The Dance Recital Is an Analogy for Creation and Free Will
The most supremely loving being in existence is also the most supremely joyful.
My wife and I went to a dance recital recently, performed by the children of friends. Seeing the performance brought us back to the many recitals we had seen over the years involving our own kids (now grown). Before the start of the show, my wife commented with anticipation and some glee, “I hope none of them do it right!” She was thinking of the youngest dancers in particular, preschool and kindergarten age. The individual personalities of the children are each more glorious than the planned choreography of the dance. We want to see the child who does not know better follow her curiosity or personal vision to do something fearless that does not match the script. The choreographer provides a plan in which a fledgling self might shine brilliantly by breaking from that plan. My wife, who deeply loves children, is transported with joy whenever this happens.
And I believe I catch a glimpse in this of how God administers the choreography of his creation, and watches our free will within it. We are, in some sense, toddlers within this dance.
The show goes on. The show will always go on, seeing its way all the way through to completion and applause no matter what. He is the choreographer. Yet he is also the audience.
When we offer ourselves fully into the dance he is scripting, when we try to dance it as well as we can through the capacities and the flourishes of these distinctive selves, we have his booming, encouraging, elated laughter filling creation and flowing all through the pageant. He sees us not conform to the plan, he sees us discover ourselves out of place and out of step, and sees us moving hurriedly back into line. We feel remorse or exposure or the sense we are doing it wrong, yet he pours out forgiveness and grace and delight at the dance we are doing.
An attribute of God deserving far more of our reflection is this: The most supremely loving being in existence is also the most supremely joyful.
He hopes for us to join the dance he has written, however we can or might. It grieves the audience for children to abandon the stage in shame or fear, to storm off the stage, to sit out the dance sullenly or to take up a willful pursuit instead.
He could see a perfect performance if he cares to. The angels would perform the dance for him as prima ballerinas. Perhaps he does watch something like this and loves it as well.
But it is these children of God, this broken performance, that somehow has his heart. And the point is not the performance, which will proceed to its end and receive its full measure of applause. The point is the dancers, these toddlers, and who they will become.
Photo: “2014 Dance Recital” by Carl Wycoff