect, if at all
"There’s a lot in Buddhism that’s in perfect consonance with Christianity,” she says, quoting a Bible Gospel passage that translates to the Second Testament version of “Be Present.”
“However,” she adds. “Religion offers things that spirituality doesn’t,”
I’m skeptical, seeing religion as restrictive and spirituality as expansive.
“Like what?” I ask.
“I was born with a congenital hip defect that no surgery has ever been able to heal,” says Andrea, who walks with a limp. “When I did a semester in India, I was treated like I deserved my fate from a prior lifetime.”
“Like a bad report card from your previous life?” I ask.
Andrea laughs. “Exactly! Christianity is based on compassion,” she says. “I want to start a Bible group to help people make religion more relevant to their lives. But people want immediate results, they are don’t see it as a slow process, like exercise.”
“Tell them to ask God to dance,” I suggest. “And to leave a notebook next to their bed and write down what happens.”
Andrea and I then discuss the benefits of meditation, admitting to each other that we sometimes do it, sometimes not.
“Recently I recommitted, a half hour a day, for the past three months,” I tell her. “And mini miracles are happening all around me. Weird little synchronicities like a friend would call just as I was thinking of her or something would suddenly be canceled, and something else even better would pop up. Even my kids seem like little gurus, uttering non-sequiturs of wisdom.”
Andrea and I agree to meet for coffee for more conversation. The debate of religion vs. spirituality will continue in some Starbucks sometime soon.
In the meantime, as I drive home, I think about how my kids seem to be pointing in me the direction of the truth. Whenever I read one of my daughter’s Disney princess books before bedtime, there’s always an interactive point that asks, “What would a princess do?” The answer invariably has some value like telling the truth or helping others. But whenever we get to that moral of the story part—which we’ve read a thousand times—my five year old invariably squeals, “Dance!”
This makes me smile. And why not? God loves nothing better than a good tango. And just to prove the point, my dance card gets punched with a sign when I go to an early morning yoga class that happened to be at my church, St. Patrick’s. After the class, as we all relax in the savasana position, lying flat on our backs, our yoga teacher reads us the following ancient poem written by the mystic Hafiz. It’s called My Sweet Crushed Angel:
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One
You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet crushed angel,
To have ever heard God’s heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
And even His best musicians are not always easy to hear,
So what if the music has stopped for awhile
So what if the price of admission to the divine is out of reach tonight,
So what my dear, if you have not the ante to gamble Real Love.
The mind and the body are famous
For holding the heart ransom,
But Hafiz knows the beloved's eternal habits.
Have patience,
For He will not be able to resist your longing for long.
You have not danced so badly,my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.
You have actually waltzed with tremendous style.
O my sweet angel,
O my sweet crushed angel.
Melina Gerosa Bellows is an editor, writer, and publishing executive.
