TED SHAWN

“To know God without being God-like is like trying to swim without entering water.”

~ Orest Bedrij

Underneath all we are taught, there is a voice that calls to us beyond what is reasonable, and in listening to that flicker of spirit, we often find deep healing. This is the voice of embodiment calling us to live our lives like sheet music played, and it often speaks to us briefly in moments of deep crisis. Sometimes it is so faint we mistake its whisper for wind through leaves. But taking it into the heart of our pain, it can often open the paralysis of our lives.

This brings to mind the story of a young divinity student who was stricken with polio, and from somewhere deep within him came an unlikely voice calling him to, of all things, dance. So, with great difficulty, he quit divinity school and began to dance, and slowly and miraculously, he not only regained the use of his leg, but went on to become one of the fathers of modern dance.

This is the story of Ted Shawn, and it is compelling for us to realize that studying God did not heal him. Embodying God did. The fact of Ted Shawn’s miracle shows us that Dance, in all its forms, is Theology lived. This leads us all to the inescapable act of living out what is kept in, of daring to breathe in muscle and bone what we know and feel and believe - again and again.

Whatever crisis we face, there is this voice of embodiment that speaks beneath our pain ever so quickly, and if we can hear it and believe it, it will show us a way to be reborn. The courage to hear and embody opens us to a startling secret, that the best chance to be whole is to love whatever gets in nthe way, until it ceases to be an obstacle.

~ Before work or during the day, sit quietly outside for a few moments.

~ Close your eyes and be still. Feel the air on your closed lids.

~ Let your love wash through your heart up your chest.

~ Let your love breeze up your throat and behind your eyes.

~ When you open your eyes, stretch and focus on the first thing you see.

~ If it is a bench, say I believe in bench. If a tree, say I believe in tree. If a torn flower, say I believe in torn flower.

~ Rise with a simple belief in what you feel and see, and touch what is before you, giving your love a way out.

The Book of Awakening

~ Mark Nepo