Cosmic Dance

The Cosmic Dance

What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as play is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance.

We do not have togo very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the newness, the emptiness andthe purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation—