Is it better to be stood still or be going somewhere?
My best mate is getting married in a few weeks’ time,
which makes me feel like I ought to be dispensing sage advice. Unfortunately however,
having been married less than two years and usually having the emotional
intelligence of a cuddly dalek, I don’t have much sage-ness to pass on. All I could
think of, was to compare it to the camp for disadvantaged young people that the
two of us have been volunteering on for the last few years! (No offence meant
to Rachael, genuinely, as you’ll see!)
Thing is we’ve always said about Falcon (that’s the camp)
that it’s the hardest and the best week of the year. Now have you ever noticed
that that’s a surprisingly common combination? That what’s hard is often also
deeply joyful? That being easy and comfortable, and feeling fully alive don’t
actually come together very often? And the reason is, at least on Falcon, that pretty
much all day every day, you’re not asking yourself, ‘What do I feel like doing?’,
you’re asking yourself, ‘How can I make that kid happier? How can I show them
love? How can I help them have a good holiday?’ And then you go do it. And the
weird thing is, that’s hard work, and it usually involves doing something you
don’t feel like doing, but at the end of the day you feel both exhausted and alive.
Why is that?
I read something brilliant the other day that compared
life to a dance. Or actually to planets and gravity – it was kind of a mixture
of the two. And it pointed out that usually, what we want is for other people
to orbit around us. We want to be the centre, not necessarily of attention, but
in the sense of everything revolving around our feelings and our desires. But this
book asked a brilliant question: if we all demand that everyone else revolve
around us, what happens? Everyone just stands still. Imagine a dance where
everyone is waiting for everyone else to dance around them. It’s the most
boring dance ever. It doesn’t even count. They’re all just standing there, murmuring
and twitching their heads at each other getting increasingly frustrated that
the others won’t do what they want! The whirling, spinning, leaping delight of
the dance never happens.
But imagine instead, a dance where everyone is trying to
revolve around everyone else. Everyone wants to orbit around the others, and
make them the centre. You see now I’m imagining something much more exciting –
much more beautiful. What comes into my head is one of those spirograph
drawings we used to do when we were kids – what you’d get would be complicated
and intricate and fast! Weaving and
whirling in and out and around, always moving, always interacting. It’s what
the very best bits of a barn dance or a ceilidh feel like, or actually the most
beautiful and satisfying moves in a game like football, or some of the most
breath-taking moments on Planet Earth or
whatever with vast shoals of fish or murmurations of starlings. Whatever you’re
imagining, this feels very much alive. Whereas
everyone standing there, waiting for the others to revolve around them,
actually isn’t all that different to being dead.
And that’s why Falcon makes you feel alive. Because you
spend all day revolving around other people – and that’s the dance we were made
for. And I was trying to tell my best mate that that’s what marriage is aiming
for – that’s what it’s meant to be – is two people revolving around each other,
24-7, wanting to put the other person at the centre, and in the process
creating a dance that is beautiful and tender and alive. But that’s hard work. It doesn’t come naturally. What comes
naturally is a grumpy grinding to a halt as you demand that the other person
orbits around you.
And the thing is if you’re with me up to this point this
should be raising a pretty big question. How come what comes naturally and what
makes us feel alive are not the same
thing? I mean that’s so obviously the case that we come to take it for
granted and we happily write and read a thousand life-coaching books on
exercise or mindfulness or destressing or relationships without ever asking
ourselves, why on earth isn’t it natural for us to do what makes us feel alive?
Why isn’t it automatic?
And there’s a lot that we could talk about there, because
there’s plenty of intermediate reasons and issues and all of that, but I want
to suggest a reason basic enough, fundamental enough, for a problem that’s so
fundamental to our lives.
We were made for the dance, but we’ve got used to being
out of it. The thing is, when Jesus turned up he gave us a glimpse of God. He
turned up revolving around others, pulling them in to revolve around him and
bringing them to life in the process (sometimes literally!) but at the same
time telling us that he’d been doing this forever. That he had always existed
and that he and his Father and their Spirit had been loving each other, giving
each other glory, revolving around each other and putting each other in the
centre since before the world was made. And we would have all called him a
lunatic if he hadn’t been so, beautifully sane!
If his madness hadn’t been unravelling the twisted knots of people’s lives and hearts
and showing them how to be properly human again! And the closer you look, the closer
the listen, the more it becomes inescapably, wonderfully obvious that this
dance of love that Jesus is living, and talking about, and drawing people into –
it’s what it means to be alive. It’s what we are made for. Because it is quite
literally what we were made for!
But there’s something very deeply stupid about us that
makes us want to be at the centre, makes us want to stand still and have the
world and other people revolve around us, makes us want to not bother with the
hard work of revolving around God and other people. Something very deeply
stupid that prefers grinding to a self-centred gridlock than whirling and diving
in other-centred movement. Something that, if given the choice, would actually
rather stand on the spot and shrivel up than move and dance and grow.
And if you don’t believe me, try being married. Try living
with someone else and trying to love them all the time. Any impression you may
have of yourself that you are naturally selfless will fade very swiftly indeed!
We are not naturally other-centred, we don’t naturally jump into the dance. But
that’s not cos it’s unnatural or unhealthy – it’s because there is something unnatural
and unhealthy about us! The dance is our truer nature; the dance is our real life.
So there you go mate. Amateur sage-ness dispensed. Happy
wedding!
