“The dance of action and contemplation is an art form that will take your entire life to master. Like Moses at the burning bush, many of us begin with a mystical moment and end with social action or what looks like politics.”
—Richard Rohr in Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer ( Paulist Press, 2014), pp. 6, 11.
Life indeed is a dance in which we either sit on the sidelines as mystics contemplating the love of God—or bravely go onto the dance floor as activists for those who have been harmed by fear. An ideal life would include doing both; but balance often isn’t our strong suit.
When I returned to the life of a “religious” person after a five-year interlude of retreating from spiritual pursuits, I had an insatiable hunger to read and study about God. I think this grew out of my medical training. If doctors want to know about a subject, we research and study in depth what has already been written about it.
Then, for some unknown reason, I began to write about what I was experiencing. Writing became like praying with my fingers. Again, part the incentive to write may have come from my training in academic medicine spilling into my spiritual life—a compulsion to “publish or perish.”
I remember on one December night reading an Advent piece at an early Christmas gathering of the women of St. Mark’s. Mrs. Metcalf, a renowned speech teacher who also sat on our pew at the church, said to me in passing as we were going to pick up our plates for dinner, “It is good to see another mystic.”
Mystic. I never thought of myself as a mystic; but suddenly I knew I had just been anointed one by a master. Again, I think medical training was a proving ground for me to develop some insight into God’s presence at work in the world. My job as a radiologist is to look for the unknown, finding evidence in the shadows and often in the dark through the imaging techniques of X-rays or ultrasounds. Radiologists examine an inside, hidden world that is just beneath the surface.
God uses every aspect of our personal experience. No skill or insight is wasted. Eventually, over many, many years of just writing about spiritual experience, I have been moved to action: making phone calls, writing letters, marching, visiting the sick and dying, aiding those who have difficulty getting groceries, advocating for prisoners and immigrants, supporting homeless veterans, working with people in recovery. As long as we can see the love of God in our contemplation and in our action, we will know one of the fruits of the spirit: peace. When one peace or “piece” is missing, I know I am off track.
I share this dance during the last day of the Christmas season, and look forward to learning from the mystic part of each of us—that also is seeking to recognize how God will appear next on our dance card in this new year.
joanna . joannaseibert.com