how can god still dance?

I saw a broken rabbit on the road, and I wondered, how can God still dance?

Wending my way down the green of a forest-canopied road this morning, breathing in the beautiful gray silence and singing hard into the quiet, I drove past this little rabbit, its perfection desecrated on the chill fog of the morning highway. It caught my breath and sent warmed tears streaming, and I was moved unexpectedly by the thought of that one tiny life brought to such a violent and graceless end. It was the first faint rumble of an earthquake of staggering realization that struck right on its heels:

If God pieced together the universe with His starry breathing, if He caught the grandest vision in all of eternity and set it into motion, if He is the deepest and highest and farthest reaches of Love itself, then somewhere in the clockless face of existence, He must have cried over this little rabbit, and the millions of little rabbits that perished before it, and the sparrows, and the cattle on a thousand hills, and the deaths of a thousand stars, and your heart, and mine.

How, then, can God still dance?

I assume God is a fabulous dancer; how else could He have painted the great spectacle of the heavens and the rush of unbelievable blue in the oceans and the incomprehensible green of the fern? How else could He have put the tiny sparkle in your eyes, or the beauty in your upturned hand, or the curve of your lower lip? Only a dancing God could have given arch to our feet, and movement like flight when we swim, and grace like swans when we die. He must dance at every birth, at every epiphany, at every slap of a whale's tail on the water, at every work of art, at every pebble on the beach, smoothed and shaped and shining. He must.

The universe, in all its entropy, in all its dying glory, in all its rebirth and failure and rebirth again, is rife with dancing and mourning, and even dancing while in mourning. Maybe only a great God of the universe, limitless in mind and fathomless in heart, could really understand how it is possible--or even necessary--to keep up the fantastic dance, even when the heart breaks, and the sorrows of a hurting world are crying out.

Maybe God can dance when we can't. Maybe God can dance because we can't. Maybe God can dance for us until He teaches us all to dance again. And maybe we'll all learn someday to dance even while we cry.

--Teri.