Would you like to dance?
Dance isn't so much a thing of the feet as a thing of the heart. Maybe your heart doesn't feel like dancing today. But wait. Listen with your heart a minute. Be still for a minute. (Hold the music, please.) And you may hear God speak to you of the deep spiritual joy and love that are abundantly yours today. Let God, your Father-Mother God, sing to you the spirit of what your life truly is - the expression of eternal, indestructible good.
If you can't quite get started listening, you could open to a book of songs that will help you. It's the book of Psalms in the Bible Songs. Prayers. Acknowledgments of God's goodness. Praises. Longings. Rejoicings. The Psalmist sang of God, ''Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness; to the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent.'' n1
n1 Psalms 30:11,12.
I found the message of this psalm true in my own experience. I was kind of blue once. I felt I didn't have that much to dance and sing about. I figured that (based on some pretty disappointing and challenging things that had happened to me) I was going to feel that way for a long time. But, as a result of my contact with Christian Science, I discovered some things that changed my whole life from sad and morbid to deeply glad and happy. One idea that I began applying to my thinking about life is the spiritual fact that since God is good, good is ever present, all-powerful, unkillable. Life, Truth, and Love are synonyms for God, as the Scriptures imply. Then Life, Truth, and Love are ever present, all-powerful, and unkillable! If joy is a spiritual attribute of God, joy is irrepressible, inevitable. And because man is God's image, he's inseparable from these elements of the divine nature.
Are my feet off the ground? No. But I am lifted up by the Scriptures and the light that Christian Science sheds on them. When the world is crying, when our hearts and the hearts of our brothers and sisters are crying, is there something great enough to break through and meet our particular needs? Our needs for health, companionship, proper food and shelter? Yes, there is! But we have to be willing to wake out of mesmeric sadness and fear and self-pity and hear the song the angels - or messengers of God - are telling us. Through prayer we have to attune our hearts to God, and have to want to respond to the spirit of God, good.
Christ Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament promises that a Saviour, or Christ, would come to take away sin and sickness from the world. The eternal Christ, God's healing, saving Truth, is still with us doing this work. The Christ, which Jesus so perfectly lived and demonstrated, is right here right now.
In the Christian Science textbook Mary Baker Eddy n2 writes: ''The Christ was the Spirit which Jesus implied in his own statements: 'I am the way, the truth, and the life;' 'I and my Father are one.' This Christ, or divinity of the man Jesus, was his divine nature, the godliness which animated him.'' n3
n2 The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.
n3 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 26. Will we let the Christ animate our thoughts, our actions, our lives? Will we let it wake us out of dull apathy and routine and mesmeric grayness? Will we let it show us a grander, spiritually-minded way to live, a way in which we can fulfill the healing mission of the Christ in our world today?
We can't just sleep! We can't be paralyzed by fears and selfishness. The spiritual rhythm of life, of indestructible good, can be felt by you and me and by everyone. It is already and always felt by our native spiritual intuition. Prayer, and study of the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, awaken us to the Christ within.
Now you may dance. Bear beautiful witness to life as a friend of yours. ''Ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.''n4
n4 Isaiah 55:11.
DAILY BIBLE VERSE Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light . . . Be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is . . . Be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves i psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ephesians 5:14, 17-20