Dance Before the Lord

Over the past several years, I have been struggling to find a way to live in praise to God. I know it sounds like a simple concept, but praising God in your life can have many applications.

For instance, praising God when you are having a hard day and it starts raining just as you pull in your driveway to unload the groceries. That's one way to praise. Or praising God when it's sunny, your windows are rolled down, and you're singing to the radio. Or doing your work to the best of your ability and giving it all you've got even when you don't understand why your boss wants you to do something a certain way. When you do the dishes (and scrub pots…) to help out your mom. All of these situations help us to praise God with our lives. But there's something else I want to talk about here.

Praising God often times is connected with a little phrase in the Christian/Catholic sub-culture - "praise and worship" - P&W for short. Some stick to chant and hymns, others to 70's charismatic movement songs, others are of the David Crowder/Hillsong variety. No matter what your taste in tunes, almost everyone has an opinion about how one should praise and worship God. It's kind of a funny thing. Even within one denomination, there could be several varying opinions about how a true follower of Christ should praise and enough services to suit your palette for praise no matter what mood you are in.

So who’s to say how to praise? Is there a way to do it? Well, you’ll find the psalmists in all sorts of positions of praise (more than yoga…) and they were seeking God with everything, in all sorts of situations and circumstances of life, and the Psalms have always been held up by the Church. “Prayed and fulfilled in Christ, the Psalms are an essential and permanent element of the prayer of the Church. They are suitable for men of every condition and time…” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2597). So what do the Psalmists say about how to praise God?

I’m not going to go through a whole list of Hebrew words and what they mean, but I want to list what we see in the Psalmists praise. Take a look at this list:
- Standing (30:8), sitting (139:1; 149:5), laying down (4:5), arms raised (28:2; 63:5), hiding (31:2; 57:2), crying (6:9), laughing (16:11), shouting (18:4; 27:6), singing (9:3), and yes, even sleeping (3:6)….
In every moment, in whatever physical position your body is in, you have an opportunity to invite God in and praise Him.

This Sunday, I was at my home parish in York, PA attending Mass with my family. Right as the piano started the musical interlude for the Gloria, I noticed something swaying slightly side to side, a little piece of pink fabric. I looked around the person’s head in front of me, and that’s when I saw her. This adorable little girl dressed in pink little pants, and a pink shirt with a cute skirt built in. Her black curls pulled in a ponytail on top of her head.

I immediately flashed back to my own twirling days, dancing in my grandparents’ living room, and making family members wait for my “performance” until I had on an appropriate dancing skirt. I loved to dance for them.

Then I was quickly overcome by delight. There was something about seeing this little girl dance to the Gloria across the aisle, moving her hips to the beat, and tapping her toes, her little skirt swishing slightly around her. I couldn’t stop smiling. Her joyful dance before the Lord was contagious. I had to smile. I was delighted in the freedom she had to dance before the Lord and I couldn’t hold it in. I smiled the whole way through the Gloria.

What’s so funny about this seemingly small incident is that before Mass I had been contemplating praise and worship, especially people who speak about how one must be physically expressive in worship to show one’s true openness to God and about the Psalms. I hadn’t really come to any deep, meaningful conclusion, but it was on my mind when I spotted the girl dancing her little heart out at Mass.

Now if I had started dancing in the middle of Mass, people would have been horrified and rightfully concerned. However, this little girl dancing and twirling to the music brought those around her great delight and joy. There was something so fitting about her dancing. King David also made a dancing debut before the Lord (2 Samuel 6:14). What are we to think about that?

The conclusion that came to my mind was that the same delight I had over this little girl’s dancing is the delight that God the Father has for each one of us. He is smiling over us and delighting in our dancing. Not because we are twirling down the aisles at Church or because we are raising our hands to praise Him. He delights in our dance. The dance of our lives – our breathing, our work, our day to day activity, our friendships, our conversations – our very lives are our dance before the Lord.

Our lives are the praise which delights God. More than hands raised, He delights in hearts raised to Him in sorrow, joy, fear, trust, and in the daily grind of errands. The Lord delights when we dance and we will always delight Him. We can’t change the Lord’s delight in having made us, even when we turn from Him and run the opposite direction. However, because He delights in us so much, He longs for us to invite Him into our lives, into our thoughts and dreams, and into every part of our dance. Let the music play on and the twirling continue...