When Wisdom Dances

Embodied Delight and Trinity Revisited

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Imagine what would it be like to dance close together
In this land of water and knowledge . . .
To drink deep what is undrinkable.
Joy Harjo, Trees Speaking

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Robert Frost

A LITURGY OF READING AND PRAYER FOR THE SEASON OF TRINITY

Opening Prayer

May we dance together.
In the name and mystery of God,
who is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.
Amen.

1^st Readings

Proverbs 8: Various

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
‘To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.

The Lord created me at the beginning^* of his work,^*
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
when he had not yet made earth and fields,^*
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;^*
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

Happy is the one who listens to me,
watching daily at my gates,
waiting beside my doors.

REFLECTION

I’ve chosen–for those who follow the CofE Lectionary–to return to a second reading from Trinity Sunday. It’s too good to miss:wisdom and delight! But also, I wanted to lean into the tradition that describes this period between Pentecost and Advent as the Season of Trinity.

Many churches have adopted a more contemporary tone, calling it Ordinary Time. I like that, too. It reminds us each year that Jesus’ life and ministry were not only about high and holy days–but also about the presence, peace, and compassion woven through the most ordinary ones.

This week, I continue to be struck by how rich it is to contemplate even our most everyday moments as a participation in the dance of Creation, Redemption and Spirit. Yes, we need to celebrate God in the ordinary–but we also need to engage our ordinary lives in ways that help us discern, rejoice in, and participate in the life of God in the world. In the midst of so much deafening noise and dangerous moves, we need to learn to hear the music of the Spirit, to practice the steps of redemption and to catch the rhythm of creation itself.

If Trinity is like a dance -

Creativity, wisdom and delight, the writer of Proverbs suggests, were an essential part of the first steps of that dance.

Marcus Borg writes:

Like the Word, Sophia was present with God before creation. Just as the Word was with God and was God, so Sophia was. And when John writes that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us as Jesus, he could just as well have said that Sophia became flesh and dwelt among us as Jesus. Jesus is the Wisdom/Sophia of God incarnate.¹

One might imagine, that:

In the beginning was Wisdom and Wisdom was with God and Wisdom was God.
She was in the beginning with God.
God delighted in Wisdom and Wisdom delighted in God and in all that God created.
Their delight was the dance of all people.
And the Spirit of that delight dances even now in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.

Playing with the text in this way challenges our curious tendency to make wisdom purely word-based and intellectual–forgetting that the very Word we celebrate became flesh and lived among us. Though Jesus was a man, this embodied, delighting Wisdom is often the gift of the feminine.

Wisdom, as distinct from mere knowledge, is not only more creative; it is more joyous, more generative, more intuitive, more compassionate. It is more alive to the present moment–taking delight in beauty and goodness, weeping over suffering long before (and long after) one might find the words to speak or write of it. Wisdom, one might say, is in whole-body living. It stirs the heart.

Wisdom delights in earth and sea and sky, but also in the many faces of humanity. She delights but also calls out to us with urgency to heed her voice.

This is why we need to resist the pull toward information grabs or intellectual pursuits that are severed from that embodied way of knowing.

This is why we need to honour the raw communication of those who dance first and speak only second–breathless or full of breath from the immediacy of their experience: women, elders, children, the disabled, poets, artists, people on the margins.

This is why we must cherish and protect time for delight. Delight is not always easy. Sometimes it is defiant: an act of resistance and faith in a weary and unjust world.

Wisdom calls from street corners and kitchens, from playgrounds and hospitals, from the gates of neighbours and the doors of hospitality.. She calls from protest marches and from quiet gardens.

She calls in words and she calls in silence.

Will you, won’t you, join the dance?

Ponder. Pray. Practice

Where do you find this embodied, intuitive Wisdom in yourself and in your life. Who/what speaks to you on this level? What are you hearing?

When did you last feel that glimmer of delight in something or someone in your everyday life?

How might you take time this week to dance with Wisdom?

Widening the Circle

Giving thanks for the mystery and dance of Trinity: take a moment to pray that we might all join that dance, especially those on our hearts and minds today.

The Lord’s Prayer

Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and for ever.
Amen.

2nd Readings

Mindful
by Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Speaking Tree
by Joy Harjo²

I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree.
Sandra Cisneros

Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken—
A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there—

Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,
But they do not understand poetry—

Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by
Wind, or water music—
Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft—

Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth
Between sunrise and sunset—

I cannot walk through all realms—
I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark—

What shall I do with all this heartache?

The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway—
To the edge of the river of life, and drink—

I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:

Imagine what would it be like to dance close together
In this land of water and knowledge . . .

To drink deep what is undrinkable.

And so may we drink deeply from the river of life, sink our roots into the gift of earth and lift our branches to the sky. May we find delight, befriend our bodies, dance in solidarity with one another. May we find Wisdom for ourselves and our world. And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all now and evermore. Amen.

Music:

Trinity Blessing. Margaret Rizza.

If you dare, let your body move to this music and see what prayer arises when you imagine dancing with God–who is Creator, Redeemer and Spirit.

1. — Marcus Borg, “Female Images of God in the Bible,” Radical Grace, vol. 24, no. 1 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2011), 4.

2. Joy Harjo (/ˈhɑːrdʒoʊ/ HAR-joh; born May 9, 1951) is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022, the first Native American to hold that honor.