The Truth Feels Good
To be contemplative means to dance with silence
A friend recently introduced me to the work of poet, dancer and Zen practitioner Brooke McNamara. Her poem “Why Dance” is a luminous and shimmering declaration, brimming with insights like these:
Imagine we can trust our pleasure…
Silence is the deepest form of pleasure…
Imagine you could trust that fullness falling breaking you open and knew that dancing is the deepest form of silence.
It’s been my experience that the world of contemplative spirituality and mysticism can carry a subtle, implicit (and sometimes explicit) bias against pleasure. Like a lingering ghost from the long shadow of Puritanism, we all too often seem to unconsciously suspect that pleasure is dangerous, or insidious, or somehow a snare laid by some unfriendly demon who is trying to lure us away from the bracing cleanliness of austere spirituality — into a luxurious indulgence that will turn us into lotus-eaters who have forgotten all about God.
Growing up in the American south, I knew plenty of Christians who thought dancing was a sin. Maybe that’s not so prevalent nowadays, but I suspect it lingers in too many subconscious minds, even those who have long ago rejected the strictures of legalistic religion.
Now here is Brooke McNamara, daring us to exult in the beauty of our bodies, dancing with trust and abandonment, letting it feel good because it does feel good… and then finding silence in the middle of it all.
Many years ago, I saw a bumpersticker that proclaimed “The truth feels good.” Those words of promise and challenge have stayed with me ever since. Granted that truth doesn’t always feel good, and what feels good isn’t always necessarily true (or good or beautiful) — but maybe we need to dive into the possibility that sometimes, pleasure is not only not our enemy; it can be a trusted friend. It is delicious to dance, a pleasure to breathe gently into the silence that beckons to us from that still place beneath our stream of thinking consciousness. Isn’t the promise of Union with God a promise of ecstasy, in other words: pleasure? And don’t the mystics again and again invite us to see that Union with God is not a future promise but a present reality (whether consciously experienced or not)?
Do the math, my friends, and ponder this with me: silence very well just might be the deepest form of dancing pleasure.
The poem “Why Dance” comes from the book Feed Your Vow: Poems for Falling into Fullness, (Performance Integral, 2015).