Dear Friends,
I returned from my annual retreat just in time to join many of you at the Priests Concert on Tuesday
evening at the Holland Center. Such great entertainers and what wonderful talent! If you went, I know you had a
great evening and it made lots of money for the CUES schools like All Saints. It was a double blessing!
One of the songs the three priests sang was Lord of the Dance which is a hymn written in 1963 by Sidney
Carter that uses the Shaker tune of Simple Gifts to sing about the life of Jesus from the view that his life is a
dance. That idea comes from an older hymn, Tomorrow Shall be my Dancing Day, which also sees the life of
Jesus as a dance, a celebration of life. I like Lord of the Dance and have thought it would be appropriate at my
funeral – for having danced with the Lord here on earth, I would then be joining God in the eternal dance in
heaven.
On this Sunday, when we celebrate Christ as King of the Universe, the image of the universe being in a
dance with God is beautiful. C.S. Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia series book, Perelandra, has a description of
the dance near the end of the book:
“And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into
sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance…
He could see also (but the word “seeing” is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light
intersected minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the
secular generalities of which history tells — people, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences
and the like — ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished.
The Great Dance does not wait to be perfected until the peoples of the Low Worlds are gathered into it. We
speak not of when it will begin, It has begun from before always. There was no time when we did not rejoice
before His face as now. The dance which we dance is at the center and for this dance all things were made.
Blessed be He!…All is righteousness and there is no equality. Not as when stones lie side by side, but as when
stone support and are supported in an arch, such is His order; rule and obedience, begetting and bearing, heat
glancing down, life growing up. Blessed is He!”
Christ upholds the universe. Christ is the center of the Dance. The scientific universal theory of
everything should finds its answer in Christ—for by the word of his power do all things live, and move, and have
their being. The mystery of the Dance, of cosmology, and of the workings of the natural world and history are
found in Christ. That is what we proclaim this Sunday. Christ is the King of the Universe. Starting from this
position changes everything.
When Pope Pius XI initiated the feast in 1925 he stated, “If to Christ our Lord is given all power in
heaven and on earth; if all people, purchased by his precious blood, are by a new right subjected to his dominion;
if this power embraces all, it must be clear that not one of our faculties is exempt from his empire. Christ must
reign in our minds, which should assent with perfect submission and firm belief to revealed truths and to the
doctrines. He must reign in our wills, which should obey the laws and precepts of God. Christ must reign in our
hearts, which should spurn natural desires and love God above all things, and cleave to him alone. Christ must
reign in our bodies and in our members.”
Peace,
Fr. Damian