Nothing could be more pitiful than a pitiable creature who does not see to pity himself, and weeps for the death that Dido suffered through love of Aeneas and not for the death he suffers himself through not loving You, O God, Light of my heart.
--Augustine, Confessions

Dancing again, oh my it was good.
I've been aware of the Pittsburgh Scottish Country Dancers for a while, but have never been able to make it down.
Last night, Valerie and I drove the hour to visit their class. Oh what fun! They were so welcoming, and had a great beginning class that Valerie could jump into. We stayed for the next class so I could dance as well. Then they had tea. All of them seemed very excited to have us, and wanted to know where I had danced before. One of the instructors knew Moon and Torf. It's a small world for Scottish Country Dancers...
It felt so good!
We danced a great jig called The Snake Pass. Has anyone done it?

A Thought from the Theater

Theater and life weave through each other until one cannot come cleanly from the other. Actors bring their characters back through the warp within their heads to the world beyond the fresnels. A tech crew outside the shadows still seems to belong there. But the weaving is more than a coincidence of roles and personality. In the midst of a production, the play is a catching paradigm for the life around it. When I watched Waiting for Godot every day for a week, each conversation with a friend became a desperate non-sequitorial search for meaning. Strange combinations of cruelty and vulnerability wandered across my sight as I wasted time waiting for things never to come. Matchmaker made a small, luminous adventure out of a semester, and during La Bete the tension between the ideal, the reasonable, and the ridiculous crowded in on every side. The characters and situations, recycled before my eyes night after night, appear in the people I meet and the books I read, in the week's new couple or the day's small tragedy.

Drama surrounds our lives in too-proliferate bounty. How can we understand the significance of each rain-forest-chaotic second ticking by? Immersed in a play, we have someone else to discover the significance for us; what we see and hear is selected, filtered, and precisely demonstrated. Our perception layers under the playwright's perception for a brief time as his words are in our mouths. A play is a picture frame around a small collection of events and people. Look at these, says the playwright, and the life outside the the frame is temporarily irrelevant.

For all of us, inside the theater or out, reality is built from the stories we tell about it. Is this not the power of worship? A play lasts a few months before we disassemble the frame, but churches have permanent walls. The words of worship in our mouths, week after week, become our own, and our performance layers deeper for all of life. The pageant of liturgy and communion frames and reframes our sense of significance and meaning each Sunday. While other plays mirror and construct a temporary and limited reality, worship is the most profound and eternal reality that we can at this time experience. The bread and wine are not mere props, but spiritual nourishment. The liturgical roles we play are our truest selves. Paradigm merges with experience, performance and personality woven tightly and rightly together for ever.