“I would only believe in a God who could dance.” Friedrich Nietzsche.
Given that Nietzsche went on to become the father of modern atheism, we can only presume that he never found his Dancing God.
Maybe he didn’t look in the right places.
Like millions of truth seekers before and after (myself included), Nietzsche attempted to find his Dancing God by rummaging through libraries of dusty books and walking hallowed hallways of academia. Not surprisingly, he came up empty-handed.
A word of wisdom to any one in search of a Dancing God*:
(*I use the image Dancing God metaphorically to refer to the life-engendering source that generates and directs and sanctifies life energy.)
Start dancing.
Get your nose out of books, your ass off the chair (or pew), and get some jiggy in it.
To be fair to Nietzsche, the connections between God and dance, body and spirit, passion and faith, are not often made. In my upbringing, religion presented itself as the antithesis of all things physical and sensual and pleasurable. If it felt good, it must be bad.
No Dancing God there.
I too was looking in the wrong places.
The Message of the Nativity
The Christmas message invites us to look for God in the fullness of life, in the bloody blessedness of a barn-yard birth. The venerable morphs into vulnerable. The eternal, infinite, divine, holy is hidden in a needy, fully-fleshed, bed-wetting, breast-sucking, infant god-child.
To see the world through the filter of the Nativity means that we will no longer be able to envision the Divine as separate or distinct from that which is fully human, (whether it be dancing or defecating.)
And the reverse is also true. We can no longer through the insight of faith, speak of anything human which does not embody that which is divine, true, eternal, loving and creative.
The more fully human the activity in which we invest our souls, the fuller we are of Spirit. Conversely, those who are most spiritual are most fully fleshed.
Back to Nietzsche’s question.
Does God dance?
Do starlings murmurate?
Do dolphins dip and dive of the prow of a ship?
Does the Sage Grouse fan out its plumage and strut and spray dust to the point of exhaustion, if only to arose the mating instinct?
Does the coral snake face off against its partner, their heads and bodies rising higher and higher, in synchronized symmetry, until finally toppling over?
Does moisture crystallize on the frosted window pane to fashion masterpieces of jewelled art?
Do planets and stars orbit around each other as they spiral relentlessly into an ever expanding cosmos?
Do lovers tenderly touch each other as they raise each other to limits of pleasure and passion?
Does a baby instantly fall asleep in his mother’s arms when she instinctively begins to rock back and forth as if to some primeval rhythm?
Dancing is all that God does.
I suspect She barely has time or energy or interest in anything else.