The Infinite Cosmic Dance

I’m a kid on a snow day this morning, enjoying the luxury of time to myself that is usually given over to something else. In my case, church. Usually right now, on Sunday mornings, I’m preparing for our Sunday gathering. Ten years into it and I am still the world’s best procrastinator. I wish there was a procrastinator’s hall of fame. I’d be so happy to be inducted into that.

The world outside is white and gray and silent. No motion but snow falling. I’m not sure how people live without this majesty. Or even, when it arrives, rush rush to do something without sitting still for a while and taking it in.

Sometimes I wonder what I have been trying to achieve all these years in ministry. It’s a loose affair, on my watch. I think everyone is entitled to their own ideas about life and death and any particular divine presence hovering over it all. I prefer an arrangement where we come together and talk and think about things rather than one in which someone stands in authority and spews their worldview. Or a worldview that was drafted thousands of years ago and fits like someone else’s shoes.

This morning, were we gathered at the Peru Church, I was going to talk about this:

After an orange cloud — formed as a result of a dust storm over the Sahara and caught up by air currents — reached the Philippines and settled there with rain, I understood that we are all sailing in the same boat. - Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Kovalyonok

I’m not sure why this truth is so hard for us to grasp, that all of life is interconnected, that … whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers …. etc, etc. is how this works, but we don’t seem to get it yet.

Let me see if I can succinctly sum-up what I have come to understand. I wish you were here so we could discuss.

All of creation, even the mean animals and the bad guys and the plants with thorns, is born of Infinity. The material is the same: Creator has created in Creator’s own image. Think about it in terms of how we make babies here. Our kids are of the same stuff of the people who made them.

There is literally a symphony of Infinity echoing within your being, in your soul. But most folks are oblivious. Or fearful, keeping things close and tight, a slave to societal norms and expectations.

Creator, Infinity, Source, wants you to spend your life exploring the depths of your being and the heights of your potential. Source wants us to understand that we are one. Infinity wants us to awaken from our slumber of ignorance and fear and begin to build, from the ruins of a society gone mad (ring any bells?), a world in which there is peace and collaboration. Mutual growth and understanding.

The journey here is a journey of the soul and you don’t have to go anywhere to be on this magic carpet ride. I do some of my most important studying tucked under two down quilts and a wool blanket, late at night, reading, before I fall asleep. From there I am transported into the realm of dreams where my subconscious sorts through the information. When I awake, the new day is for integration and exploration.

Years ago, in a class in a hospital on chaplaincy, in a room with seven other sacred souls learning how to deliver spiritual care to patients, I was asked, How do you experience God in your life? And without hesitation I said, in every breath I take.

I had no idea where that came from, I was not then and still am not a particularly religious person. I was, in fact, the least religious person in our cohort back then. I wasn’t a doubter so much as uninterested in the constraints of any particular religious dogma. The God/Source/Infinite Energy I love is too large to fit in any articulated container.

What I said that day came from somewhere else, I spoke it so quickly it couldn’t possibly have been an intellectual answer to the metaphysical question. I was born of the cosmos, and I breathe that truth all day, every day. Confined as we are here, by our flesh and bones, by gravity and grocery shopping, we forget that we are each a luminous being, from and of Infinite Potential.

A dust storm forms in the Sahara and rains in the Philippines. The water evaporates and is carried in the clouds to Vermont where it rains and fills my well. I drink it and the dust from the Sahara becomes me.

The Infinite cosmic dance is you and me and the snowflakes and light dancing on the other side of my windows. Please don’t stay small.

What is it I have been doing all these years in church? Bearing witness to the divine in all. ALL. And yes, that means you.

And look! None of us had to sit in an uncomfortable pew today to sort out this Cosmic Mystery. Now please go outside and play.