According to Hafiz, the Sufi mystic, God knows only four words and keeps repeating them; ‘come dance with me’. Such an invitation should not seem strange coming from the great Mover and Shaker whose nature is dance, who sets creation dancing.
Earth spins as it goes on its annual journey around the sun, our parent star, (something quite impossible to conceive while we held earth to be the centre of everything). And stars must feel their planets and sense the allure of other stars and galaxies, all choreographed in space time.
The whirling dervishes of the Sufis understand something of this for they twirl and wheel to express their ecstatic communion with the Divine who is dancing in them. Most of us opt for a more static God who moves rather stiffly through his kingdom and is not much fun. By contrast, one of the earliest images we have of the divine is of a threesome dancing together with heaven and earth an extension of that original ballet.
A dancing world makes sense to us, embodied as nourishment, affirmation, diversity. One day, hopefully, a parliament will stand up before the order of business and begin to sway together, moving as one body. And the praying congregation begin to dance, having ‘got it’ at last, that God is the dancer, creation the dance as young and old join hands on a World Dance Day to celebrate our being here, falling into step with every other dancing life form, from hydra to hippo!