The Dance of Life

My friend, Jean, has a huge problem with God. “How can there be a God, she asks, “when there is so much suffering in the world?” And cruelest of all, she finds, is the suffering of innocent children. She can’t even bear to watch Nature films, as they may show predator animals pouncing on poor little prey animals. What kind of a world is this? If God is Love, how can he be so cruel? No matter how I tried to answer that question for her by pointing out, for instance, that God’s ways are certainly not our ways, my friend was never satisfied. But can you blame her? My attempt at an answer really was far too small for such a big question.

Then, one day it came to me--not an answer, but a realization. I was watching one of those Nature films, which I happen to love because they always turn my thoughts to the Creator of this marvelous world. It seems to me that if we could learn how to read and understand the secrets nature holds, we would know at the same time many of the secrets of heaven.

In this particular episode a hungry cheetah was in hot pursuit of a terrified gazelle. Each was running for their life, and each had a very different end in view: one asked, will I go hungry? and the other asked, will I escape being eaten? I found myself rooting for the gazelle, urging it to Run! Run! Run for your life! Then I remembered that the cheetah had cubs to feed, and she was hunting for them. She doesn’t always succeed; the gazelle has a fighting chance; but this time the cheetah did bring down her prey. The camera showed the terror in it’s eyes as it went down, and something else as well for just an instant. It is said that at that moment of truth the fallen animal goes into a sort of ecstasy, it goes “out of itself” and feels no pain. I think that must be true, for animals have great wisdom about Life, and maybe on some wordless level my little gazelle understood the mystery I was witnessing and struggling to understand.

As I watched the realization suddenly came to me: it’s all God. In reality there is no hunter and there is no hunted: there is only God. It’s all God. God is in the cheetah, hunting down his prey, and God is in the gazelle, running for her life. It was Life pursuing Life so that Life could continue the Dance of Creation.

Another time I saw this same secret of nature in a DVD documentary on the ocean--The Blue Planet. On the surface the ocean seems like a huge, watery desert, but deep within there is a constant dance going on between the big fish searching vast areas for their food, and the little fish desperately trying to escape being eaten. As I watched, the words of the psalm came to me, “He gives them their food in due season...” And the food He gives, of course, is the little fish. Is it cruel? Does God not love the plankton and little fishes? Once again I saw and realized that it is ALL GOD. If God is Love, then we really can say that it is ALL LOVE. The huge schools of sardines and anchovies form themselves into a swirling ball in their effort to escape the predators. In the middle of the feeding frenzy it is all chaos and heart-stopping escapes. One has to draw back and see it as God must see it: as one great whole. From that vantage, the big picture looks very much like a dance, turning, twisting, circling around and around in a Pas de Deux of Love and Life.

Then I understood that God does not see things in opposition, as we do. When he sees the Hunter and the Hunted He is not seeing either/or, This vs. That. He is seeing the relationship between them that make them one. God does not see things in duality, but only in the wholeness in which all things are. As Thich Nhat Han said so beautifully and so simply, “We all inter-are”. God see everything whole. Each of the myriad life forms that flow from His creative Spirit are manifestations of the One LIFE from which they came forth.

This is not easy for us to see because we are too close to it, we are in it. The sardine, swimming for dear life in a huge school of thousands of other sardines is hardly aware that it is part of a magnificent, eternal dance. This awareness is for humans to have so as to give glory to God. There is a Buddhist saying that comes to mind here: LIFE LIVES ON life. We all eat and are eaten. When we forget this, we cry; when we remember this, we can nourish one another.

So, am I suggesting that the Holocaust is not about Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews? Or that little children with terminal illnesses are simply one life form being exchanged for another? Of course not. In Nature, it has been said, it is not the individual that matters; it is the species. This adage no longer applies when we are speaking of Human Nature. So how does God see us, He who does not see things in duality but in wholeness? Only the mystics are given to see that we are swimming in this Ocean of Life; the rest of us are too close to see ourselves there, for we are IN it. But God does not have that limitation. He sees us as we are, first to last, in the finished product. He sees us as made in His Image and Likeness, He sees us in His Only-begotten Son, in whom he is well-pleased.

When God sees the Holocaust, He sees His Chosen People entering into the Kingdom He has prepared for them from all eternity, having triumphed over evil. When He sees the innocent suffering of children, He looks upon each child with such infinite love and tenderness that their suffering is transformed by the power of Love into beauty. The beheld have become their beholder and they spend all eternity thanking God for giving them such beauty as only His gaze of Love can do. It is only we, in our limited vision, who think we see disaster and ruin when in reality what we are seeing is the Dance of Life, giving glory to God the Father Almighty. In the Heart of God the lion and the lamb, the gazelle and the cheetah lie down together, rejoicing; they have entered the Joy of the Lord. Truly, it is all God.