Excerpt from New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton:
The General Dance
What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What to God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts himself in the garden of His Creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyse them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve oursleves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But is does not matter much, because no depair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.
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