Spirituality
Celebrating The Awe and Wonder Of The “Full Catastrophe”
Maybe Zorba was right after all…
Every day is a good day. There is something to learn, care, and celebrate. ~Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion
At the end of the movie, Zorba the Greek, Basil, an uptight Englishman loses everything he’s worked hard to build. Devastated, he turns to his Greek friend, uttering the famous line, Zorba, teach me to dance. Balalaikas strum as they dance shoulder to shoulder on the beach while credits roll.
When there’s something to celebrate, I dance. Come to find out, there’s always something to celebrate.
As a student of metaphysics and mysticism, I’ve been asking what, if any, wisdom from my Jewish roots might speak to our times right now.
I didn’t expect Matthew Fox to answer me via his study of Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century Christian mystic Eckhart Tolle named himself after. But he did.
He did by turning me on to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Born in Warsaw, Poland, emigrating to the U.S. just six weeks before Hitler’s invasion, Heschel is considered the best theological mind in modern Judaism.
A professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, he did not confine himself to the hallowed halls of academia. His theology compelled him to embody his reverent awe of the Holy dimension in all reality through action for peace and justice.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called him a great prophet as they marched side by side in Selma, Alabama, and other locations. Together they implored religious communities to oppose racism as well as the Vietnam war.
This holding fast to the love a human soul enjoys with its Divine Beloved in the face of horrors like the Holocaust in Europe and racial violence in the U.S. percolates in me as election events unfold. Is this love a powerful response to those horrors?
If so, that’s a cause for celebration!
All these ideas danced in my mind when I discovered this week’s prompt — all things celebration. Wasting no time, I Googled quotes about celebration.
Who should show up at the top of the list — let me repeat — at the TOP of the list, but Rabbi Heschel! What a blessing, or as we say in Yiddish, mitzvah!
Here’s his quote:
People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state — it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle….Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.Source: The Wisdom of Heschel ~Abraham Joshua Heschel
If he, like Zorba, calls us to celebrate — how are we to do that? Especially when it doesn’t feel like there is much to celebrate, or given the pandemic, many joyous ways to do it.
What does that mean anyway?
To me, it means being as fully engaged as I can. With life, with my life, my creativity, my friends and family, as well as my community. And to be engaged from a passionate devotion to that which is holy in myself, in others, and in a world very much animated with and by Spirit.
Rabbi Heschel claimed his soul was at home in the eighteenth-century rabbi Reb Bal Shem Tov’s teachings. Shem Tov focused on sustaining delight and awe as the foundation of spiritual wisdom. Celebrating awe is lifted to a spiritual practice — We must keep our own amazement, our own eagerness alive.
My guess is he did not fault God for humanity’s cruelty. Instead, he let his reverent joy in the divinity of life itself sustain tireless efforts to work for peace and justice.
His activism did not belie his faith; it grew out of it.
Let me remind myself, as often as I need to, that this kind of celebration is a spiritual practice.
My soul thrills to the celestial music of the moon and stars, waves and waterfalls, the wind twirling dry autumn leaves. When she asks my heart for a joyous dance to the wonderment of all this, let the answer be Yes! Yes! Yes!
I practice reverence by noticing the presence of the holy in all of life.
Not just the fluttering butterfly in all its splendor, but the pudgy caterpillar in its orgy of eating, oblivious perhaps to the butterfly in its destiny. Let the transformative goo of the cocooning process inspire awe and wonder.
Whether we notice it or not, all of creation is alive and well, unfolding miracle after miracle. Let’s make it a point to notice. And may we notice with such reverence that we become better stewards of this earth entrusted to our care.
For us to survive and thrive as well as our planet will take some divine intervention. That might be in the form of what I like to call amazing grace.
Sure enough, among the celebration quotes was another one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Robert Farrar Capon, American Episcopal priest, author, and chef. Here’s his contribution to the party:
Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears. ~Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace
Join me as we take our fingers out of our ears and dance!
Enjoy this reading list of Mystical Poetry
Marilyn Flower writes political humor and satire to delight socially and spiritually conscious folks. She’s a regular columnist for the prison newsletter, Freedom Anywhere, where she writes about faith and prayer. Five of her short plays have been produced in San Francisco. Clowning and improvisation strengthen her resolve during these crazy times. Stay in touch!
