The African dance of life is a liberating and healing experience. African dancers celebrate life on the beats of their hearts, the clapping of their hands and the harmony of their singing voices.
The celebration of their hearts, hands and voices is a transcending movement from the roots covered with the clay of earth aspiring for the unreachable skies.
This dance represents the history of mankind across ages. It is the history of sin and forgiveness, of failure and repentance, of brokenness and healing. Through God’s Grace Humanity is being renewed and energized to live a new life. Yet this new life goes through a difficult and hectic path whereby humans learn by experience. In other words we learn from our failures, disappointments and the misuse of our innate energies. I would like to talk about three innate energies that usually have a negative connotation in our perception and how if appropriately used they become springboards towards positive change.
Let us start with fear. Fear is an energy that stimulates in us the power to protect ourselves from danger. Fear grounds us, breaks us and paralyzes our thoughts and actions. But through ages, man has learned how to use this energy in order to create defense mechanisms and attitudes.
When man reached the limits of his ability to make his defensive mechanisms non vulnerable, he placed his destiny in the hands of God as Creator and absolute protector. Man reached faith to transcend his fear. Fear was the way to confidence and faith.
The second innate energy is curiosity. Man developed his knowledge in order to satisfy his curiosity.
Knowledge was developed through ages to overcome ignorance by covering a large scope of arts and sciences. It materialized into science and technology including philosophy (wisdom seeking) and philocaly (beauty seeking). When Curiosity is well oriented it leads to wisdom and beauty, another two attributes of God. God remaining unreachable by intelligence is known to man, through beauty and wisdom, by the alertness of the heart.
The third innate energy (and the most dangerous one) is greed. Greed leads man to a state of continuous consumerism in order to fill the emptiness of his own existence, and the more he feeds himself he reaches the bitter feeling of an empty fullness, a fake fullness, a fullness that does not satisfy his hunger and his thirst to infinity and to the absolute. Greed is also about money and power. Accumulating wealth and power gives the false impression of immortality.
In such cases man becomes a consumer of life instead of being a thankful receiver of God’s gifts as a mark of His abundant mercy for humankind . When coming to this conclusion man knows that man lives not only by bread but from the Word of God that he discovers the real meaning of life.
This leads us to conclude that man comes out from earth, from clay, to re-discover the taste of the lost paradise. This means also that nothing is bad or good by itself. The difference is made by the manner we use it to discover, learn and grow.
This is man’s history across ages. This is man’s journey into life. This is man’s cruise over bridges of hope. This is the drumbeat of life.
Father George Dimas
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